Bultungin. The Losers . One-Shot . Shifter!Verse
Author: Faithunbreakable/ pprfaith
Title: Bultungin
Series: Shifter!Verse. Prequel to Here Be Dragons, set after There Are Wolves and White Noise. Use the tag, svp.
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: Bultungin - Kanuri language, meaning I change myself into a hyena. Pre-Movie AU. Shortish.
Warning: It's hyena-schmoop, possibly newly invented by yours truly.
Disclaimer: I do not own.
A/N: vesselandpestle is the beta.
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Bultungin
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Pooch is standing twenty feet from the jeep Roque and the Colonel are busy unloading. He holds his face to the sun, feels it burn through his clothes and into his skin, hot like an actual touch, heavy and real. He inhales and smells sand and dry grass, feels the animal inside him stir and rumble.
This is where they come from, the edge of the great desert, the center of Africa. This is where they were born, where they were worshipped.
Behind him, Clay is already cursing the heat, hating it. He’s made for cold, wet winters and tall trees, not for scraggly grass and endless sand. Wolf, not hyena.
Pooch really, really doesn’t care.
He’s the newbie of the group, having only been with the two wolves for a bit over four months, but he spent the past five hours driving them to the ass-end of the Saharan desert and he deserves a break. He deserves this.
He remembers his father promising to take him here one day. He was five and believed the man, even though he never had the slightest intention of taking his bastard half-blood son to Africa. Things like that are reserved for full-bloods, for real firstborns.
Pooch is the fifth firstborn of his father’s line and the only one born to a woman who isn’t clan. That was two strikes against him before he was ever born. No-one cares, in their world, if a child is born in wedlock or not. Only the firstborn inherit the gift, so it’s commonplace for men to sire their children on different women, resulting in more than one ‘firstborn’. But usually both parents are clan. One a firstborn, one a second or third-born, with enough animal in them to be more than human, but not enough to ever change.
Marissa Porteus is one hundred percent human and her son was an accident, the result of a drunken night. She never would have called the man again, never would have asked him for anything, if her newborn son hadn’t suddenly turned into a baby hyena one night when he was barely a month old.
The old man grumbled and rumbled, but he did pay and occasionally, he came by and took Pooch out to run. He died when his youngest was seven and the duty of taking care of him fell to his oldest son, Pooch’s half brother, some twenty years older and with no patience for a pup.
He was the one that invented ‘Pooch’ and he despised how Linwood ran with the name, making it his own. Making it himself instead of the insult it was meant to be. He enlisted the second he turned eighteen and found Jolene two years later, thirdborn of her family and as eager to get away from clan politics as Pooch himself.
Life became good.
And now here he is, standing at the root of his people, the origin of everything the clans are, knowing that his proud and arrogant brother has never stood here, never seen this. Knowing that his brother would probably laugh at him, Pooch, the soldier, playing third fiddle to two non-borns, who should, by rights and tradition, bow to him. Married to a thirdborn rebel woman, childless still at twenty-eight.
But his brother stopped mattering long ago and right now, right here, under the sun, with his new (last) team at his back and his wedding band on his finger, Pooch knows what home is.
“Hey, Colonel!” he calls without looking away from the sun drenched open plain in front of him. “Ya mind if I go for a run?!”
Roque drops a box of something or other into the dirt, coughs at the sand that rises from the impact and curses under his breath. Even he can’t ruin Pooch’s mood today.
“If you check the perimeter while you’re at it, no.”
Pooch spins enough to salute crisply and then takes off down the slope they’re setting up camp on, one hand on the buttons of his shirt, the other on the fly of his pants. He flings his clothes and boots away until there’s nothing artificial left on him except his wedding band.
Since they’re not really here, there are no dog tags for this mission. And really, even if they get to keep their tags, they’re usually safely stored away in an old cigar box in Clay’s bunk, where they don’t get lost during a shift. It’s against regs, but then, most of what they are and do is. So there. And the wedding band… Pooch paid a fortune, literally a fortune for the enchantments on his ring. It shifts with him, ring to bracelet, man to hyena, and back.
He promised Jolene forever and he damn well meant it, too.
His human trappings a trail behind him, he takes a single deep breath and leaps, changing mid-air and landing on four paws, barely disturbing the sand. He takes off at a dead run, first straight and then looping around in a wide circle. He lets the scents and sights of the dry land sink in, foreign and yet, somehow, deep down, familiar. Pooch may never have been here before, but the hyena was. The hyena knows this ground, this sand, this sun.
He returns to the others an hour later, without having found the first trace of human scent, and barrels straight into Roque’s legs, just because he can. That, and the motherfucker needs to seriously loosen up. He’s been a wolf for over four years, as far as Pooch knows, and that’s long enough to figure some shit out but the man still fights and fights and fights.
All that vibrating he’s doing twenty-four-seven is driving Pooch up the wall. So he rams his head into the SiC’s knees and gets a heavy hand on the scruff of his neck in return, a bellowed curse, a kick to the ribs. Clay, sitting in the shadow of one of the tents they’ve put up, kicks back in his folding chair and laughs.
Pooch yips at him, too, and then goes back to harassing Roque, snapping at his legs and dancing out of reach before he can land a punch or another kick. He laughs as he does it, the high-pitched laugh of a hyena. Humans dislike the sound, he knows, but to him it’s simply an expression of joy. Laughter is laughter and shit doesn’t need to be pretty to be good.
Eventually, when Roque looks like he’s about to pull his Sig (loaded with silver), Clay takes pity on the man and says, “Jesus, Roque, just run with him.”
He waves his right hand vaguely in the direction of the open steppe, cigar smoke curling lazily around the movement before it’s carried away. Roque growls and tries to protest because it still hurts him, the shift, still pains him because he fights too much. Pooch tried to tell him, but the other man never listens.
Fighting yourself when you’re human is not smart. Fighting yourself when there is actually something inside you that fights back is just plain stupid.
But Roque is Roque and Pooch is sure, even after knowing the man only for months, that Roque has no idea how to not fight. The taller man strips angrily, jerkily, his knives clattering to the ground first, followed by clothes. He snarls at Pooch, naked and angry, a black cut-out against the reddening evening sky. Pooch wants to paint his face and hand him a spear and feels absurdly glad for his four-legged form because if he said out loud what he is thinking, Roque would kill him and his woman would never forgive him for making her a widow after less than a year of marriage.
Then Roque looks like he’s hesitating again and Pooch cannot allow that, snaps at his thigh and takes off at a dead run. Roque follows, yelling, cursing, angry. It takes more than one leap for him, more than a single thought, takes him half a mile of running and screaming and occasionally stopping and breathing hard, to shift. But then there is a wolf in the Sahara and Pooch throws back his head in the last of the day’s light and laughs, high and tittering and free.
Somewhere, almost out of earshot, Clay calls for them to, “Come the fuck back, or hunt your own damn dinner!”
.
Comment?
The next part might take a while yet because somehow, Roque and Jensen refuse to fall in with the style of the rest of this 'verse. Annoying.
Title: Bultungin
Series: Shifter!Verse. Prequel to Here Be Dragons, set after There Are Wolves and White Noise. Use the tag, svp.
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: Bultungin - Kanuri language, meaning I change myself into a hyena. Pre-Movie AU. Shortish.
Warning: It's hyena-schmoop, possibly newly invented by yours truly.
Disclaimer: I do not own.
A/N: vesselandpestle is the beta.
.
.
Bultungin
.
Pooch is standing twenty feet from the jeep Roque and the Colonel are busy unloading. He holds his face to the sun, feels it burn through his clothes and into his skin, hot like an actual touch, heavy and real. He inhales and smells sand and dry grass, feels the animal inside him stir and rumble.
This is where they come from, the edge of the great desert, the center of Africa. This is where they were born, where they were worshipped.
Behind him, Clay is already cursing the heat, hating it. He’s made for cold, wet winters and tall trees, not for scraggly grass and endless sand. Wolf, not hyena.
Pooch really, really doesn’t care.
He’s the newbie of the group, having only been with the two wolves for a bit over four months, but he spent the past five hours driving them to the ass-end of the Saharan desert and he deserves a break. He deserves this.
He remembers his father promising to take him here one day. He was five and believed the man, even though he never had the slightest intention of taking his bastard half-blood son to Africa. Things like that are reserved for full-bloods, for real firstborns.
Pooch is the fifth firstborn of his father’s line and the only one born to a woman who isn’t clan. That was two strikes against him before he was ever born. No-one cares, in their world, if a child is born in wedlock or not. Only the firstborn inherit the gift, so it’s commonplace for men to sire their children on different women, resulting in more than one ‘firstborn’. But usually both parents are clan. One a firstborn, one a second or third-born, with enough animal in them to be more than human, but not enough to ever change.
Marissa Porteus is one hundred percent human and her son was an accident, the result of a drunken night. She never would have called the man again, never would have asked him for anything, if her newborn son hadn’t suddenly turned into a baby hyena one night when he was barely a month old.
The old man grumbled and rumbled, but he did pay and occasionally, he came by and took Pooch out to run. He died when his youngest was seven and the duty of taking care of him fell to his oldest son, Pooch’s half brother, some twenty years older and with no patience for a pup.
He was the one that invented ‘Pooch’ and he despised how Linwood ran with the name, making it his own. Making it himself instead of the insult it was meant to be. He enlisted the second he turned eighteen and found Jolene two years later, thirdborn of her family and as eager to get away from clan politics as Pooch himself.
Life became good.
And now here he is, standing at the root of his people, the origin of everything the clans are, knowing that his proud and arrogant brother has never stood here, never seen this. Knowing that his brother would probably laugh at him, Pooch, the soldier, playing third fiddle to two non-borns, who should, by rights and tradition, bow to him. Married to a thirdborn rebel woman, childless still at twenty-eight.
But his brother stopped mattering long ago and right now, right here, under the sun, with his new (last) team at his back and his wedding band on his finger, Pooch knows what home is.
“Hey, Colonel!” he calls without looking away from the sun drenched open plain in front of him. “Ya mind if I go for a run?!”
Roque drops a box of something or other into the dirt, coughs at the sand that rises from the impact and curses under his breath. Even he can’t ruin Pooch’s mood today.
“If you check the perimeter while you’re at it, no.”
Pooch spins enough to salute crisply and then takes off down the slope they’re setting up camp on, one hand on the buttons of his shirt, the other on the fly of his pants. He flings his clothes and boots away until there’s nothing artificial left on him except his wedding band.
Since they’re not really here, there are no dog tags for this mission. And really, even if they get to keep their tags, they’re usually safely stored away in an old cigar box in Clay’s bunk, where they don’t get lost during a shift. It’s against regs, but then, most of what they are and do is. So there. And the wedding band… Pooch paid a fortune, literally a fortune for the enchantments on his ring. It shifts with him, ring to bracelet, man to hyena, and back.
He promised Jolene forever and he damn well meant it, too.
His human trappings a trail behind him, he takes a single deep breath and leaps, changing mid-air and landing on four paws, barely disturbing the sand. He takes off at a dead run, first straight and then looping around in a wide circle. He lets the scents and sights of the dry land sink in, foreign and yet, somehow, deep down, familiar. Pooch may never have been here before, but the hyena was. The hyena knows this ground, this sand, this sun.
He returns to the others an hour later, without having found the first trace of human scent, and barrels straight into Roque’s legs, just because he can. That, and the motherfucker needs to seriously loosen up. He’s been a wolf for over four years, as far as Pooch knows, and that’s long enough to figure some shit out but the man still fights and fights and fights.
All that vibrating he’s doing twenty-four-seven is driving Pooch up the wall. So he rams his head into the SiC’s knees and gets a heavy hand on the scruff of his neck in return, a bellowed curse, a kick to the ribs. Clay, sitting in the shadow of one of the tents they’ve put up, kicks back in his folding chair and laughs.
Pooch yips at him, too, and then goes back to harassing Roque, snapping at his legs and dancing out of reach before he can land a punch or another kick. He laughs as he does it, the high-pitched laugh of a hyena. Humans dislike the sound, he knows, but to him it’s simply an expression of joy. Laughter is laughter and shit doesn’t need to be pretty to be good.
Eventually, when Roque looks like he’s about to pull his Sig (loaded with silver), Clay takes pity on the man and says, “Jesus, Roque, just run with him.”
He waves his right hand vaguely in the direction of the open steppe, cigar smoke curling lazily around the movement before it’s carried away. Roque growls and tries to protest because it still hurts him, the shift, still pains him because he fights too much. Pooch tried to tell him, but the other man never listens.
Fighting yourself when you’re human is not smart. Fighting yourself when there is actually something inside you that fights back is just plain stupid.
But Roque is Roque and Pooch is sure, even after knowing the man only for months, that Roque has no idea how to not fight. The taller man strips angrily, jerkily, his knives clattering to the ground first, followed by clothes. He snarls at Pooch, naked and angry, a black cut-out against the reddening evening sky. Pooch wants to paint his face and hand him a spear and feels absurdly glad for his four-legged form because if he said out loud what he is thinking, Roque would kill him and his woman would never forgive him for making her a widow after less than a year of marriage.
Then Roque looks like he’s hesitating again and Pooch cannot allow that, snaps at his thigh and takes off at a dead run. Roque follows, yelling, cursing, angry. It takes more than one leap for him, more than a single thought, takes him half a mile of running and screaming and occasionally stopping and breathing hard, to shift. But then there is a wolf in the Sahara and Pooch throws back his head in the last of the day’s light and laughs, high and tittering and free.
Somewhere, almost out of earshot, Clay calls for them to, “Come the fuck back, or hunt your own damn dinner!”
.
Comment?
The next part might take a while yet because somehow, Roque and Jensen refuse to fall in with the style of the rest of this 'verse. Annoying.