(no subject)
Nothing had happened.
The time shift had left him confused and unprepared as it was, having just come off a full moon and not expecting to have another but two weeks after; and yes, his friends had happily reported that the island had the cure his parents never found, but it was too big a thing to believe without seeing. It was too much a part of him not to fear sunset on the thirtieth, to spend the hours leading up to it staring at the trees and exploring the lower levels of the compound for a sturdy door on an empty room.
He'd sat in a linen closet for two hours, poking at newly tied stitches and sighing deeper as the night stretched out before him.
For two hours, nothing happened. And for every hour after that--and the next night, when the moon was still full, he'd sat on the compound steps staring up at it. He'd had coffee instead of tea and stared gratefully up at the sky, at something he hadn't seen with his own eyes since he was just a boy. It was pretty unremarkable, all things considered, big and white and moving too slowly across the night to be followed.
After a time the chill chased him in, though the chill hadn't made his hands shake, and he'd eventually just thrown up the coffee. Acid in, acid out, tasting just as bitter the second time and he likely won't be trying it again. He'd washed up and gone back to the clinic, crawled into bed and wondered if it would be his last time in such a place, and wondered nothing at all, curled up asleep in a bed with no more fur or fangs than he'd shown up with.
It's when he wakes up that the feeling creeps in. When he feels exactly the same, ordinary and without any fresh bites, without any soreness or sickness or exhaustion. He fixes a cup of tea and nearly forgets to drink it, lets it get cold next to him as he eats his breakfast, stares down at the marks on his hands and thinks no more of those and honestly believes it.
It feels distant, is what he figures. It feels like something that happened to someone else, which is sensible, really--back there, it is happening to someone else, will probably always happen to him, but here, things are different. He can drink all the tea he'd like and hold people back and carry on with Sirius, but now it doesn't matter. He doesn't change anymore, and that must change something.
Staring at his reflection on the cool surface of his tea, he shoves his chair back with a wail against the floor, pours it out without fixing a second, and wanders away from the kitchen. He's tired of being indoors, clinging to his ratty old clothes, reading books he's known all his life and sleeping off something that isn't real anymore. Something that happens to someone else. Pushing his feet into the old boots he promises to replace later, he heads out onto the path, no companion but his thoughts and a restless energy he hasn't felt in years.
[Slowtime notice still stands, but I finally checked the moon calendar and needed to get this up. Posting before work, will return any tags this evening. Find him anywhere between the compound and the Western shore, wandering about in an odd but decidedly good mood.]