about | background | characters | fiction | illustration | preview

Lucius: Salvage

When he was fifteen, walking to his lover's house, he saw his mother and father hanging bloody from a farmer's fence, next to two other corpses.

He threw up for an hour afterwards, continuing to retch dryly when all that he ate was gone. After that he never ate properly again.

(But really he didn't like to eat because his body demanded he eat. What good thing had ever come of obeying idiotic animalistic urges, he never knew.)

His mother and father instinctively loved to hunt, and were running with the local wolf pack when the lot of them stumbled across a bounty hunter after the farmer's increasingly huge cash reward.

They shot themselves, he sometimes liked to say, not that he would say it to anyone. They taught the wolves to outsmart the hunters, and unfortunately possessed of that penchant for mischief that seemed to plague all Fae, they enjoyed taunting the farmer whenever they could-- in human or wolf form.

Father would sometimes call on the farmer, in a neighborly way, and suggest ridiculous things that would put his chickens out for easier eating. Mother disapproved of this, as she was afraid if the wolves *really* ate some of the farmer's livestock, he'd get it into his head to go out with a hunting party. But with father and mother keeping the wolves out of harm's way, nobody came to claim the prize, and eventually everybody forgot about it.

Until the hides were hanging bloody on the fence, that is.

Lucius thought they were stupid. There had been absolutely no reason for his parents to associate with the local packs. He had been taught the age-old hate between the two species, Wolf and Werewolf, and never understood how-- or why-- his parents took to playing with them.

Really, he didn't actually think his parents were stupid. In fact he rather missed them. In fact he sometimes felt sick, thinking about them, even if he couldn't cry for them.

He wished he had begged them to stay at home, to act like proper parents, like people for god's sake, a man and a woman grown up and working two jobs and talking stocks and drinking coffee.

He never wept. They lived in a small town and the people talked about it. He never wept and he moved into the house of a local schoolteacher and tongues wagged. Lucius dreamt of going out and murdering the rest of the wolf pack that had escaped the bounty hunter. They had gotten away, most of them, and his parents had died. He dreamt of going out and murdering the townspeople too, tearing out their tongues, wag wag wag.

They lived in a small town (the better to be discreet said the wolf) because his father had big dreams he didn't want big city life to get in the way of. Sometimes father sat Lucius down and patiently told him the old stories and about his dream of bringing together the werewolf people again, about his dream of sharing, of being part of, of how secrets were not meant to die when one man died. His mother would stand off to the left a little, smiling a small sad smile, because her mother had been killed by other werewolves for the secrets they would have exploited. Later when father went to bed she would sometimes take Lucius aside and tell him that not all his secrets were for everyone, and that he must pick and choose what to reveal for the good of the pack.

Of course he only rolled his eyes at them and said "Yes mother" and thought about tomorrow's soccer practice.

Of course.

Of course now he wished he had said "Yes mother" and taken them seriously, and of course now he didn't eat enough to play soccer, mostly he just pushed the food around his plate and that was the physical activity of the day. Mostly he just stared hatefully at Peter and thought about the good of their Pack, if you could call it a pack, because really two men who were more people than wolves could barely be called a pack.

He sometimes thought about telling Peter what he knew, but he couldn't decide if he liked or hated Peter. After all some of the things Peter did to him were perfectly illegal under Man's Law and probably could get him thrown in jail for long periods of time.

And he wasn't talking sodomy.

He sometimes thought about eating Peter, eating his soft slight beer belly and eating his strong thighs and eating his genitals. Eating his eyeballs and his tongue. Peter was stronger, Peter was possibly wiser and Peter was his alpha, so none of these things were possible much less appropriate things to think.

If you were not a wolf and you were not a man, what were you?

When he was fifteen he was really not old enough to have what he thought of as a "lover". He had a twenty-four-year-old school teacher in Podunk, Illinois and he had an advanced maturity (at least in his own mind) and he had a nice, tight butt. And he liked to think he was spiting his mother and father when he let the teacher bend him over his desk and fuck him. He liked to think, "well what werewolf, self-respecting, would let his math teacher fuck him on a stupid desk that's not even made of real wood?"

Back when his nose hadn't quite outgrown him, and he had beautiful hair and scruffy clothes and all the innocence to satisfy any man who enjoyed stealing the virginity from small children.

Well, he wasn't really innocent. He knew the teacher was looking and he came just as fast and hard.

Being fucked in a bed, his bed, the bed that was supposed to be his after his parents died, wasn't the same. He would lay in his bed with his hair spread out over his pillow, and he would see the moonlight on the foot of the bed and wait for his father to come with more stories.

His father never came, but the teacher did, and sometimes on his face or in his mouth or just between his legs.

Finally he couldn't take being alone and so he waited for the teacher to come and then he told him a story, one about a little boy named Lucius and the Big Bad Wolf.

He never liked silver dollars after that, or silver crosses, or silver moonlight. He had a scar on the inside of his thigh, cross-shaped, and he's never screamed like that before or after or since.

He had only wanted the teacher to understand. He had only wanted (a Pack) a family.

He should have killed the teacher too. But the first person he killed was another werewolf.