Marlowe was going to do it this time. He really was. The summer was almost over, he'd been thinking about this for months, and in the last week or so, Caiti had started to seem so discouraged again. Every time he'd seen her, she'd complained that she was out of ideas and each time she said it, she seemed seconds away from crying.
Just as he had last month, he had prepared something to catch the venom, set it out in the little shed, and just as he had last month he had spent every minute since positively dreading what was coming. But this time he wasn't going to chicken out.
Caiti arrived to bring him his potion at a quarter to seven and she looked exhausted. Sometimes Marlowe selfishly wished she still only made the wolfsbane potion for him, because there was no one else he liked being around as much when he was feeling miserable, but he knew that wasn't fair of him to think that way. He was very privileged never to have experienced a full moon without the potion. Caiti was doing something really big and he was proud of her.
Still, he was glad to see her, even if only for a few minutes. He drank his potion first thing, a glass of water second, and then he hugged Caiti tight, just because he felt like it. She looped her arms around his waist, cheek pressed against his sternum. He felt instantly better.
"Can you stay over tonight?" he asked.
She pulled back a little and frowned at him.
"So you're here in the morning," he explained. "I like when you're here in the morning."
"Okay," said Caiti, still apparently puzzled.
—-
While what he had told Caiti was true, and mostly he did just want her there so that when he woke up and headed back inside to his bedroom, she would already be there, there was another reason Marlowe wanted Caiti to stay.
For some reason, he felt like if she were nearby, if he knew she was nearby, he would be less likely to talk himself out of doing this.
He was in the shed now, lying on his back on the couch. Nothing had happened yet and nothing probably would happen for a while longer, but he always preferred to play it safe. He shut his eyes while he waited, tried to imagine himself back in this position last month, when Caiti had come to find him in the morning and she had curled up with him.
He could practically feel her weight on his chest, comforting and solid and real.
He'd told her he would do it this time.
He shut his eyes tight and repeated that to himself over and over and over again until he felt the buzzing feeling he'd carried around all day start to intensify until it was impossible to ignore. He bit down hard, tried not to cry out as shooting pains went though his limbs and a pounding headache beat against his temples. This part was temporary. This part only lasted a minute.
Right after this, he kept telling himself. I'm going to do it right after this. He focused on that thought instead of what was happening to him, tried to breathe evenly, tried to pretend it wasn't happening. And then with a great shaking sigh, everything in him quieted. Nothing hurt anymore, for now. He felt strong and agile and powerful and he wished he didn't.
That little cup he'd prepared was sitting there staring at him and Marlowe almost let himself freeze up again.
Now, he told himself. You have to do it now.
It turned out to be more difficult than he'd anticipated though, because without hands, there wasn't a great way to hold the cup still. Usually Marlowe tried not to move around too much at all during the full moon. He didn't like how familiar this other body felt to move in. He didn't like how he instinctively knew how it worked when it didn't feel like his. But he had to do a lot of things tonight that scared him.
He circled the coffee table several times trying to work out what to do. He hadn't thought this through nearly as well as he'd thought he had. Finally, sure if he waited any longer, it would be another month before he tried again, he approached the cup and, somewhat awkwardly without a a way to hold it still, positioned his teeth against the edge of the glass, felt them puncture the plastic wrap he'd taken from his mum's baking drawer in the kitchen, and he bit down hard.
He shut his eyes as he did so, so he couldn't confirm whether anything actually happened, but he swore he felt several drops of liquid drip out.
Marlowe did this three times before he couldn't take it anymore and then he climbed back onto the couch, tucking his limbs up underneath him. He felt short of breath. It hadn't been enjoyable, and that's what he had been so afraid of, but he still found himself almost itching to bite something else, anything else. He tried to fight the urge, tried to tell himself to go to sleep, even though he could never usually sleep on these nights, and that in the morning, that feeling would be gone.
After twenty minutes, he broke down. He bit down on his own forearm — which was the nearest thing he could reach — hard enough to draw blood, and instantly he felt the rush of endorphins or dopamine or whatever chemical it was and wished he hadn't done it. At the same time, he wanted to do it again. He didn't even feel the sting in his arm, didn't care that a bead of blood was dripping onto the couch cushion. All he could think about was how he felt like he'd been designed to do this.
The rational part of his brain was horrified. The human part wanted to turn back time, to erase what had just happened.
The wolf part of his brain felt like it had finally woken up from a year and a half of being suppressed.
Marlowe did not know who he was.
—-
In the morning, Marlowe left the shed as quick as he possibly could. His vision blurred and he felt off-balance. He hadn't slept at all. He had wanted to. He had really tried. But that desire to bite something had been there all night, quiet enough to resist except for that one time because he had, after all, taken the wolfsbane potion, and yet loud enough to notice in a way he never had before.
He didn't take the cup with the venom he may or may not have successfully collected. He didn't stop to look and see how much he had bled onto the couch. He just made his way blindly inside, half-blinded by a pounding headache. He felt dizzy.
His arm did hurt now, but he didn't want to look at it and see the shape of the bite — inhuman. He wished he'd left a sweatshirt or something out in the living room that he could pull on before he went into his bedroom so Caiti wouldn't see it right away, but there was nothing.
He was sweating anyway. He'd never have lasted in it.
He pushed into his bedroom and saw Caiti fast asleep still and suddenly he regretted even asking her to stay here, because now he had to deal with the fact that he was what he was and she was perfect and she didn't deserve to be held back by whatever monster had gotten stuck inside him.
But then she started to stir and, eyes barely open, she mumbled, "Well, come lay down. Aren't you exhausted?"
So Marlowe laid back, his joints sighing with relief and he listened to his own heartbeat which seemed weirdly amplified inside his eardrums and he tried to push back the waves of hatred he was feeling for himself, but it was so hard.
Caiti stretched next to him and then she rolled over and he felt her hand touch his shoulder and then lift up again. "Oh," she breathed. Her fingers brushed the skin just under the bite. Marlowe winced.
"Marlowe-" she said, but he didn't want to hear whatever she had to say. Her tone alone told him he couldn't take it right now.
"I did it," he told her. His voice sounded faint and weak. "I don't know if it worked or not, but I did it." He did not open his eyes, could not look at her face. He didn't want to see her examining that bite, her fingers gone now.
"Give me two minutes, Caiti said. She got up, and he thought she was just going to leave, but then she felt her hand in his hair, thumb brushing across his forehead. "Two minutes," she repeated, and then her footsteps retreated and he was left in the loudest silence he'd ever heard.
—-
It was still dark outside as Caiti hurried across the yard to the little shed. She didn't have a clue how early in the morning it was.
Marlowe had left it unlocked, luckily, and inside, she found a glass cup sitting on the coffee table. Pooled along one side of the bottom was a tiny amount of pale yellow liquid, maybe an eighth of a teaspoon at the most. Afraid it would dry up if she didn't transfer it to a better container quickly, she picked it up and turned to go, thinking she would take it to the greenhouse, transfer it to a more appropriate vial, and then return to make sure Marlowe was alright.
But before she could leave, she spotted a deep red spot on the sofa and she thought back to that wound on his arm that had still looked wet and how exceptionally pale Marlowe had looked. Caiti wavered. The shape of that bite... it was so obvious what had happened. It wasn't just a scratch. She just didn't understand why he'd done it.
She disapparated right away, her stomach full of nerves.
Working as quickly and as a carefully as she could, Caiti found an empty vial and used her wand to siphon the venom from one container to the other before sealing it up tight. She would worry about labeling it later. She wasn't likely to forget what this was.
Then she turned to her shelf of ingredients, pushing some aside. Dittany was easy to find. She had plenty of it. Powdered silver on the other hand — she was almost certain she didn't have it, unless maybe it had come in that set of expensive ingredients her parents had given her last year at Christmas. The box they'd come in was under a bunch of her more regularly used ingredients and she hurried to clear them off so she could pull it off the shelf.
Inside were a number of tiny jars, arranged in alphabetical order for the most part. She had used a few. She searched through them all twice, heart sinking, but then she spied an 'S' peeking around the underside of a jar on the edge and she pulled it out. Powdered Silver, it read in loopy writing.
"Oh thank god," Caiti said to herself. She grabbed a bowl, not entirely sure what she was doing. She was not a healer. Taking her best guess at the ratio of ingredients she mixed the two together, stirred them up into a paste, and then grabbed the two bottles, the bowl, and the spoon she'd used to mix. She'd take it all with her just in case.
With everything in hand, she headed back to Marlowe's house. He looked even whiter than when she'd left him, or maybe she was just noticing it more completely because she'd woken up now. "Oh god, Marlowe," she whispered, hurrying over to him.
Marlowe's eyes opened a sliver.
Using the back of the spoon, Caiti spread a little of the mixture onto the cut. She felt tears pricking at her eyes. "Damn it, I don't even know what I'm doing," she said, mostly to herself. "This is probably all wrong. We should go to the hospital."
"No," Marlowe murmured.
"You're bleeding," Caiti said, taking hold of his hand. "You've been bleeding all night it looks like. We have to stop this. It won't stop on its own."
"I'm fine," Marlowe said softly. Caiti looked down at the cut. The mixture was drying in each puncture, and she thought the redness in between might have gone down a bit, but that was probably just a projection. She wanted it to work so badly.
"It doesn't hurt as much now," Marlowe said.
The tears started to leak out. "Why did you do that to yourself?"
Marlowe just shrugged. "I don't know. It just happened."
Caiti inhaled, ready to say something else, but Marlowe beat her to it.
"Can we please not talk about it?" he asked. His eyes fell back closed. He didn't sound angry, just tired.
Caiti was far too antsy to lay down next to him now, but she shut herself up even though she had a million things she wanted to say. She felt like shouting at him. She felt like demanding an explanation. She felt like making him promise he'd never do something stupid like that again. She thought about telling him she'd taken that venom and put it in a better container and that she wasn't going to do anything with it until she was one hundred percent certain how to use it to make it worthwhile, so he would never need to do that again.
Her brain went a millions miles a minute, emotions pinging around her body like little zaps of electricity, but she said nothing, just sat beside him and held his hand and watched that wound in his arm change, or maybe not change, as time went by.
She thought Marlowe had fallen asleep. He wasn't moving, wasn't saying anything, and his breaths came in and out so evenly. His fingers were loose between hers.
But then after several minutes had passed, she saw him open his mouth, inhale, and pause. She could tell he wanted to say something.
His fingers tightened around hers for a second and then he opened his eyes again.
"You're angry," he said.
"No."
"You are. And I get why, but I'm... Caiti, I'm having a pretty intense inner battle right now and I had an awful night, and I really need you not to be angry with me. I think I've got that part covered."
Caiti hesitated. "You're sure it feels better? We don't need to go get it looked at?"
Marlowe shut his eyes again, shook his head. "It doesn't hurt."
He let go of her hand and rolled onto his side.
Caiti sat upright, hands in her lap. How was she supposed to just stop being angry with him? The blood pounded in her ears and she felt hot all over. This was a new kind of anger. It wasn't like when they'd shouted at each other in the past. It wasn't like when he said something that hurt her and her sadness disguised itself as anger first because anger was easier to feel and to hide behind until she was on her own and could break down.
This was so, so different than that.
But Caiti thought about what he'd said, tried to imagine for a second what must be going on in his head right now, and she swallowed hard.
"Marlowe?" she said.
He made a little noise to show he was listening.
"Thank you for doing that. I won't waste it."
Still too agitated to lay down, she scooted up on the bed, sat against the headrest, put her hands on Marlowe's shoulders and said, "Come're."
He shifted, laying his head in her lap. Caiti put her hand on his forehead and then smoothed in back into his hair. She stared straight ahead of her at the clock on the wall. It was just after six.
Marlowe sniffed. He turned his face down. Caiti thought she saw a wet tear track on his cheek. If he was crying, he was definitely trying to hide it. She took a deep breath to calm herself, stroked his hair and the back of his neck, traced his spine with the tip of her finger, and tried to believe that whatever makeshift job she had done on his arm was good enough.
—-
Marlowe tried his best to look asleep. He didn't want to be talked to or questioned. He just wanted to lay there and let Caiti take care of him and dwell on the stupid, stupid thing he'd done all on his own. He was mortified. How little self control did he have that even with the potion he couldn't resist that urge?
He felt so small and belittled — by himself no less — and most of all, he felt so ashamed.
But Caiti was still there. She hadn't fled in terror, even though this had to have been the most real his being a werewolf had ever appeared to her. It wasn't like she'd ever seen him on a full moon, and she never, never would. But this was proof. And Caiti hadn't run away.
After a little while, he heard his bedroom door open, smelled his mum's coffee and felt the bed depress next to him. He kept still. He didn't want to talk to her either.
"He's hurt," Caiti whispered. She sounded about to cry. "I tried to fix it, but I don't know."
His mum put her hand on his arm, so, so gently. He knew it was her, because Caiti's hands had not moved from where they were when his mum had come in the room — one in his hair, one on his shoulder. It blew him away sometimes how sweet she could be.
His mum's fingers brushed over the wound. It really didn't hurt anymore. He hadn't been lying. The bite was the least of his concerns.
It was his mind he was worried about.
"In the hospital it looked like this," his mum said. "His shoulder. Before it healed all the way."
His shoulder was where he'd been bit initially, right where it curved into his neck. He still bore the scar, but it wasn't quite as noticeable anymore. They'd given him a cream at the hospital that had helped a lot.
"I used powdered silver and dittany. That's what they use," said Caiti, her voice now thick with tears. Marlowe wondered if he should open his eyes, tell her not to worry. He couldn't decide if it was worth all the questions. "I just don't know if I did it right. It's not a potion. I'm not a healer."
He felt something wet on his cheek that could only have been a tear, but it wasn't his.
"Oh Caiti, I'm sure you did exactly what you needed to do. He looks peaceful."
"He said it didn't hurt anymore," Caiti said, her voice now barely above a whisper.
Marlowe rolled onto his back, off her lap. He put his hands on his face and rubbed his temples. "It doesn't," he said.
Caiti really started to cry then. Marlowe pushed himself up. He pulled her into his arms, chin on top of her head. "I'm fine," he said. "Honestly." He kept his eyes up on the ceiling so he didn't have to look at his mum.
Caiti squeezed him tight. "I'm sorry," he said, to her and to his mum. "It was stupid. It was an impulse and I just... I don't know. I'm just sorry."
"Don't apologize, sweetheart," his mum said. She brushed her hand across his upper back a few times and then she got up and left him alone with Caiti. He wasn't sure if this was better or worse.
Marlowe took a deep breath and tried to think of something to say, but he couldn't. He couldn't explain to her everything that was going on in his head. He couldn't explain how much regret he felt and how much fear and apprehension. He couldn't explain what had made him done it, how it had felt it both actively not want to do it and at the same time, feel this desperate, urgent need to do it. How he hadn't really been sure where that impulse was coming from, but how strong it had felt. He couldn't explain to her how this was the first time he'd ever felt aware of the wolf inside him, not just in his body, but in his head.
And even if he could have put these feelings into words that might have made sense to her, he wouldn't, because what if she needed him to do it again? What if she discovered something in her research, but she needed more venom to test it properly, or what if it just wasn't enough? If Caiti needed him to do it again, she couldn't be afraid to ask for it. She had to feel like it was something he was capable of doing month after month.
Marlowe didn't know if it was.
"I'm sorry," he said again.
"Stop," Caiti sniffed. Her grip on him hadn't eased up even a little.
"I didn't mean to scare you. I don't want you to be worried about me."
"You don't have to explain yourself," she said. "I just love you is all."
And it hit him again how selflessly she cared about him and how terrifying and wonderful that was all at the same time. He pressed his lips to the side of her face. "Believe me," he said softly. "There's nothing I've ever been more sure of."
He readjusted his arms around her, but didn't let go.