Chapter Text
Kristi was woken up by a solid thump to the outer glass doors of the clinic, heavy enough it felt like it should have pushed the doors from its frame with a rattle that was like a muffled apocalypse. It pulled her from a dream of softness and warmth and sleepy comfort so solidly that she sat up dislodging Mari's arm where it was draped across her and thought for a moment something had landed on the roof.
She had been in this town long enough that she was on her feet and fumbling for her keys before she had truly woken.
A second thump as she became awake enough to notice that she could see her way to the door, even if, still mostly asleep she bumped against the doorframe with her hip. "I'm coming," she shouted. She was awake enough to realise that whatever was ramming against the door it was not one of those things. If there was light enough to see they had gone back to where they came from.
She was fumbling with the bolt on the inner door, she was always careful to lock both doors, when she saw the figure, wearing dark colours, thump against the door again leaving a bloody smear in his wake. "I'm coming," she repeated. She couldn't go any faster but she did understand his need for urgency.
When she got the door open he shouldered past her into the clinic and put a second figure, the one she barely noticed when she saw him, on the bed and turned, stumbling to his knees.
At some point Randall had gotten up, coming up the stairs from the old gymnasium and was holding a baseball bat. Mari came out wearing only the vest and panties that she had slept in. Her hair undone and a black and gold mess of tangles against her neck and she was trying to tend to the man in black.
Kristi had followed him to the bed and her mind immediately went into work. The man was almost bled out, his gums pale and his eyes rolling back in his head, his pulse was thready and he was covered in drying and dried blood. But when she pulled her hand away from his wrist most of the blood was fresh. There was a series of healing and fresh slashes across the side of his arm, and a lot of previous scars where this had been done a lot. The cuts were ritualistic but careful not to cut any tendons, veins or arteries. His sleeve was heavy with absorbed blood as she pushed it back.
She needed gloves.
She needed to place a line. She could worry about stopping the bleeding when she had a line in place and a bag of saline and glucose on the drip stand.
It would give her a moment to think if nothing else.
On the floor the other man was vomitting, something black and sticky that spread across the floor in a clear oily substance that stunk of rot and made Kristi want to gag and she wasn't near it.
She couldn't find a vein, they were all almost collapsed due to the lack of blood. "If I have to put this in your foot, dammit," she said, "I absolutely will, so either you get me a vein or I'll..." She didn't know why she was threatening only that she was trying to save his life and he was not making it easy for her.
She formed a quick tourniquet around the top of his arm by twisting the fabric of his shirt to make the veins bulge and as she was slipping the needle into the now visible vein when there was a thump noise that made her look up, her thumb slipping on the bloody skin but the cannula prevented the needle going further. Randall had the baseball bat, the one stiles and Kenny had used the day before with Ethan and had left against the cabinet and was now pushing the other man, the one who had carried her patient here, who was unconscious on the floor into the closet, and Mari was running barefoot, slip sliding on the bloody and vomit covered floor to get the talisman from the door to hang it on the closet door.
Kristi didn't have time to question that as she hooked up the drip, and rooted around in her kit for something to wipe away enough of the blood that she could see if anything needed to be stitched. There was broken glass in his shirt, which caught and tore her glove.
Randall had gone back downstairs and came up with his feet shoved into his boots, which he hadn't laced, and his jeans open as he pulled a sweater over his head, "I'll get Boyd," he said and ran out of the door.
Kristi was too busy trying to stabilise the man on the bed to even take the time to wonder what the fuck was going on around her.
Boyd had spots of shaving foam on his cheeks, and he hadn't had the opportunity to button up his cuffs. His shirt was a pale dun colour and it looked like it might have been the only button up he had found in the pile of clothes in Colony House. It was worn almost down to threads at the cuffs. He was holding his jacket in one hand and a tumbler of coffee in the other.
He had heavy bags under his eyes and more white in his curly hair, which needed cutting.
Kristi had set Mari down to donate blood to the figure on the bed.
Boyd draped his jacket over the back of one of the chairs along the wall. It looked like it would take an act of god to get him to put down the coffee. It was on heavy rationing, but the substitute did not need to be. It tasted exactly like sweet black coffee but lacked the caffeine, and it was the man on the bed who had taught Bakta to make it. For the first time in probably decades there was something close to coffee in the pots of the diner, herbs grown for tea and not just foraged.
Mari went to stand up, forgetting that she was hooked up to the cannula, aware that she was undressed - in just vest and panties, with blood and the vomit dried on her leg. The black substance had dried like tar twisting through the black hairs on her legs and would need to be cut off.
Kristi was still thinking like a doctor. Until the vitals of the man on the bed were stabilised she couldn't think of anything else. She had compartmentalised the problems. It didn't matter that she was wearing her favourite shirt - the one that Mari had kept in her bag for all those months - and panties with socks squelching with blood in front of Boyd. It mattered that she could get the man in front of her at a point where he wasn't bleeding out on the make shift hospital bed.
She couldn't figure out what was happening with him. It was inexplicable. His pulse was thready and his blood seemed to be coating everything but there wasn't nearly enough wounds to account for all of the gore. He had clearly been bleeding himself for at least days, and his partner, now locked in the closet and she couldn't spare the brain power to know why, would have had to know - and he had been hunting for the town since he arrived.
If they knew how to make a coffee substitute from common weeds then they knew to eat liver to account for blood loss if nothing else.
Kristi probably looked as run down as Boyd, worn to the bone, she must have, because he offered her his tumbler of coffee. She didn't even hesitate and took a large swig like she was back at college and going to parties, emptying red solo cups in single mouthfuls.
She passed the cup back with a thanks.
Intellectually she knew that there wasn't enough caffeine in that entire cup to make a difference to the way her mind was thinking.
Since she had come here she felt positively bipolar, that there were two people inside her that the town needed. Kristi, the woman who had stepped into Father Khatri's role of listener; who never lost her temper, and had a cup of tea waiting, and the doctor who stitched them back up physically.
She was exhausted.
Both of her.
Boyd took a mouthful of coffee as he took a second long look around the clinic, at the blood stains on the floor, at the small bits of broken glass and something else metallic on the floor, at the pool of vomit with a stripe of cleaner floor where Mari had slipped and fallen into the wall.
"So," it was an opening and Kristi knew if she stepped into it she would have to become Kristi and not the doctor, but the doctor was overseeing the blood transfusion. "If he's here," Boyd had a slow careful way of speaking almost as if he had been performing Shakespeare in the theatre and not managing logistics for the army before coming here. "Where's?" He was cut off by Kenny running into the clinic with Randall behind him, Randall's face was dominated by his scars and the hair he kept buzzcut short. He still hadn't tied the laces of his black army style boots and the doctor had a thought about how it would be up to her to set his bones when he tripped. Didn't they understand how busy she was?
Kenny said something into Boyd's ear. Of them all only Kenny looked put together. He must have stayed the night in the sheriff's station with Boyd to be here and so tidy.
Boyd's face went ashen and he nodded at Kenny. "Okay," he muttered to himself and took another drink of his coffee. It must have been down to the dregs by now.
"Can you wake him up?" Boyd asked.
Kristi wanted to tell him yes, to flip a switch and wake him up, to get to work cleaning up the mess, and actually think about what was going on and what it meant. "When the transfusion is over," she said, choosing to be politic, "chances are he'll wake up on his own, but short of putting a whole bottle of glucose in him, no." Perhaps not that politic.
Mari looked up at her and went to say something but Randall spoke before she could. "They started banging on the door at dawn," he said in that arrogant, dismissive tone of his. The one that spoke of hurt and anger and knowing nothing but lashing out to protect himself. He was determined to make his problems everyone else's problem and the town just seemed to make his discontent sharper.
He hadn't forgiven Boyd for the scars on his neck and face and Kristi didn't think he should be forced to either. This town made monsters of everything in it.
"His husband was fucked up too," Randall continued, "full of broken glass and mirror pieces, jeans pulled down by the weight of blood, and as soon as he dumped him there," he gestured with a bob of his head to the bed, "he fell, threw up that," the word had a unique emphasis and disgust to it, "and when she went to help him he turned into one of those things," had had exceeded himself with the disgust in that word.
She could understand the hate and she hadn't been carved up like provolone by them.
"Randall hit him across the head with the bat," Randall had put it back across the wall. Kenny had been using it the day before to play ball with Ethan and Stiles until Ethan had fallen and skinned his elbow and Kenny brought him into the clinic to get it treated with betadine. They had left the mitt, ball and bat behind when Kenny brought Ethan back to his mom making jokes about how Tabitha wouldn't let them play any more now he was all scuffed up.
"And that was fucked up," Randall continued, "I didn't hit him, but he went down hard, and it was like," he licked his lips thinking, "like fucking magnets, you know how they push apart, it was like that, but he went down hard, into that," he looked at the pool of cold, hardening vomit, "so we put him in the closet with one of the talimans.
Boyd's sigh managed to say that even if coffee wasn't rationed there wasn't enough of it for this. "Kristi," his tone was careful and measured as he spoke, making sure he could not be misinterpreted as he asked what he thought were the important questions. "Did you see him change?"
"Are you fucking questioning me?" Randall asked, the chip on his shoulder forcing him to lash out like a scared and wounded dog on the street.
"No," Boyd said spreading his hands. He had spent years in warzones he was using his training to express that he was not a threat, "you said he changed, I believe you, I wanted to know if Kristi saw the change."
"I saw it too," Mari said, the blood transfusion was done and she went to pull out the cannula, but without even a bandaid Kristi stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
"Okay," Boyd said, "I'm asking Kristi because she's been up close and personal with one of those things when they changed. I want to know if he looked like that."
Randall's rage was almost a growl as he said, "I saw it, he fucking changed."
"Were his teeth inside his mouth or not?" Boyd snapped as if he had asked the question ten or twelve times.
Randall's rage deflated like a burst balloon, "what kind of fucking question is that?" he asked.
"Were his teeth inside his mouth?" Boyd asked Mari.
"I," she paused, "it was so quick, but inside, yeah, inside."
"Randall, you said that they looked like people when they hurt you," Kenny was trying to be the peacemaker, "so you didn't see them change, Kristi did, she did an autopsy on one of them. She knows what they look like." He was following whatever trail that Boyd was. This town was lousy with secrets.
"Papery skin, button eyes and too many shark teeth, they don't have lips or hair, and their ears are..." Kristi started to describe the figure. She had hoped to forget but she had had the smiling one on her table, she had opened him up and taken his organs, shrivelled and dry as dust, out of his cadaver. She had held them in her hands, protected by a pair of rubber washing up gloves, and put them on the tray. She wasn't going to forget it.
"He didn't look like that," Mari said, "he changed, but he didn't look like that. He had pointed ears and his brow was all swollen and his teeth were sharp."
Boyd seemed to visibly ease at least part of the way. He wasn't relaxed or, as she better knew him, between crises, but he wasn't at red alert now.
Kristi watched the way that the puzzle pieces were slipping into place in Boyd's mind. He had an answer that satisfied him so he could turn his attention to the others.
Boyd understood what had happened, and the information he had asked about the transformation cemented it.
"You can open the closet," He said and turned to Kenny and said something quiet that Kristi couldn't hear because both Randall and Mari exploded, to the extent that Mari went to stand and Kristi had to put her hand on her shoulder to stop her. She had just given blood, if she got up too fast she was going to pass out and then there would be two patients and not one.
Under normal circumstances Kristi would have gotten her some fruit and tea to help stabilise her before she'd let her move. These were not normal circumstances.
"No fucking way," Randall said putting himself bodily against the door and lifting the bat from where he had propped it back against the cabinet. He had it crossed in front of his body now, facing down Boyd but he still lashed out. He reminded Kristi of a dog she had seen as a kid, hit by a car and her parents were trying to get it into the car to take to the vets or the rescue and the dog was stuck, its back leg clearly broken, with blood around its mouth and it was as fierce as any dragon trying to scare them away because it was scared, because it was hurting, so it barked and snarled, but it had eased when her dad got a blanket over its head and her mom found the peanut butter in the groceries and moved Kristi to the front seat so she could sit in the back feeding it peanut butter from an old popsicle stick.
Randall wouldn't be as easily mollified with a blanket and some peanut butter.
They didn't even have peanut butter or popsicle sticks to put it on.
"Look," Boyd said, leaning forward, that quiet tone he used when he wanted to force his opinion, when he wanted to insist that he knew more and he knew best and he was too tired to truly deal with the opposition. His hand went to where he normally wore his gun but it wasn't there, he had left it locked in the drawer in the sheriffs station.
It said so much about the hurry he had come to the clinic in.
Randall didn't look impressed and like that stray dog looked about to bite, anger flushing his face with blood that darkened the puckered scar on his cheek and throat.
Behind them the door opened as if it had not been locked, showing just how useless the talisman was.
He still looked grey. He was a man with a blueish grey foundation and skin usually tanned by being outside all of the hours of daylight, his black hair was close cropped to his head and his beard starting to bulge where he hadn't had the opportunity to groom himself for the day.
He was wearing a black henley, the elbows bagging swollen from fluid and jeans that looked almost painted on. His feet were bare.
Standing proud from the flesh of his hip was a piece of mirror that must have been the size of his hand, "It's okay, Boyd," he said, and stood between Boyd and Randall, "I think the cat is out of the bag, don't you." He sounded tired. He wasn't a man given to long conversations, Kristi had been told he was painfully shy and, this was said with a nudge and a laugh, it made him like a hissing cat making itself as big as it could to hide the fact it was pissing itself scared.
Saying that he changed.
His forehead bulged, rolling his eyebrows down into the lids, and there was extra bone at the cheekbones, dried blood flaking off as the skin stretched, ears pointing and teeth sharpening, but most telling, and most unlike those things that came at night, his eyes were bright, shining like hazard lights, red, in the shadowed hollows his eye sockets had become.
He was different, it wasn't natural, but it wasn't the same as the things. His fingernails had thickened, yellow and sharp but his arms had not elongated. It was not that the glamour illusion of humanity that the things used had been shattered, which Kristi had seen, or been seen through, but that he was both the handsome man that she and Fatima had leered at when he was building up at Colony House, and whatever this was.
"What the fuck?" It was Mari who said it. Kristi had thought it would Randall, but he was silent.
"A werewolf," Boyd said and it was clear he had known all along. It explained things, like how he could stand with that huge piece of mirror in his hip, the blood painting his jeans slick.
Randall looked disgusted, "you mean all the times he told me," this was said with a bob of the head to the patient on the bed, "that you were a werewolf he wasn't lying?" he muttered and it was just loud enough for Kristi to hear.
"We need to get you out of those clothes," Kristi said, "get the glass out, see to those cuts."
"Aren't you going to ask about?" Mari cut her off, "you are married to him."
"I could hear everything you did and said," Derek answered. "Otherwise I would have come out of that closet a whole lot sooner." The extra teeth in his mouth made his speech almost slurred and put a threat in his voice that he might not have intended. Kristi knew Derek to be a gentle person who never hesitated to do something for anyone.
He had fixed the locked doors at the back of the clinic for her, using planks to attach them to the doorframe and placing wedges into every gap to lock everything shut, so even if someone undid the chains and heavy padlock they could not enter the clinic that way.
She wasn't sure she could have expressed how much safer it had made her feel but now Boyd had revealed Derek to be a werewolf.
It certainly explained the hunting.
Of course he could take down one of the animals in the forest without all the tack that Randall had asked him about, more than once.
"Derek," Boyd started, "now we can talk, we need to,"
"Not if he is going to hit me with the bat again," Derek cut him off, looking at the baseball bat in Randall's hand. He was holding it in a loose handshake tennis grip, not the two handed grip used to strike a ball. He was holding it like he was going to use it as a bludgeon.
The bat had been in the truck that Derek came with, the one loaded with supplies for something, the one that Boyd discouraged questions about. Was the bat special? Hadn't Randall said something about the bat.
Randall offered the bat to Boyd but he was no less suspicious, and Kenny was there, behind Boyd, aware of things and eager to be part of it. Kenny always tried to please Boyd, it was one of the things that Kristi liked about him, that around Boyd he wanted to be the dutiful and adoring son. Considering the way this place fucked up relationships even that was strained. Kenny knew what Boyd was going to ask and Kristi didn't think that it was about why the two of them were covered in blood; Or why Derek had vomitted the black sludge.
"Derek, where's Joey?" Kenny asked. Had Randall still the bat he would have smashed it into Derek's head, "where's the baby? Her diaper bag is at the church, where is she?"
There was a croak from the figure on the bed, a noise that was spoken and it sent Kristi immediately for his pulse to see if it was any better, her fingers on his wrist as Mari leaned over him. "Home," Mari said, leaning over closer to hear him repeat it. "He said home."
"Derek," Boyd was reaching for his non existent gun again before he realised he had the baseball bat tucked under his arm that he could use as a weapon. "Where's Joey?"
"Stiles sent her home," Derek answered, "that's why we're so fucked up."