(please note this is completely raw, unedited, unrefined...)
“Dear Luna, what have you done to my truck?” He asked emerging from the shadows. His close cropped blonde hair was still light enough to catch the yellowing over head light in the garage.
The air was flooded with the rawness of him, James felt it creeping down his spine and over taking his senses. The way he smelled, like the Earth after rain and the scent of fir trees rustled by a spring breeze. He was refreshing and grounding. He looked different now. When James looked at him, glancing at him to avoid the temptation to stare, he was so aware of the differences. There was more of him now, heavier muscle covering a formerly lean and lanky frame. He had filled out, filled into himself in some ways, lost something else in others. He had always been light, brightness in a dim world and his smile had been paralyzingly brilliant. When he smiled James always felt the earth move, even when they were children, when there was a scheme, a plan, something that he would suggest and then he would smile and James would agree to whatever cockamamie plan it was. He didn’t have that any more, in fact since he had first returned over a week ago James hadn’t seen him smile once. Not that James had much to smile about either.
“Dear Luna?” James snorted, turning his attention to the box of busy work he was sorting, screws and nails by size, shape and head. “You sound like one of them.” The traditional werewolves who had come seeking an alliance, a joint effort in a battle against an imposing Evil.
“I am one of them.” He said casually. He called himself Orion now, a name that in the circles of wolves had become synonymous with death and carnage to the foe they all shared.
To James he would always be Sundance, to look at him was to be reminded of that. So James didn’t look at him, didn’t seek out the familiar set of eyes he had always found to be comforting. Home was in Sundance’s eyes, so blue you could see the bottom of the ocean through them, so perfectly clear and so alive. They smiled, to James they had always smiled. James hadn’t seen Orion smile once.
“I told you to take care of my truck…” Sundance said, he was facing the old chevy, studying the patterns of mud splattered all along the frame.
“Yeah well, I haven’t had much chance to worry about your precious car.” James shoved a box of bolts aside roughly, rougher than necessary. “I did that looking for you, clearly a waste of my time.”
“Are you still angry about that?” Sundance did a fair job faking surprise at the reaction. He folded his arms across his larger chest, the broader muscles constricting under a tee shirt. A tee shirt, nothing like what he would have worn in days past, it was faded and cut poorly with the fabric thin enough you could almost see through in places. Sundance would have never stood for such treatment of his wardrobe. Orion apparently didn’t care.
“Are you kidding me?!” James slammed down a metal case, the recently sorted screws and nails bouncing out of place and scattering along the work bench. He turned and faced Sundance, not sure if he was more out raged or hurt by the implications. “Am I still angry about that?! Of course I’m still angry! You took off into the woods on some glory hunt! I spend weeks searching for you! Calling for you and you’re too fucking busy getting in cozy with your new friends to even bother to what? Bother to see if I even survived after your cockamamie plan?”
That night, that was the Sundance he remembered. The wild hair, the brilliant eyes, the quick and intelligent mind that never quite got used to it’s full potential. The man who would throw out a plan and just run with it, hoping and praying it worked. The man who always managed to come out of everything with barely a scratch on him.
There was a scratch now. The tee shirt stretched thin and ill fitting over Sundance’s shoulders and from the collar poked a scar, it rose up out of the shirt and crawled with jagged tears towards Sundance’s ear. It fanned out, spreading like the branches of a tree, the furthest limb crawling along the strongest point of Sundance’s jaw, ending as a small point on his chin. A man who hadn’t so much as a bicycle accident scar from his childhood, now had a horrific spiraling scar across a portion of what had previous been a handsome face.
The scar told a violent story. The extra muscle, the shortened hair, the lack of a smile told a worse one.
“I knew you were alive. I saw you.” Sundance admitted it with no apology in his tone. It was a simple statement of fact. He had always been an excellent poker player, but James had always known the tell. He couldn’t see if there was one now, he feared there wasn’t. No bluffing, Orion had only truth to offer whether James liked it or not.
“You bastard….” James tasted the disbelief like vinegar on his tongue. His stomach turned, he wanted to be sick all over the floor of the garage. He had come here for solitude, it was where he hid when he couldn’t take it any more. The one place in the world where he could sit in the cab of Sundance’s old truck – the same one he had when they were teens – and quietly mourn his loss. Even after Sundance had shown up, calling himself another name and turning a cold shoulder to James’s disbelief, James mourned the loss of his friend. His lover. His brother. His mate. “You were there? All those times I thought I was losing my mind and you watched from a distance?!”
And he had thought he was losing his mind, the smell of Sundance lingering. His mind playing tricks on him as he searched, as he called, as he begged the gods and the earth to just give him back. He had been so sure that his mind was fooling him, that his heart was reaching out to give him what he needed. So much so he hadn’t spent a night sober since Sundance had vanished, until the night Orion walked into the Moonshine and said ‘hello’.
“I had no choice.” Sundance, his voice still flat but his brows had stitched together, creasing in annoyance.
“You had every choice!” James paced across the garage. He crossed Sundance’s path but did so well out of reach. Well out of range.
“I owed someone my life and it was a debt I had no intention of going back on.” Sundance tracked him with his body, watching him from under those annoyed brows, with eyes that were brilliant, and still so crystal clear blue.
James rounded back to face Sundance, disbelief and anger clouding all the grief and confusion. “Oh now you’re honorable? Run from responsibility you entire fucking life but the first chance you get to leave and you take it in the name of HONOR?!” At the end James kicked a bench, sending it skidding along one set of legs to the wall. It clipped a leg on the work bench, spun out and flipped over leaving only a deafening silence in the wake of it’s angry screeches.
“I have run from duties I could not fulfill. Do not confuse my inability to lead with a lack of responsibility. I have protected you since we were children, James Morvidus.” Sundance was warning him, cautioning him in a way James felt was achingly familiar. But he did not know this Orion who wore the same face. “Always starting fights he couldn’t finish.”
A cheap shot from the blonde.
“You’re doing just fine leading your troops!” A cheaper one from James.
“A general is not an Alpha, you of all people should know that.”
James felt the retort like a sucker punch to his gut. It twisted him inside. He had spent years longing for a position he could not have in their home town. He had come up with the plan to run, to flee and never look back. He hadn’t asked Sundance to go with him, but wasn’t surprised he had. Sundance always followed James, right into range of the monster that nearly killed them that night so many months ago…
James shook the thoughts of that night from his head. Forcing the last vision of Sundance, wounded, powerless against a greater foe, from his mind’s eye.
“That’s what this is about? You never came back because you didn’t want to be alpha?” James had been pushing for it. They were alphas now, this was their place. They could be, with the Firebrands, as they saw fit, no rules. They could rule as a mated pair. Sundance dismissed it, ignored it, or simply said ‘no’. James had always believed he would eventually win, because Sundance always followed him.
“I came back.”
“Six months later.”
“I had no choice, I wasn’t going to let the man who saved my life die because I had to tuck you in at night!” Sundance uncurled his arms, a hand back through roman styled hair that had no give as his longer hair would have in the past. It was an old habit, an old gesture James knew too well; Orion was starting to lose his composure.
“We were building a life here!” James reminded him. A life they could lead any which way they chose. A life where they didn’t have to spend their days hiding from others. Tucking away their affair, covering up their relationship…staying in the closet for eternity. Here they could have been free, been who they wanted to be. Who James had always wanted them to be.
“YOU were building a life here.” Sundance’s hand moved out. Smacking into a solid plank of corrigated wood attached to the wall. The tools balanced on hooks in the wall rattled, bounced with the force of the strike. To James’s eye the strike had not seemed that powerful, that overt, but the ding of the hammer against the wooden wall behind it said otherwise.
The statement tore at James. His insides felt as if they had been shredded, giving way to the acid in the pit of his stomach to eat it’s way through his soul. How could he have not known how little Sundance wanted this life? Hadn’t Sundance always been the one to insist on the closet, on the hiding of what they really were?
“You left…” It was the only thing James could think to say. The last dig he had, the last barb that was stuck in his heart. The notion that at the end of the day, Sundance had survived – more or less – the attack from the demon, but he hadn’t come home. He hadn’t come back to James to tell him as such, he had remained. Only to show up months later as the right hand to the alpha of the Greylock Pack, and not the least bit apologetic for his leaving.
“I didn’t leave, I told you to go. I told you to go so you could survive.” There was obvious anger in Sundance now. His voice was deep, graveled as if from years of smoking, but James suspected it had more to do with the scars that were close to encircling his throat. He moved forward, stalking towards James with a sense of purpose and determination James was unfamiliar with coming from the blond. James didn’t step back, though everything in his instinct told him to quit, to stop while he was still ahead. While he still had a head. But he held his ground as Sundance crowded him. James stepped back to avoid being run over, ceasing as his back collided with the solid metal frame of the truck. “And I went through a pain you can not imagine…like silver in my veins, my body rotting from the inside out it was unimaginable but I would do it again. I would stay in those woods away from you forever if it ensured you never got that close to dying again.” Sundance loomed over the top of James, so much taller than James remembered, though the extra weight did not help him feel any thing less.
“You choose strangers and a life in the wild over me. OVER ME!” He emphasized the words. Not out of desperation of a man with no place to go, trapped as he was against the truck with the even less forgiving figure of Orion looming over him. But as a man who needed Sundance to see, the betrayal was deeper than that of lovers who were separated by a war they didn’t quite understand yet. It wasn’t the act of a man who needed to cause pain to the one he cared for more to feel a sense of fairplay restored. It was far deeper, the betrayal more real and more important than anything else he could think of. James was not the jilted lover, but the forgotten friend. Their friendship, their brotherhood, predated everything else. His first memories were tied to Sundance, to the blue eyes staring back at him. They had been side by side since infancy, their birthdays a mere months apart.
Sundance slammed a violent fist into the side of the truck. A car he had pain painstakingly saved for, repaired, repainted, tended to since he was 16 years old. And he left a sizable dent in the door. “I have never chosen anything over you! My entire life I have always chosen you! I have followed you to the ends of the Earth, I have followed you here, to this place, to this fight and I will not be made to feel guilty for choosing your life over mine. Not now, not ever.”
They were so close now, their faces hovering near one another. James wanted to touch him, to reach out and hold onto Sundance and feel the power course under his finger tips as he had for so many years. To feel the security of knowing everything would some how find a way to work out so long as they remained side by side. But he didn’t have the chance to consider why it would or would not be a good idea. Sundance stepped away from him, shoving James’s shoulers back into the metal as he did so.
The blond grabbed the hem of his poorly cut shirt, and shoved it down over rippling muscles on a core that was solid as a 1,000 year old oak tree. James’s upper lip curled back and he leapt forward shoving Sundance’s broad shoulders forcefully in retaliation.
“Don’t touch me.” He barked.
“Don’t touch me.” Sundance snarled back and shoved James again. Sundance had always been strong, but the shove came with Power behind it and James stumbled back half a pace, caught off guard by the strength of it.
“Why not?” James recovered and shoved Sundance again, hands square on the center of his chest throwing him backwards several steps. “I out rank you, General. I am an Alpha, I can throw you around all I fucking want.”
Sundance recovered, faster than James had, his surprise not as great. He closed the gap between him with an upper lip curled back, white teeth showing edges scissors into one another as they spoke. His voice darkened, turning rougher and harsher as a low warning growl crawled up from the back of his throat. “You so sure about that , Jimmy?”
James had hated the nickname ‘Jimmy’ for as long as any one could recall. It was not his name, it sounded like it belonged to a frat boy with an alcohol or gambling problem. It did not belong to a man who wanted to be alpha of his own pack some day, who had ambition beyond his grasp in his home town where he would always be the first born son of the beta, and not the heir to the thrown. It was a point of contention and a name only used by Sundance in gentle mocking. But it wasn’t mocking or gentle here, it was thrown out into the midsummer night air with a sense of vengeance attached. It was said to cause harm.
James punched Sundance in the nose.
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