#I will not feel bad about using my author's notes to shill the Hybrid Zine

[nehswritesstuffs]

The Scottish Werewolf of Hackney - Part IV

A bit on the shorter end, this chapter, but I plan on getting the next installment out soon-ish, so yeah.

Part I - Part II - Part III - FFN - AO3 

The thing about the full moon is, well, you need to see it first. [2840 words; Whouffaldi werewolf AU]

It was raining—storming, even—the night of the full moon. A large thunderstorm was covering the entire British Isles, which only made Clara irritated more than anything. She even went to bed irritated, which was something she made a conscious effort to not do under normal circumstances. These were circumstances far from normal, which made her feel justified in the break from her routine. Basil, however, seemed significantly less perturbed.

“At least the moon is out during the night right now,” he said from his spot by the window the following morning.  The storm from the night before had calmed to a slight mist, making it look more foggy than anything outside. “It’s not like it’s always out; when it’s not full, you can see it nearly whenev—” He was cut off by Clara throwing a cushion towards his face as he turned to face her.

“Yeah, except now what are we going to do?” she sniped. “I feel bad that you got hurt protecting me, but at the same time, you need to leave at some point.”

“Traveling’s too risky for me at the moment without some sort of guard; there are beings out there that would love a shot at me in a weakened state,” he scowled.

“Then what was the lindworm’s excuse?”

“Lindworms aren��t known for their overabundance of intellect, Clara,” Basil replied. “If I had more time before the attack, I could have used a form that was more adept at fighting than I was working with, but that was out of our hands.”

“I know you’re talking, but all I hear is that you’re finding more reasons to couch-surf on your work holiday,” she said.

“You wound me.”

“I speak the truth.”

Instead of dignifying that with a response, Basil retreated to the guest bathroom, utilizing what Clara referred to as “Number Three”. Nearly all the men she had ever known (and some women; she wasn’t fully immune herself), were prone to misuse the privacy bathroom breaks provided to watch internet videos, or check email, or just read, with no other traditional bathroom activities being done in the meantime. It was how her father avoided her stepmother when she was being confrontational and menopausal, it was how students tried to avoid being in class too much for their liking, and it was now how Basil was attempting to avoid her before she went to work. She decided to brush it off and put together her lunch instead—there was no use in letting him derail her morning.

A noise broke the soft silence of Clara milling about in the kitchen—her mobile—and she went to pick it up. The photo on the screen was two mud-caked men in football kits, though there was now only one who would have been capable of calling, and he never called.

“Adrian? What’s wrong?” she asked as she answered.

“I hate to call you this early, Clara,” Adrian apologized, “but you said you have a family friend staying with you right now, yeah?”

“Yeah…”

“…and that he’s a freelancer who may or may not have a job at the moment?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Long story short: I walked into the office not five minutes ago to find out that Mr. Atif is taking a leave of absence. His father fell at the family home in Egypt last night. Everything’s alright, but he wants to take the rest of term off so that he can not only take care of them, but also the paperwork necessary to move them here so he and Mrs. Atif can watch over them better…”

“…and your mind went immediately to my flat-guest.”

“If you’re willing to vouch for him, I’ve been told he can start immediately. If not, then we’ll have to put out an advertisement for a temp immediately, and you know how well that went last time…”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Clara shuddered. The string of temps they had suffered through before Mr. Atif’s tenure was a disastrous mix of lazy, slapdash, and downright insane, which made the staff (and some students) applaud the kindly, stable current caretaker’s entry all the more. “I’ll get him down there—he might be a bit over-qualified, but that doesn’t matter, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t; I’ll tell Mr. Coburn.”

“Alright, thanks.” Clara ended the call and went towards the guest bathroom, knocking on the door. Basil opened it almost immediately, fully clothed and with his mobile in-hand. Yup… a Number Three.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Coal Hill’s in need of some emergency help and I was told that if you came in with me that you’d be put to work immediately.”

“As what? Physics teacher? Music director? Art instructor?”

“Caretaker.”

“No; out of the question.”

“Basil…”

“I’m not going undercover or anything…”

“…but you did just say that it’s dangerous for you to be out without supervision, and this would enable you to get out of the flat…”

Basil scoffed at that. “You’re too short, your face is too round, you’re too bossy, you know very little about the preternatural world…”

“Fake it ‘til you make it, and if not, our P.E. instructor teaches Muay Thai on weekends,” she declared. “Now get ready; you’re going to work with me.”

“I already have a job, remember?”

“…and considering we’re not in Bristol right this moment, I can assume that you need the change of scenery. Hurry up or I’ll phone the faun-man to come pick you up, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

Basil pouted as he complied, as he did not want to see Nardole just yet after just getting rid of him again. Besides, the fact of the matter was that, even if the threat was empty, irritating his hostess any further would result in a possible lack of treats being brought back to the flat, and that was something that he had rather been looking forward to as of late. He followed Clara out the door and down to her motorbike, hopping on the back and awkwardly attempting to find a place to put his hands before she zoomed off onto the street.

A ride through the mist and fog turned into a ride in the rain, and by the time they arrived at Coal Hill, it was thundering again. Clara and Basil ran into the school, currently devoid of students, with the latter soaked and the former only nominally wet thanks to her raincoat.

“No fair, Clara; I can’t just shake this off like normal,” Basil growled. He attempted to shake his body dry, yet could only really get water off his hair. “This is highly inefficient.”

“This is likely preparing you to be better about which coat you wear in the future,” Clara chuckled. She led the sopping wet Basil throughout the school, bringing him directly to the main office where Adrian and Mr. Coburn were still chatting away. “Morning! I brought the substitute caretaker, as promised.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Mr. Coburn exhaled. He reached his arm out to shake Basil’s hand, yet blinked in surprise as he gave the newcomer a decent look. “Do I know you?”

“You might’ve sent some students my way; normally I lecture in St. Luke’s, Bristol,” Basil replied. “Clara said you needed a favor, so here I am.”

“If you normally are in Bristol, then why are you staying at Miss Oswald’s?” Adrian wondered. A brief silence gripped the four, during which Clara began to panic.

“Basil is an old friend and agreed to stay with me for a while after my flat was broken into, because it was getting to me that someone else was in there,” she blurted out. “Normally I wouldn’t’ve bothered him, but he was in the area and—”

“I’m actually on holiday from St. Luke’s,” Basil said. “Change of pace and all that.”

“Then I’m honored that you decided to spend some of your holiday here with us, and far from what your usual working capacity is,” Mr. Coburn said. He led Basil away, giving Adrian and Clara room to talk.

“He’s the one you’ve got over at your place?” he wondered. She nodded, which only made him frown. “You made it sound like he was some daft uncle or something, and I met all your daft uncles last year. Is everything alright?”

“Yeah; he’s generally harmless towards other human beings,” she replied. “Irritable? Yes. A problem? Not that I can tell. The only thing is that he’s taken apart my toaster about half a dozen times by now and I need to be able to leave the flat without worrying for my kitchen appliances.”

“That’s good, at least.” He stared in the direction Mr. Coburn had brought Basil, his eyes narrowing slightly. “There’s something about him though… I don’t know how long you’ve known him or how you met, but please be careful.”

“He and I met at one of those seminars you never seem to get picked to attend,” she lied. “Red flags going up?”

“Yeah, though I can’t place why. Guess it’s one of those things that I hope is a false alarm.” Another teacher then came into the office to check her pigeon-hole for messages, causing him to drop his voice to just barely a whisper. “Be careful, yeah? We can’t go losing you too.”

“Thanks,” Clara nodded. She watched as Adrian turned on his heel and left, deciding to use the extra time she now had at work to put together a couple more plans ahead. A few steps and she was at her own pigeon-hole, looking over her mail, seeing if there was anything good.

“You on to Adrian now?” the other teacher asked. Clara glanced over and saw an incredulous look across her coworker’s face.

“No…? He and I are friends, is all; you’d be part of the group if you’d come out after work on Fridays to the pub every now and then.”

“I’d rather not…”

“Your loss then,” Clara shrugged. The other teacher seemed unfazed by that, however.

“Did you see the new dish that Mr. Coburn’s showing around?” she asked. “A bit on the older end for me, but still a nice addition to the scenery. I wonder who has him as a substitute.”

“Mr. Atif has to take a leave of absence to help out his parents,” Clara explained. She didn’t want to get into too much, being that she didn’t know how the particular coworker would handle Basil staying on her couch. “His replacement should only be temporary; nothing at all like the Year of the Seven Caretakers.”

“That was bloody awful; don’t remind me,” the other teacher groaned. Clara smiled inwardly as she was inundated with griping about the year none of the rest of staff wanted to relive. That way, she was able to politely excuse herself after a few moments and went back to her classroom, ready to wade her way through short essays pretending to be about Animal Farm and her upcoming lectures on roman à clef novels.

What she noticed, however, was that she couldn’t get her mind off of Basil. After having him shut up in her flat for the past two or so weeks, there was something in her that couldn’t help but worry about him now that they were both out and about, with him potentially out in the open for any other weird creature to attack. Had someone asked her a month prior if there were such things as werewolves, she would have found the nearest Hammer Horror anthology and beat the person with it, but now… now she wasn’t entirely certain what was real anymore and what was only fantasy.

In fact, Clara got to wait until the period before lunch before she heard anything from Basil again. She was in the middle of an attempt at briefly explaining the propaganda techniques used by the characters in Animal Farm when he barged into the room, Mr. Atif’s coat flapping about his skinny frame as he went directly towards the back wall and the windows there.

“What are you doing?” she asked, feeling as though surprise was too strong an emotion to waste on the encounter. Clara and her students watched as he attempted to heft himself up towards the open window, doing a poor job of wiggling out of it.

“Miss? Who is this?” one of the students asked.

“This is Mr. Smith, our caretaker while Mr. Atif takes care of a few things at home,” she explained. Walking over towards Basil, she grabbed hold of one of his ankles and yanked down, pulling him back to the floor. Soaked in rain from the shoulders up and along his arms, he was an odd sight that made Clara falter slightly before repeating herself. “Answer me: what are you doing?”

“Checking for baby griffins,” he replied, his face amazingly straight for the words spoken. “We’re at the beginning of the birthing season, yeah, but it’s good to take measures now instea—” He was cut off by Clara holding up a finger, which caused him to stop mid-sentence and follow her when she crooked said finger and walked out into the corridor. “Yes?”

“What is the matter with you?” she hissed. “Baby griffins?!”

“They’re actually quite common around London, interestingly enough,” he claimed. “They’re diurnal when they’re small and easily mistakable for other creatures at a glance, but once they get to be about the size of a large cat they switch to being nocturnal and…” Basil stopped when Clara hit his shoulder, cutting him off again.

“I don’t care! Don’t do that when I’m in the middle of a lecture!”

“Hey, I’m not the one making eyes at a coblynau … well, part-coblynau, actually… now that I think about it, while there is a trace, it wouldn’t surprise me if the ancestor was from three or four hundred years back, considering he’s only slightly odd-looking, not down-right ugly…” He saw that Clara’s arms were folded across her chest and she was leaning on her one hip as she glared at him. “What? You know what a werewolf is, but not a coblynau? Being a teacher is an excellent parallel, I thought.”

“A coblynau never met Abbott and Costello,” she said flatly. “Now I don’t care if we have an infestation of giant spiders or murderous pepper pots or lizard people on our hands—act like a normal human being for once.”

“Then don’t come complaining to me when a window accidentally gets left open overnight and baby griffins get into your things,” he warned.

“You’re mental and trying to catch me off-guard, I know it,” she said. At that, she turned back around and went into her classroom, only to find that all her students were staring at her in confusion. “Is there a problem?”

“You’re never like that with Mr. Atif, Miss,” a girl in the front row said. “I thought he was trying to be funny.”

“He’s being a disruptive pain more than anything,” she replied. “Now, where were we?” Clara was cut off by a boy’s hand shooting up. “Yes…?”

“Why was he talking about baby griffins?”

“…because, as we already established, he was trying to be funny, but really wasn’t,” she said. “He’s used to dealing with older students, so take it as him not knowing how to handle lower secondary. Now, we left off around manipulated truths and loaded language…”

The class resigned themselves to return to the lesson, hoping that they would get to talk about the new caretaker soon. Some could sense that it was their teacher who was manipulating the truth merely so that they could finish the lesson in time for the period to end, though they all knew that it was beyond unproductive to call her out on it. Class eventually ended and it was time for Clara’s lunch period. She sat down hard in her chair.

‘Why does he have to be so difficult?’ she wondered to herself. ‘It’s not like he has to do anything foreign to him—just tidy up until we can get a new substitute caretaker.’ Clara thought about him attempting to tell her about baby griffins, his face almost affectionate once he began describing them. He was still rather soaked from the rain then, wasn’t he? His hair, excellent at being fluffy while dry, had become curly—almost wavy—when wet, something she had witnessed before when he showered back at her flat, and…

Clara went pale as she realized the disturbing fact: she was beginning to fancy Basil. Not only was she beginning to fancy Basil, a man whom she knew to nearly be as old as her dad, she realized she was dangerously close to fancying someone whom she only knew of as a dog when they first met. She groaned in realization and let her head drop to her desk—what the bloody hell, Clara Oswald?

The next full moon—and his eviction from her flat—couldn’t come soon enough.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

A/N: In case you’ve missed it, I’ve contributed to a zine! The Hybrid is a Whouffaldi fan zine, available digital, physical, AND with merch stretch goals! There’s twenty-three full-page art pieces and eighteen new stories, never before published either online or in print! Proceeds go to One to One Children’s Fund, a charity for which Jenna Coleman acts as an ambassador. More information can be found here!