#this sweet little angel wrecks a LOT of home furnishings tbh

[swan-archive]

some fig tree wereverse content, nothing much to see here. takes place maybe a month or so after the events of “crawl til dawn on my hands and knees.”

You end up having a lot of mending on your hands when you’ve got a werewolf pup in the house, it turns out. Scuffed trouser knees from going on all fours too early, claws torn through the toes of stockings, buttons torn away from a daring wriggle through a just-barely-wide-enough gap under a fence, you name it, Alexander has done it to his clothes, and with a vengeance. Hence the small mountain of clothes in need of patching lying there on the settee next to Rachel.

She hasn’t been avoiding doing it, not really, not actively, but the task has been picked up and then put down again more times than she can count in the past few weeks. Always some slightly more urgent fire to put out, something that needs her hands on it immediately, until this morning Alex had come out to breakfast wearing breeches with a great rent torn in one leg. She’d been obliged to cut a tail-hole in his last good pair of trousers so as not to leave him wandering around looking like a beggar.

So: this is the emergency that requires her attention now. She pricks her thumb with the needle, curses softly and sucks away the bead of blood before it can stain the shirt in her hands.

At least she has the house to herself, so she can work without interruption. James is off at work, Jamie and Alex are both out playing—the neighborhood kids have finally gotten over their fear of a wolf in their midst and welcomed Alex back into the fold. Thank God. Alex is a bright child, more willing than most to entertain himself with a book or practicing his letters, but Lord, the energy in him now, the way he tears around the house when he grows bored of his lessons. It’ll be good for him to be around other children more. Give him a chance to burn some of that off.

Lost in her own thoughts, it takes Rachel a few long minutes to process the squeak of the side door’s rusty hinge. Someone in the house. She sits up straight, heart kicking into a sprint, but no creak of boots on the floorboards, no intruders appearing in the doorway. She relaxes a little. The house settling, maybe. That’s all.

After a moment, a soft rustle and a scraping sound from the kitchen, like a chair being bumped. Then silence.

…Or maybe not. “Jamie? Alex?” Rachel calls into the back of the house. No reply. She sits still for several seconds, listening.

Another scrape, and then a quiet play-growl.

“Alexander,” Rachel says. “Alexander, you had better not be where I think you are.”

Silence again.

Rachel sighs and rises and walks into the kitchen. She nearly treads on Alex as she steps through the doorway, where he’s lying sprawled out on his belly on the floorboards. He squeaks and flinches away with a look of abject guilt on his face that would put a real dog to shame. “I didn’t do it,” he yelps, pushing himself up into a sitting position.

Rachel raises an eyebrow. Looks down at the chair nearest the door. One of its legs has fresh little toothmarks in it, and is still wet with saliva.

“I didn’t,” Alex repeats, trailing off in a pitiful whine. She’s not sure when he picked up the kicked-puppy act, but he performs it to an almost alarming degree of perfection. Even Rachel is tripped up by it, the way it pings the part of her brain that says poor little animal, poor little hurt creature before the part that can analyze what’s actually been done here.

She can’t encourage this sort of behavior, so when Alex starts in on another whimper, she interrupts as quickly as she can. “That’s it, up, out of the kitchen,” she says, catching Alex up and lifting him to her shoulder. He squirms unhappily, and it’s not like holding a child, not this time of the moon; he’s all thick fur and loose skin underneath that, wriggly and roly-poly like a baby animal. His limbs jut out at odd angles, not quite settled into the orientations that will leave Alex stuck on all fours. It’s all Rachel can do to keep him from slipping out of her arms.

“I can walk—I don’t want—”

“No, I am not letting you out of my sight,” scolds Rachel, carrying Alex back out to the front room with her. “What have we told you about chewing on the furniture, Alexander?”

“Not to do it,” Alex mumbles.

“Right. So I think, if you’re going to be in a chewing mood, you’d better stay in here with me, where I can keep an eye on you.” Rachel deposits him on the settee next to where she’d been sitting, and he turns himself around in a little circle before sinking down to the cushions with a sulky expression on his furry face.

“I don’t need…” he begins, but Rachel just looks at him, her no nonsense now, my boy look, and he trails off. Sighs, the heartfelt sigh of an inconvenienced dog, and drops his chin to his paws—to his hands. Rachel suppresses her own sigh and picks up her mending again, keeping one eye on Alex.

It’s getting worse.

Not that she ought to have expected any different, but she’d hoped, maybe, that her son was bright enough and clever enough and special enough to resist the pull of his own body, to stay himself despite everything. Which—no, that’s cruel, cruel to say he’s beyond recognition, and a lie besides. He still has his wits, his stubborn will, that smart mouth that has gotten him in trouble more than once. Still that love in him that astounds Rachel even now with its fierceness. Still the right face, a few days a month, if not right now. Plenty there to make Alexander.

As for the rest, though. Well. He’s her son, her baby, but he howls out the window at the dogs in the street and pisses off the neighbors, digs in the garden, shoves his nose into foul filthy things and makes a mess of the house like an ill-trained pet. Doesn’t understand what’s wrong with any of those things when reprimanded, or does, but too late to make any difference, just soon enough for Rachel to see the confusion and horror bloom on his face as he stands there to be corrected. And the very next day he’s off again. Can’t help himself. The curse is too insidious, the instincts taking root in his brain are too strong.

All Rachel can do is watch them do their work.

This is what comes of thinking you’re a special case, Rachel, my girl, you get your heart broken in the end every time, Rachel tells herself viciously, snipping off a thread like it’s done her a personal injury. How many people over the centuries must have been inflicted with the wolf-curse? When, in all that time, had wishes or prayers or denial or bargains ever done a lick of good to break it? Never. Not once. Stupid, Rachel, stupid stupid stupid.

Alex curls himself up in a ball. Licks at his hands and mouths them absently. And that’s a bad sign, Rachel knows from experience that he’ll chew them raw if he’s not paying attention. She reaches over and taps him on the nose.

“Don’t do that, love.”

“Mmff—sorry, Maman.” He licks the cleft in his upper lip, flexes his fingers. Wrinkles his nose in displeasure, in a way that suggests he’s going to find something else to sink his teeth into in a few minutes. Redirect that.

“You don’t need to stay right there next to me, Alex. We can fetch you your toys, and you can play, but I want you in here with me, okay?”

Alex grumbles something indistinct and curls himself up tighter, comically small. Not interested.

“What were you even doing back here so soon?” Rachel asks, more gently. “I didn’t hear you come in. I thought you were still out playing with your friends.”

“I…I didn’t wanna play anymore.” He tries to give this an air of nonchalance, but he’s even easier to read than he was as a human boy—his ears droop and he glances away from her, caught in a lie. He pouts a little harder at Rachel’s skeptical look. “Well, I didn’t! I wasn’t having fun. Why should I play if it’s not any fun?”

“Hmm.” Something else there, an undertone to his voice that needles at Rachel. Ought to tease that out before it manifests itself in more furniture-chewing. She lays the shirt she’s mending aside and holds out her arms. “Baby, can you come here for a second?”

Alex puts his head up and looks at her with ears pricked suspiciously, but the offer of physical contact is too much for him to pass up, and he crawls over into her lap. Puts his arms around her neck after a moment, as if remembering that that’s how a child ought to cuddle, waggles his tail side to side as he gets comfortable. Rachel runs a soothing hand down his back and feels the tension coiled there, like he’s about to spring at a rat or a bird. No wonder he’d needed to get his teeth in something.

“Do you want to tell me what happened out there, Alex?”

“Nothing! Nothing happened—”

“Alexander.”

Alex will fuss and grouse and put on a brave face until the cows come home, if you let him, Rachel knows this, recognizes her own stubborn pride in that. Where gentling him won’t work to tease out the truth, sometimes a bit of extra firmness will. Show him he’s not fooling anyone, and let his talkative streak do the rest.

It works. Alex huffs, bumps Rachel’s chin with his cold little nose in a last-ditch attempt at the cuteness defense, and finally says, “Nothing happened. Really. I don’t care. It was just a game. It doesn’t matter.” Alex nestles himself a bit closer to Rachel, and adds, in a very small voice, “I’m tired of always dying though.”

“What do you mean, sweetheart?”

“It’s—I—they always make me be the monster. Because I roar better, that’s what Peter said, but that’s stupid, I don’t roar, I’m not a lion, it’s called growling, that’s what I told him—anyway. Um.” Alex swipes at his face. The fur under his eyes a little matted, a little damp, Rachel can tell from this close, scrubbed-away tear tracks faint down the sides of his muzzle. “They made me be the monster again. And I didn’t want to, so I said, I wanna be the knight for once, it isn’t fair, but they told me you have to, it’s not as good when someone else is the monster, you do it best, and besides you can’t hold a sword when you’re crawling around on the ground like that. And then, and then Anders said, he, he said…” Alex trails off, his voice gone inhuman-rough with a snarl of anger and shame. Tears pooling again in his eyes.

“What did he say, love?”

“He said,” Alex chokes out, “well, you can’t be the knight, but maybe you can be the horse. And then he laughed. They all laughed. Like it was a really good joke.”

Oh.

Rachel’s stomach churns, searing rage and cold, leaden pity both clawing at her. How dare he, how dare that child—how dare his parents tell him that was—how dare they treat her son—

She clutches at Alex, who babbles on, unable to stop now that he’s gotten himself going. “And I, I know you said not to get mad at people, because it might scare them, but I got a little mad and I’m sorry and I didn’t mean to growl for real but then Anders’ mom—we were playing in front of his house—she came out and yelled at me and called me a—nasty word, and told me to go away and it wasn’t fun anymore anyway so I came back here. But then I was bored. So.” His shoulders quiver with one sob, another. No kicked-dog whine in his voice now, just the hitching of a hurt child. “I’m s-sorry. Sorry I chewed the chair. I shouldn’t have done it. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Alex, baby—” But what is there to say to him? You didn’t deserve that is true, but it’s  cold comfort, Alex has heard it already a thousand times, and the words trip on the fact that he acted out against another child. Not worth the reaction he got, but he should know better, it’s not safe for him to behave like that anymore, what if it had been Anders’ father home instead of his mother, and he’d had a gun—

Catastrophizing, Rachel, she thinks, reining herself in, deal with the problem you have, not the one you’re making up to scare yourself. Not useful. Not useful. Crying child in her arms, and another one out there somewhere who’s seen a monster—figure out, maybe, which of them is hurt more. God forbid it’s the other boy, but she has to be sure.

“Alexander,” she asks, as carefully as she can, “you didn’t—no one was hurt, were they—?”

“No!” Alex yelps, pushing away from her, shocked through his tears. “No, no, I said, didn’t I say all I did was growl? I wouldn’t, I’d never, I promise, I’m not bad, I know not to bite, I’m not like—like him—”

His face twists with horror, and he shakes his head hard, squeezes his eyes shut against the flood of tears, and oh, God, like him. Only one him Alex could be referring to. “No, no, no, Alex, that’s not what I meant, you’re not like that at all,” Rachel says desperately, wrapping her arms around him. Alex bares his teeth, lets out a harsh painful noise that sounds like neither child nor wolf, but in the end has nowhere else to go. He collapses against Rachel with a wail and lets her enfold him.

“I’m not like that,” Alex sobs into her dress. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I wouldn’t…”

“I know, baby, I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean to growl. I know it was wrong. I know I was bad.”

“Shh. Shh. Later, love. Don’t worry about that now.”

“I’m n-nuh-not…” The rest of the sentence is lost in another wave of sobs. Rachel strokes his ears, strokes the scraggly remnants of his hair, mostly gone to fur by now, and says nothing.

Alex weeps stormily for a while, trembling and clinging to Rachel like he’s expecting her to to shove him off her lap any second. She rocks him like she’d done when he was a tiny baby, whispers little nothings against the tips of his ears. I’ve got you. I’m here. I love you, my darling, oh, I love you. You’re still my baby. You’re still mine. Nearly misses him gnawing at his paws again until he squeaks and twitches with pain in her arms. Sharp white puppy teeth digging into the pad of his thumb, when Rachel draws away to look.

“Alex, what did I say?” She tugs his hand away. He drags it back up to his lips automatically.

“Not to,” he says against his knuckles. An awful note of hopelessness in his voice, eyes dull despite the tears still glistening there. “I know you said not to. But it’s hard. I don’t know how to stop.”

Redirect, redirect, Rachel tells herself desperately. He doesn’t deserve to tear into himself for this, not for a playground disagreement. She’s not a fool, and her baby is hurting. There must be something she can do for him…

An idea occurs. She shies away from it on reflex—no, no, animal, condescending, not my baby, can’t subject him to—but all she’s got right now are bad options, and this is the most palatable. Worth a shot.

“Alex, I’m going to fetch something for you, okay? I won’t be gone five minutes. Wait for me here?”

Alex mumbles assent and permits Rachel to shift him from her lap to the settee again. He splays himself over the cushions, and she gives him a quick rub on the velvety bridge of his nose before hurrying out of the room. Back through the kitchen to grab a clean-ish rag from the shelf above the hearth, and from there out through the side door into the alley. It’s almost comically simple when she looks at it now: Alex has a chewing problem, she’d made a stew just the other day, point A to point B to point C. Still, she wishes she’d thought of it a little sooner, before she’d thrown the kitchen trash out for the neighborhood strays to take care of.

Rachel approaches the garbage heap, and it’s their lucky day, because there are still a couple of chunks of soup bone resting at the top. She picks up the largest one gingerly between thumb and forefinger. Must be a reason it hasn’t yet been carried off, Alex could probably tell her what makes it a less desirable tidbit, but it’s what they have to work with. With a grimace, she dunks her rag in the rain barrel standing nearby and scrubs the bone off as best she can—luckily, it hasn’t been sitting out long enough to pick up a particularly foul stench—and carries it into the house.

Alex perks up immediately when she walks back into the front room, hops down off the settee and lurches toward her on all fours, sniffing the air. Rachel holds out the bone awkwardly and the flash of mute unthinking delight in his eyes cuts her to the core, but he recoils just as quickly from her hand and ducks his head.

“I thought…you said I wasn’t allowed. Not from the garbage heap,” he says, and of course a quick wash wasn’t enough to hide the smell from him. He tugs at one ear, his gaze flicking from the bone to Rachel’s face with the nervous energy of an animal that’s scented a trap.

“We can make an exception. Just this once.” Rachel kneels down to his level and brushes her fingertips against his muzzle. “I’m going to give you this, okay? It’s for you to chew. But I want you to promise me that as long as you have it, you’re not going to go after the furniture, or your own hands. Can you do that for me, Alex?”

“Yes, Maman,” he chirps, nodding hard enough to make his ears flop about, his tail already up and wagging again. “I can, I will, I swear I’ll never ever do it again.”

And how many times has a man told her that particular lie? More than enough for her to know better than to believe it, that’s for sure. Never again. I promise. I’ll never hurt you. Never leave you. Never let you down. This was the last time.

Alex isn’t James, though, isn’t Johann. Isn’t even George. He’s just a baby. Too young for willful malice and too young for the little white lies told to soothe a cut that’s already bleeding. He means exactly what he says in the moment, and maybe he’ll even keep his promise for a while, until the next time he’s bored or hurting or angry and he doesn’t think, he just acts. It hurts a little less, knowing he’s sincere. Just a little less, though.

Rachel could probably extract a better promise out of Alex if she were made of sterner stuff. Scare him into compliance, scold him until his canine brain understands this is not how we behave, not be shaken by his big sad eyes or the face of a baby animal, something that needs to be cuddled and cosseted and protected. Make him safe, no matter what it takes.

But Rachel is already made of, pardon her language, pretty fucking stern stuff. Wouldn’t have made it to this point if she weren’t.

This is the way things are. The wolf demands concessions, one way or another, and denying it the small things now only means it’ll need more from her when she finally caves. So.

She waggles the bone tantalizingly, ignores the twist in her gut. “Go ahead, then.”

With a yip of excitement, Alex snatches the bone out of her hands and settles down on the floor before the settee with it, his crying jag all but forgotten. Easier for him to keep a grip on it, with his stubby fingers and thumbs, than it would be for a dog, but he sinks his teeth in with the same half-starved gusto as you’d see in a stray, rumbles out a happy growl that makes Rachel’s hair stand on end. The growling is hard to bear. Whines and yelps could almost be child noises, and any old hound can bark, but the growl is a predator’s sound, too deep and too wild for a little boy.

Alex puts his head up, cocks it at her, and Rachel realizes she’s staring. She gives him a small wave to cover. His tail frisks, back and forth.

“Thank you, Maman,” he says. “It’s good. Better than the chair.”

“That’s…I’m glad, baby,” says Rachel, forcing a smile. It is good. Really it is. Not such a difficult fix, in the end. She can start saving the soup bones after she cooks with them. No big deal.

Rachel scoots over so her back is against the settee, sits there on the floor with her skirts spread around her like she’s a girl. A girl and her dog. The soup bone creaks a little under Alex’s onslaught, and it might be worth it to fetch the other scraps on the trash heap for when he finishes with this one. Later, though. Later. Alex flashes a wolfish grin at her, his tongue lolling out, and she reaches over to scratch at the side of his neck. Drool on his chin. Rachel ought to wipe that away, chide him for being messy and uncouth. Doesn’t.

With a sigh, she pulls her sewing basket down onto her lap and picks up the half-mended shirt again.