CoR Into the Wolf Den

Tiko

Tiko

Draconic Administrator/Mentor
Mentor
Administrator
It was to the old abandoned rail yard that Bastien had taken Ethan too. Though as Ethan would quickly learn, it wasn't as abandoned as it was believed. There was a lot of signs of recent activity and along the side of one building was a stack of supply crates, lumber, and cement blocks. Perhaps someone was developing the place into something else finally? It had sat abandoned on the outskirts of Lupaix for as long as Ethan could remember.

"Come on, I'll introduce you to Jesse," Bastien told him. "He can give you something for that fever you're running, and check your injuries."

He led Ethan to a side door of a large warehouse before opening it to step inside and waved Ethan to go on in.

The infirmary looked more like a field station than a hospital room. Some of the equipment looked a bit old, but everything was well kept and clean.

"The hospitals won't have us, so we have to take care of our own," Bastien explained.
 
They seemed to have arrived... somewhere. Ethan wasn't entirely sure where they were. He hadn't been paying attention, for most of the trip - just following along with what Bastien wanted, fully aware that it was a horrible idea that was getting worse every moment. The guy had almost certainly killed people. Could Ethan be sure that he hadn't killed Aidan? What if he'd been the one?

Sitting on a park bench wasn't going to solve that problem, though. If he wanted to get rid of the wolves, he needed to find the wolves - and what better way than following them? He'd sort it out. Somehow. It didn't make a lot of sense, but it made enough. It was possible that was just the fever talking, but Ethan wasn't feeling up to contradicting it.

The warehouse didn't look like much on the outside, which was why it was a surprise that it looked clean and neat on the inside. It didn't look like a state of the art emergency room, sure, but it looked a bit like the first aid room any security team would have, somewhere. The building he worked in had one. The building he had worked in. Maybe he still worked there. He didn't know. They hadn't fired him yet, he supposed, but... well, he certainly wasn't going to show up like this.

Our own. That was a strange turn of phrase. Ethan didn't know why it sounded so odd to him - maybe something about the idea of weres being good for anything but getting kids killed. Maybe they just saved their responsibility for themselves, and their violence for everyone else.

He made a sound, maybe it was agreement, maybe it was just acknowledgement. He didn't add words to it, instead just staring, keeping his eyes on the floor, not wanting to look around too much. The room didn't seem to want to stay in one place, and neither did his skeleton. Maybe the two of them would join together and waltz off in some alternate dimension accessible only through fever dreams.

God above, he felt like trash.
 
With the pack spread thin, it could be hard to know for sure who would actually be around. But Jesse you could generally count on being at hand. He had been pushing to start joining in patrols, but being the only one of the lot with a formal medical education had its limitations. Namely needing to be on hand for emergencies.

He was currently in the back room at work pouring over some medical texts and jotting down some notes. An array of blood samples was the focus of his attention at the moment. When he heard the door open, he returned the tray of blood samples to a small fridge he had installed. It was less than ideal storage, but it was all he had at his disposal for the time being.

"Is this him?" Jesse asked as he entered from the other room.

"Yeah, his name is Ethan," Bastien answered.

Jesse had a gangly build to him, with unruly black hair and when he smiled at Ethan, it seemed genuine.

"My name's Jesse," he told Ethan. "We're a bit short on supplies, but there's some beds and we can get you taken care of. Bastien said he isn't sure if you've had any medical treatment since you where discharged from the hospital?"
 
Is that who?

Ethan looked back over his shoulder, then realized they were talking about him, just a moment before Bastien's clarifying words. The man he was apparently being introduced to looked... lanky, he supposed. Untamed hair. Alison swore by coconut oil, but this guy didn't really smell like-

Well, he wasn't going to go around sticking his nose in strange guys' hair, so never mind that.

Oh, there had been a question. "I... uh." Ethan took a moment, trying to push his brain back far enough to remember what it had been. Medical treatment. That was right. They'd patched him up at the hospital and sent him on his way.

"No. Not since. I have... there's a number I'm supposed to call." A phone number, for a followup, and if Bastien was right about it, it would go straight to voicemail or they'd be too busy to schedule him, and they'd forget to call him back.

Wasn't that how it should be?

"I just... need somewhere to be. For a bit." Just until he was ready to go home again, and try to pick up the pieces of his life - except there weren't any pieces left to pick up, were they? He should have been... picking up his son. He could imagine the weight of him in his arms, the way there was always a knee in his ribs, the way he'd always mutter to stop squiggling but never put him down.

I should have never put him down.

If he hadn't let him go at the park, had kept him home...

But there wasn't any way to fix that, and the only thing left to do was stop it from happening to other people's little boys - by whatever means necessary.
 
Jesse's expression turned too one of genuine concern. It was clear to see that Ethan was still in a state of shock from his ordeal. He didn't want to press the man for details. It wasn't important right now. He caught himself at that thought. No, whatever this man had been through was important. But it wouldn't be beneficial to start probing those wounds until he had seen to the physical ones.

"We have some beds here," Jesse answered. "You can stay here a few days at least. Maybe longer, but that will be up to Ragenard."

Given Ethan's state, he didn't expect anyone would turn him out though.

"I can take a look and see how your injuries are healing, and if anything needs redressing," he asked. "Is there anything I should know about? Any preexisting conditions?"

Bastien meanwhile had stepped off to one side while Jesse spoke to Ethan. He kept an eye on the pair though. There had been no sign of that brief spark of raw fury he had glimpsed at the park, and he didn't get the sense that Ethan was currently a thread to either him or Jesse. But he didn't want to be taken off guard either.

He shot a quick text to Ragenard.

'We're here. Jesse's looking him over.'
 
"Yeah." Bed seemed like a good idea. Any bed. Any bed but one, because his should have had Alison in it, and she wasn't there, wasn't-

God, he was tired.

Exhaustion crept up again, stemming the rising panic, less because he'd dealt with it and more just because he wasn't in a state to experience it right now. Everything hurt and the room was too cold - it was freezing in here, how did they stand it?

No, that was probably the fever rising, wasn't it? The thought seemed distant, far too rational for what was an irrational situation. Questions, more questions, no answers at all. He had to give some sort of answer. "No, uh... no pre-existing conditions." He'd always been healthy. Was being a damned werewolf a pre-existing condition? Not that Ethan was, but the rest of them - were they? Or were they just working for them? Was that just as bad? Or was that worse? He supposed it depended on how much coercion was involved.

"Who's Ragenard?"
 
Ragenard sat at his desk in his air-conditioned office, poring over an old-school paper map. It depicted an area labeled "Shadewood Park" as an amorphous blob to the upper right and provided finely detailed views of the various utility lines and sewage that intersected the amorphous park blob and beyond. Unsurprisingly, no fewer than three covert exits leading to the PQ via the catacombs abounded around Shadewood Park’s immediate environs.

It was obvious that whatever maniac or lunentia-ridden wolf was roaming Lupaix’s boundaries had to be coming in from the PQ—realistically speaking, as lone wolves were careful to make themselves known within a pack’s territory—but the area to cover was vast, and the reality never wholly matched what was represented on their resources, although they were the best tools they could have hoped for.

The surveying map provided a view that Aether Maps could never offer, into the sort of features that mattered for those in this life. Sewer entrances, utility corridors through sections of the ever-present catacombs, and the voids throughout without connected utilities that made for the perfect shipment dead drops. Ragenard was once again thankful to Salem’s ghost that the dearly departed former Secretary had taught him how to access that kind of thorough but boring information correctly and discreetly from the bureau of public records’ library.

Not just how to ask but when to ask, and which old-timers within the office to bribe to make sure certain blueprints were “lost” in the system. Best of all, Salem had made sure his contacts within were used to working with different people; few things a Prospect dreaded more than being sent to The Library to spend a few hours going through the dusty records for the right kind of forgotten city planning to suit their needs under the guise of “a school project” or “Bossman Architect sent me.”

Liam could be a dipshit, but he could read and get Ragenard what he required from the Library. Ragenard was musing on whether he wanted to put Ziessel through Liam’s peculiar brand of smartly choosing the stupidest options after the kid was done with the Enforcer’s “basic training” in the hopes she could better tell if there was a diamond in the rough when his phone buzzed.

I’ll be there in a minute, Ragenard texted back to Jesse as he stood up. He carefully rolled the map back up whilst suppressing a sigh and let the ever-at-bay thoughts of Clarissa in. The softening of his features was immediate, and while it may have seemed out of place with his temperament to those who didn’t know him well, Ragenard didn’t worry about that for once.

While he knew that the presence of a gentler countenance wasn’t likely to be noticed then, it would matter later. He’d seen many faces paraded before him after Clarissa’s loss too and had come to learn which ones to reference again later based on the genuine spark he’d assumed himself to be dead to feel during the fact.

Ragenard kept to his thoughts as he made his way from his office towards the infirmary. It wasn’t much, the bit of rote empathy, but it was an honest bit he could offer to a stranger whose situation Ragenard felt partially responsible for—he simply couldn’t fathom a rogue wolf escaping their notice if he’d had his head on his shoulders the last year—at least until he knew more about the man’s temperament.

If he was the kind to desire revenge, Ragenard would make sure he got it, he decided as he opened the infirmary door. Then promptly remembered a few things upon actually laying eyes on Ethan; the other man looked like shit. Revenge was a concern for a later time.

“I’m Ragenard,” the large man replied kindly to the room as he crossed the threshold and nodded to Jesse and Bastien in greeting. He was—as was the norm—wearing his cut. Unlike the other ranks in the organization, the top two were by design a challenge to the world, with no illusions reserved. “Your world has changed in more ways than you can process right now,” the man with ‘First Amongst Wolves’ upon his breast and back advised Ethan with a tone as heavy as the iron it hid and as soft as the velvet it wore. “This is a safe place for what you are now.”
 
"Let me get some things," Jesse told Ethan.

He was quick and efficient as he moved through the small clinic and retrieved some boxes of bandages and other supplies that he set out on a nearby counter. He then retrieved a white bottle of pills from a cabinet and shook a few out into a small cup which he offered along with a cup of water to Ethan. "Here. These should help with the fever, for now. We will need to adjust as it progresses though. Why don't we get you settled in, and then I can take a look at how things are healing. I can show you where you can stay. I'll need to run a blood test to be sure, but..."

The arrival of Ragenard spared him from having to break the news to Ethan, though he suspected the man already suspected. It wasn't too long ago that Jesse himself had been facing that same news. Though by this point, it seemed a lifetime ago.

He nodded to Ragenard in return, though couldn't help the grimace at the bluntness of Ragenard's words. "Yeah uh... That's Ragenard," Jesse said by way of explaining his earlier difficulty in trying to answer this man's question about who Ragenard was. It wasn't that he didn't like Ragenard, he just didn't know what to make of him half the time.

Meanwhile Bastien had returned his phone to his pocket and met Ragenard's nod with one of his own as well. Bastien had settled into the change in leadership well. The rougher aspects of Ragenard had never rubbed him wrong, like it had some of the other pack members.

"Hey, I can fill you in on things after you're done here," Bastien said.
 
The lanky guy with the wild hair left for a moment, and returned with a bottle and offered Ethan a couple pills.

Yeah. Sure. That was probably how they got you, wasn't it? Those pills could be anything. They'd probably make him feel better. And then they'd wear off, and he'd feel like shit again, and he'd want more of those little pills to take the edge off, and then it'd be hey, I just need a little favor or something like that, and give it a few months and he'd be weighing morality against withdrawal and coming up with a loss on both sides. That was how they operated, wasn't it?

"No." No. He seemed nice, but - no. He was still one of them, wasn't he? They'd killed his son. What would this Jesse do, if the withdrawal hit or the wolf hit or whatever it was it did? Bastien had already pretty much admitted to killing people. Ethan-

Ethan was going to kill people. He supposed that was the case, wasn't it? It was just a matter of whether or not they were actually people. He didn't know if he wanted to think about that, or if he could think about that. Thinking was hard. Too many shadows - in his mind, in his soul, in the doorway.

The last one was a man - a huge man. He could have been a linebacker, maybe. He was - apparently - Ragenard.

Ragenard had a little vest on that proclaimed him as - Ethan didn't know what all the little designs were exactly, but he was enough of a Boy Scout to know insignia when he saw them.

First.

First.

First. One. Him. A man who either was responsible or should have been responsible.

My son is dead. Because of him.

Rational? No. But he didn't need to be rational, not any more. Rational was for - for people with sons, to set an example for. Ethan didn't need rationality. He just needed - anger - blood red and rising, all flushed like the fever, hot and furious and needing only a target - several targets.

But one First.

He was moving before he realized it. Maybe not before anyone else did, but Ethan didn't really realize it until he'd already closed most of the distance between himself and the man in the doorway, who was prattling on with soothing nonsense as if anything he could possibly say was going to bring a dead boy back to life.

Get behind him, lock the arm, get a knee behind his thigh and bring him down. Security guards were trained in this sort of thing. Ethan'd taken down guys bigger than him before.

Of course, none of them had been werewolves - but he had to start somewhere, didn't he?

Kill one. First.
 
Surprise wasn’t amongst the things Ragenard felt while he stood and watched the familiar gears turning in Ethan’s head. He wasn’t sure if the adrift man had reached a point where he’d settled on Ragenard as his sacrificial dummy or if he’d hit the stage where he blamed himself yet and wisely chose the largest person in the room to kick his ass.

It had been a good forty years since Ragenard stood in familiar shoes, so however impressionable the pair, there were bound to be details he’d missed. But things were still progressing along the expected path.

Ragenard didn’t need to note the tenseness in Ethan’s gaze when it dropped from his eyes upon seeing him and where it seemed to settle on his rank patch. Didn’t need his enhanced senses to hear Ethan’s heart rate spiking or smell the adrenaline storm that was suffusing his sweat out of nowhere. There wasn’t a need for any of that, when he clearly could see the man’s shoulders threatening to overtake his ears.

Ragenard watched him sub-vocalize whatever mantra was keeping him going beneath his breath, until one of the man’s eyebrows quirked lower than the other as his eyes evidently tunnel vision. His shoulders slumped slightly. Here we go, Ragenard thought as Ethan…

Well, Ragenard would have told the man he had “exploded” if he’d been asked, but the wounded man’s impassioned—if incoherent—spittle fueled advance was sadder than anything else in his eyes. Ragenard did note that Ethan did maintain some semblance of coherence even in his grief fueled assault, as the man didn’t foolishly go for his front but tried to move behind Ragenard, presumably to perform some actual practiced maneuver.

There were a couple of lessons to impart here, Ragenard reasoned. He decided that kicking Ethan’s ass wasn’t going to help anyone, least of at all his own ego. Bloodstone First beats bereaved fresh wolf, read all about it! Ragenard thought in a movie street urchin voice as he felt Ethan’s knee behind his thigh.

Ragenard didn’t move an inch, the tensing of his thigh muscle and his mass being twice that of Ethan’s solely overpowering the man’s first attempt at attack. Ragenard promptly waved Bastien and Jesse back.

“That’s not the strongest you can be, not anymore. You want to hurt a monster, you have to be a monster,” Ragenard snarled as he body checked Ethan away with a well-placed hip thrust.
 
Somehow, things had gone wrong, there.

Ethan knew this, because the thought was occurring to him from the floor, where he'd landed on his rear, catching most of his weight on his wrist, which was not thanking him for this. It took him a moment to figure out how he'd gotten there, which was made much more difficult by the fact that there kept shifting position - or, the whole room kept shifting position, or he was just ridiculously dizzy.

Fever. Right.

He drew his knees up, and put his head between them. It might have helped, but it didn't solve the problem. Ethan supposed this was why people were supposed to take sick days or something. Sure. Take a sick day, then kill the werewolves. That sounded like an excellent plan, one that was not going to go horribly wrong.

He raised his head, looking up at the man, who went quite a ways up. Ethan... was going to need more sick days. He rubbed his head, as if this would help him decide which direction was which right now.

That's not the strongest you can be. Who'd said that? Oh, the big guy. Something about being a monster. Yeah. Ethan nodded a little bit, whether accepting this because it made sense or just because he didn't seem to have any other options. There was a hole in his chest where his family was supposed to be, and a man in front of him telling him how to hurt people.

Ethan decided he could work with that.

"Fine." The word came out a little more dazed than he'd wanted it to, but it'd come out, and once it was there it was an anchor point to hang the rest of them on. He nodded a little bit, trying to bring things back under control. Deep breath. One. Good enough.

"I'll kill you last."
 
"Well, it looks like you have this in hand," Bastien said. "I'll leave you to it. Need anything before I head out?"

Meanwhile Jesse crouched down next to where Ethan sat and again offered the pills.

"That fever is just going to get worse," Jesse warned him. "Take the Tylenol and if the fever doesn't start responding within thirty minutes, we can try a higher dose. Your body is going to be going through some changes, which will make it difficult to determine correct dosages for you."
 
"Nah, I'm good. Thanks, Bast. Be chill," Ragenard replied with a wave towards Bastien. He then turned his attention back to Ethan, carefully controlling his expression. "That's the spirit," he retorted to the hapless security guard with a smile. It did not reach his eyes, however. "It's going to take you some time to shape up, killer." Ragenard resisted the urge to spit on the ground as punctuation to his sardony. It wasn't like him to feel so affronted over some unappreciated empathy, and the self-awareness bothered him. Could he actually remember the emotional state Clarissa's death placed him under?

Even if he did, did it matter? He'd been born to this life, and Clarissa was no damsel in distress. Either way, there was still some rankling involved, even if Ragenard couldn't accurately trace it. Then there was the fact that at the moment, Ragenard saw every bigot he'd ever seen before, right within Ethan, however unjustly. Why do I think that? Ragenard wondered, as his nose wrinkled.

"We're running low on EZ-Doze, right, Jesse?" Ragenard said. His statement didn't fully commit to pretending it was a question. "Haven't heard from Iveria on the scheduled re-up, and I don't know where Reinhard got his side-connect whenever the Iverians can't come through."

He was referring to one of the vernacular names for the cocktail of drugs that suppressed a lycanthrope's shifting. They could be useful the first few nights of a newly turned, in easing their transition as the first few shifts were rendered either partial or merely mental while under their effects. "Be sure to be judicious with it," Ragenard continued in a deadpan tone, turning his gaze from Ethan to Jesse.

"I'm sure Reinhard taught you well. Just remember a newly shifted werewolf typically regenerates better those first couple of times than they ever will again. I don't mind being your orderly if needed." His faux smile didn't wane, but still, Ragenard wasn't satisfied. Why am I being such an asshole? Ragenard thought to himself. The thought brought a slight sensation of vertigo and mirth with it.

"Oh, and be sure to record his first shift," Ragenard added. "Y'know, that whole theory that a person's psyche better assimilates when directly faced with the truth." A particularly sharp laughter seemed to ring out at the threshold of his hearing, much to Ragenard's annoyance. He turned his attention back to Ethan. "Won't lie to you. Next couple of hours are probably going to suck, but whatever you're thinking now, you're safe here until you got a handle on yourself," Ragenard said with sincerity. You could tell because his tone was as dead pan as his face, in a sharp return to typical.
 
Jesse looked dumbfounded as the words just kept coming from Ragenard. His shock was more than apparent as his expression was a mix of dismay and then anger. It was far from a typical emotion for the easy going med student, but he stiffened at the instructions? Orders?

"What- no that's-" Jesse seemed to be at a loss for words before he looked firmly at Ethan. "We don't do any of those things," he stated firmly.

Had he missed this side of Ragenard? Asshole didn't even begin to cover it.

"Was that really called for?" Jesse asked coldly.

Ragenard had never seen Jesse display even a modicum of anger towards anyone before. Even after the treatment he had endured at the hands of Rowan, in the hours and days following his rescue his only concern had been toward the wounded. But crouched there next to Ethan, he was staring daggers at Ragenard.

Ethan was witnessing first hand what happens when pack members are influenced by each other's emotional states.
 
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Oh. Good. Ethan knew who Ragenard was. Ragenard was a jerk. Well, as long as they'd worked that out. Ethan was pretty sure he didn't understand about half of what Ragenard had actually said, because it was in some incomprehensible code known only to lycanists, but the tone had been pretty unmistakable.

Jesse was arguing. Excellent. The traditional "good cop / bad cop" routine. This was all just starting to feel more and more like another day at the office, except his office wasn't filled with people who turned into snarling monsters.

Except sometimes Jim, when the coffee ran out - oh. He was getting a little hysterical. Okay. Ethan told himself that it wasn't actually that funny and that he should definitely not be giggling. Which he certainly was not, because that would be undignified and unmanly and probably annoy Ragenard The Jerk, which was actually not a point against it.

So, what was he going to do about it? Give a little, he supposed. Let them think the routine was working, don't show them that he was on to it. Ethan made himself try to focus, at least a little bit, back to a word that had actually made sense, something he understood.

"Tylenol?" Right. Jesse had said something about that. Ethan still wasn't entirely convinced it wasn't werewolf meth, but also, this fever wasn't getting any better. The floor was cold. The room was cold, actually. No, that was probably just another temperature spike. The room was... very nice. Or it would be. If it stayed put.

He made a sound, something of a committed grunt, and held out his hand, without further comment. Fine. Hit me with the werewolf meth.

At this point, he was starting to feel like he didn't really have a choice.
 
Ragenard's nose wrinkled again, and a sense of vertigo struck him. Was it called for? Ragenard asked himself while shaking his head, trying to parse what in Ethan had changed and why his mind insisted that he was reacting to something there. "You tell me Kid," Ragenard grunted at Jesse, with less commitment in it than Ethan had displayed. "With Reinhard, I had no doubts he could balance doing his best for the pack with doing his best for the pack."

He wasn't doubling down on being an asshole, he felt. It was a true concern of Ragenard's, so he didn't understand why the thought felt so ruefully funny the more he contemplated his own words. He wasn't misspeaking, he didn't think. It didn't feel like the stroke symptoms that were mentioned in those pamphlets the city started sending you when you turned seventy—never mind the waste of tax money sending human health info his way—but something about this whole situation had Ragenard feeling oddly detached and distant from his own actions.

"We're Lupaix's protectors, that hasn't changed. But we can't do that if we can't heal our own because..." Ragenard shook his head, chasing more vertigo away. Because this asshole doesn't want to be here or associate with the likes of us, except I don't know why I felt that or why I don't anymore, he thought. "...We're stuck with our pants down after failing to ration our resources" he said instead. The replacement ending to this thought felt cheap and fake, for all that Ragenard was sure it was a semi-reasonable thing to say.

"Besides Doc, I didn't make that up about the video proof. Didn't Reinhard have you study medicine's most discredited jackpots?" he asked with a tone contrived towards being relaxed. "A surprising amount of them were our kind, being pushed out of the spotlight. Especially in the field of psychology" he added with an academic nod. His therapist would be proud of his actually having studied his doubts about her field away but perhaps less so in his avoidant behavior. Or she would have, if he hadn't last seen her more than six months in the past, but still.

"I'm serious, call me if he turns out to be an angry first timer," Ragenard jumped in to add before the echo of his previous words could fade. Was he worried about what the silence would bring? "I'll be upstairs in my office...hmm, an intercom would be useful, I think I have speaker wire out in the--" the sound of the rest of his mumbling was lost as Ragenard promptly and animatedly walked out from the room without awaiting Jesse's responses.
 
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