fic: Lose Your Soul Tonight

[tiny_white_hats]

Title: Lose Your Soul Tonight

Fandom: Supernatural

Characters: Kate (episode 8.04, "Bitten"), OMC

Rating: PG-13

Words: 1,768

Disclaimer: I don't own anything in this unofficial fanwork, nor do I claim to or profit in any way.

Summary: After Sam and Dean let her live, Kate, a newly turned werewolf, strikes out on her own, and struggles with not killing anyone.

A/N: Written for snickfic for the 2013 rarewomen fic exchange. I don't know if it's entirely clear, so, to clarify, any text in italics is footage Kate filmed of herself, interspersed with the actual events. Washtenaw County, Michigan is (according to Supernatural Wiki) where this episode actually took place, but, to the best of my knowledge, I made up Riverton, Indiana.

“I'm leaving. And you'll never hear from me ever again. Look, I know that there's another way. I can eat animal hearts. I've never hurt anyone. Nobody human, anyway. I didn't choose this. Please... please give me a chance”

*

Kate left town right after she set up Mike’s last testament, the only movie he’d ever get to make. She grabbed a bag of clothes and a camera, Mike’s favourite, and left. She didn’t look back, not once, the memory of Mike’s still, torn body, spread out beneath a sheet as if he were just asleep was still frozen in her head, like a movie stuck on pause.

She followed the train tracks, balancing step by step on the heavy metal beam and waiting for a train to come. She wanted to get out of Michigan, find somewhere even more anonymous, somewhere where she could hide, and she didn’t have the time to walk, There was a full moon every month, after all, and Kate still wasn’t sure what to expect. If Mike had changed without the moon, then what would happen on a full moon? Kate didn’t want to find out until she had too, and didn’t want anyone else to ever have to find out. She wasn’t sure how she would be able to live with that kind of blood on her hands.

Finally a southbound freight train came barreling through, shaking the sturdy metal tracks with its movement, the vibrations clanging through Kate’s bones. Hopping trains turned out to be much harder than it was in the movies, but somehow she managed. Kate pulled the door to the cargo car she’d chosen shut with a clang, sealing herself in a boxcar that resembled nothing more than a rolling tomb.

She couldn’t get out of this town fast enough.

*

“My name is Kate Blaidyn, and I'm a werewolf. But I’m not a killer, I swear. I’m not. If you’re watching this, anyone, I just want you to know that. I’ve never killed a human before.”

*

She hadn’t killed anyone. It has been 23 days and she hasn’t killed. She dreamt about it some nights, nights when the moon grew pregnant and swollen in the dark night sky, and remembered the lingering smell of Brian's blood in her nose, the wet smear of it across her hands. It wasn’t repulsive, like she’d always imagined, but it wasn’t sweet either. Instead, when she remembered the smell of blood, it was rich and warm and sharp, like cider burning down the back of her throat.

She couldn’t help but crave it.

It was horrifying and it should have been nauseating, but just thinking about fresh blood, about the tear of flesh and the crunch of bones was enough to make her stomach roar like a wolf and to turn her on like nothing else. It wasn’t just dreams anymore either, like after she first was turned; now the thought of blood haunted her waking hours, too. It had been a moon and a half since she was bitten and her hunger had swollen like the moon with each fading day until it became this consuming, swallowing bloodlust she could not shake.

Every waking moment, Kate hungered for a kill, and each moment she spent asleep she dreamt sharp, red nightmares of death. Something was going to give, and Kate was terrified down to her bones by the very thought of that (and by the thrill of excitement that ran down her spine like a current at the thought of blood in her mouth). She didn’t know how long she could continue like that.

*

“I know, I know. It’s this whole ‘fight your nature’ thing, right? Only, fighting yourself is a lot harder than I expected. It’s, it’s inside of you, you know? The wolf. And I think it wants out.”

*

When Kate woke naked in the woods, sprawled next to a dead elk, she was stained with mud and nearly as bloodied as the dead stag, and she was very certain that something was wrong. She had no memory of this dead elk beside her, or the bite wound torn through his neck or the gaping hole ripped in his chest as if he’d been made of nothing more substantial than rice paper, until, all of a second, she remembered.

She remembered looking up, late last evening, to see the full moon peering shyly over the horizon, bloated sickly like a corpse, and falling to her knees with the shock of the full, uncontrolled change slackening her muscles, feeling her limbs lengthen and stretch, her muscles reweave, her bones shift, and watching fur sprout and spread like a tide across her pale, moonlit flesh. And then she remembered coming to her feet, all four of them, and breaking into a run. The wolf didn’t accept hunger the way the woman did, wouldn’t starve itself on a moral principle, and so it hunted.

She crept into town that morning, looking for something, anything to cover herself, but that dead stag haunted her like a shadow, clung in her mind and wouldn’t let go. She hadn’t meant to kill it, but now it was dead.

What if the next body was human?

*

“Sometimes, I think about killing things, and it feels good. It feels really good. And I can smell more and hear more than I used to, like a wolf can. It’s like the wolf is taking over my life, even when I’m still human. On days other than the full moon, I can choose when I change, but that’s the only control I have. I never asked for any of this.”

*

Max was the first person she interacted with, really interacted with, after leaving Washtenaw County, Michigan. Max was a college boy from Indiana, home for spring break, energetic and bright and youthful. He saw her camera in her bag, well made and well used, when she first sat down at the bar in the local diner, and just like that, Max was there.

“I’m interested in film,” he told her earnestly, eyes wide and riverwater green over his chipped blue mug of coffee. “I don’t study it or anything, I’m a Poly Sci major, at Butler, but I think film is interesting. Cool way to tell a story.”

Kate had only meant to stay in Riverton, Indiana for a day, just do odd jobs around the local hotel long enough to pay for a roof over her head for the night, and to leave town with the sunrise. Max, however, changed things. Nodding his head with his sharp green eyes, he earnestly offered her the extra room in his mother’s house, insisted that she loved taking in travelers, and stared pleadingly at her until she agreed.

Kate liked his smile and his eager enthusiasm. Max wasn’t embarrassed by it, even when it was dorky and over the top, which she found incredibly endearing, the way she’d found Mike completely adorable. It hurt less to think of Mike now, and by now, months after his death, Kate could remember him without wanting to throw up in grief and rage and sorrow, and could remember things about him other than the sight of still body lying dead on the wooden floor. Mike would have liked Max, she thought, watching the way the room’s light danced in Max’s eyes, the opaque greenness of them reflecting light like tiny mirrors.

Max looks almost like Mike, too. Dirty blonde hair in perpetual disarray and smiling green eyes and unconscious charm. But when she kissed him, the third night she stays in Riverton, it was because Max was the first person to make her smile in months, to actually try and break through the shell she built up after the day when Mike and Brian died and she fled. It had nothing to do with Mike, for the first time in a while.

“Are you sure?” Max asked as she led him to her temporary room, after asking if his mom was out. “I mean, we just met.”

“I like you, and I like sex, and I see no reason why I can’t just, you know, combine interests,” Kate smirked, a little touched by his concern. “And I’m leaving Riverton tomorrow morning, so might as well make the most of tonight, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Max echoed, smiling until Kate took his face between her hands and kissed him hard, like an animal.

It was good sex, more or less. Awkward and a little fumbling, for rather inexperienced Max and for Kate, who had never slept with anyone besides Mike. Waking up beside somebody was possibly the best part, Kate decided drowsily, lying against Max’s body with her eyes still closed and drifting somewhere between sleep and waking. But then she smelled the blood and forced her eyes open, still remembering the morning when she woke up to find a dead stag at her side.

Beside her, Max’s face was frozen in sleep, as he lay dead beside her.

*

“It was me, obviously. I killed Max. I killed Max and I pulled out his heart and I ate it, and I feel sick just thinking about it. It’s been 127 days since I was turned, and this is the first time I ever killed another human. I want you to remember that, whoever you are. It took me 127 days to end up like this. I wasn’t a monster when I started, remember? But now, I don’t know what I am. I just know I’m not safe.

There’s a number on the sticky note for a couple of private detectives. Will you call them, as my last will and testament or whatever? Tell them it’s Kate Blaidyn, and that it’s an emergency. They’ll know what to do. That’s all, I guess. I think I’m done here.”

*

A gunshot rang out from the woods early that morning, but by the time police came to the scene, it was too late. They found a dead woman, laying so still she looked asleep in a puddle of her own blood, with a hole torn through her head from temple to temple. She was holding a beat up video camera with a post-it note on it reading “Play me, please,” with a hastily scrawled phone number below it. The officer pressed the playback button on the camera, and the dead woman’s face filled the screen.

*

“My name is Kate Blaidyn, and I'm a werewolf. But I’m not a killer, I swear. I’m not. If you’re watching this, anyone, I just want you to know that. I’ve never killed a human before.”

fin.