"Excuse me," you say to the wolf, "can we talk about the duck after I've kicked this guy's ass? Thanks." And then you go for Aconite like a F-5 fur tornado.
"Oh shit," the lady says, and backs away from the developing fight. A few of the younger, sillier kids— probably last spring's pups— bounce forward excitedly to watch and snap at the air, cheering indiscriminately, but are rounded up by older siblings and herded after their mother. She and the eldest son clearly don't want to be around when Bel's finished up with Aconite, in case he decides to round on them next. "We'll figure this out later," the lady tells you, uneasily. Licking blood off your stinging nose, you wag a friendly agreement. They lope off. You think things over for a bit, then go steal Lord Aconite's wallet. You tuck it into a free pocket of your backpack. You tuck his keys into a pocket of Bel's. "Having fun?" you call to Bel, all that finished. "Leave a little of him for the crows!"
Hackles still standing, you back away from the cringing, whimpering werewolf. Without taking your eyes off him, you say, "Give him his wallet and keys back, Erskin, he's gotta have a way to leave once the moon's over. Plus you're gonna hate carrying them after fifty miles or so, I bet." You lick your victim's blood off your muzzle. "Get up, Rhett," you say quietly. "I didn't hurt you that bad."
"Aw," you say, disappointed. You had felt very clever for a moment. You pull them ungraciously back out of the packs and drop them. Then you piss on them, meeting his eyes, very aware that your muzzle is still beading blood. He can use them when he's human again but you're damned if he's going to be happy about it. Rhett— ha! Rhett!— rolls over and manages a sort of half-cringe, half-grovel, his tail still clamped between his legs. "You bastards," he mumbles. "You're fucking monsters. You're evil. You came just to hurt me. I never get a fucking break. I hope you feel really fucking great about picking on me."
"We were having fun LARPing with you until you decided to pick a for-real fight with the locals. Somebody could get killed that way. Plus you were such a dick to my best friend, how did you think that was going to go over? Jesus." You shake yourself and pad over to your pack, pretending you've turned your back on him, though you're waiting for him to try to jump you, asshole that he is. "Let me guess -- this was all super real to you, and you thought we would really for real call you 'Lord Aconite' and follow your every command five minutes after we met you."
Rhett is growling, viciously resentful, and at Bel's last jab he breaks his composure again and strikes out to try and bite Bel's back leg. "FUCK YOU, I'M BETTER THAN YOU, I'M BETTER THAN EVERYONE, I COULD RULE, I COULD LEAD AN ARMY, YOU SABOTAGED ME—" You sit back down, vastly entertained, to watch the sequel ass-kicking.
So predictable. You whirl and go for him again, this time biting a little harder when you bite. You're pretty sure you crack a couple ribs this time. "Are you rabid?" you demand as you back off again. "The fuck is wrong with you?" Shaking your head, you go get your backpack on. He's in no shape to try and jump you now. "I thought we might stick around and give you some pointers, even though you were being a jerk. I don't want you to die or anything. But if you're going to keep throwing baby tantrums we're leaving."
You help him settle his, then he helps you— significantly more, you're not as clever with items— into yours and you shake to get used to it again. As you trot off, he manages to bark more incoherent anger after the two of you, mostly to the tune of how you're assholes who are just trying to ruin him, and to never come back, because he won't be fooled again. "Well, that was a way to spend an afternoon," you comment, still licking at your muzzle. "To be honest, I expected that to be more funny and less sad."
"Yeah, the delusional was amusing but there was too much just-plain-mean in there." You sigh. "Oh well. Think there's any chance we didn't scare the locals completely off? You wanted to make friends with them, right?"
"There's six of them and two of us," you say dryly. "If things have soured, we're going to be the ones scared off. We'll just have to wait and see, and be on good behavior if they do show up. We've got a better chance of making nice than a pair of real wolves would— humans have any number of flaws, but they're champions at making friends. There are worse heritages."
"Truth. Which makes it all the more depressing that Lord Diaper Tantrum was so very, very bad at it. How's your nose? Lemme see it." You stop in the path to give his muzzle a proper licking.
"Boo hoo, the big scary baby gave me an ouchie," you whimper, enjoying the attention. You lick him back, too, where Rhett got in a lucky gouge over his eyebrow. "You'll look very dashing next week," you say.
You chuckle, nuzzle his cheek fondly, and then resume trotting along the trail. It's gotten pretty dark already, but you feel like it's probably still early. "I'm not going to be hungry for a while, I think; those ducks were super fat. Wanna just try to make enough distance that there's no way Lord Teabag can possibly catch up? Or maybe you could teach me how to be harder to track. There's plenty of water, for all it's cold as hell." Erskin wants to Just Go, though, and you don't blame him one bit. You adjust each other's packs a bit with slight tugs of teeth, until you both feel quite comfortable with the weight, and then speed up to a long, easy lope, putting the miles -- and the depressing manbaby with his suicidal piss tantrums -- behind you. The packs may not be comfortable to sprint in, but that middling gait doesn't make them jounce at all. You chat a bit as you travel, with long companionable silences interspersed. It gets dark early, but the trail is broad and smooth, and there's a bit of skyglow, so you keep going until you find a nice flat campsite next to a trickle of a stream. It's tiny, smaller than your bathroom at your dad's place, nothing anyone would call a clearing; just a patch of moss and ferns and river-rounded pebbles between towering pines. But your tent is even smaller, and it's not as if you'll be cooking or setting out lawn chairs. "Okay," you say once you've backed out of your pack. "Here's hoping I can do hands one more time. Because otherwise we're just going to have to bivvy under a tree and hope it doesn't rain." It hurts. Fuck, it hurts bad. You let out an involuntary roar of pain that's embarrassingly like the ones movie werewolves do while their bones and skin make terrible splintery sucking noises. The thought of sleeping in a puddle for three or four nights is impetus enough to push through, though, and at last you fall out the other side, naked, scoured, trembling. You swipe at your nosebleed with the back of your hand, sniff hard, and get busy setting up groundcloth and tent as fast as you can, because you don't know how long you can keep this up.
You dance circles of frantic concern around him, licking his bare arms and sides, but when he shrugs you off and sets to working you do your best to refocus and help. It's awkward with just your muzzle and paws— and no real idea of how to set up any of this equipment— but you can pull and hold, and hopefully you do more to speed things up than get in the way. Next time you'll have a better idea of what to do. When he falls back into fur you nearly pounce on him, you're so anxious. It looked terrible. You couldn't possibly have been so frightening any of the times you had a bad change.
You're every bit as eager for comfort as he is to comfort you. "That sucked," you whimper. "That sucked a lot." That's about all there is to say about it. After panting against his side for a few minutes while he licks your rumpled fur back into shape, you feel a fair bit better, and pull yourself together. "Worth it, I think. The tent's not one hundred percent waterproof, but unless rain absolutely buckets down we should sleep pretty dry. The rest we can do with teeth and paws. Getting the sleeping bags in and so forth." The doggie sleeping bags pack up so small, they could've fit in your jeans pockets -- no trouble at all for these roomy backpacks -- but once unfolded they puff up nicely, and you feel warmer just looking at them.
You poke your head into the tent, then hop in and out of the entrance in growing amusement. "Ha! Werewolf tent. A tent for werewolves. With werewolf sleeping bags. This is too funny." You stick your head into the sleeping bag. "Absurd!" This doesn't stop you from burrowing all the way into the sleeping bag, then scuffling around and making an ambush pounce on Bel when he comes over to peer at you.
"You're absurd," you laugh, rolling him over and then burrowing in alongside him. "Mm, it's nice and warm. But it's still early. Nap, or explore? Can't decide." You shove your nose under his neck to defer the decision.
"That," you agree, "is one of the greatest things about being out here." Two of you in one doggie bag is really too tight a fit. You wriggle out of his, and nose yours right up next to him instead. You have a go at the tent zipper with your teeth to see if you can block the wind a bit more, and to your delight, it zips smoothly, not finicky about the angle it's held at like the one on your old tent. You leave just a bottom corner open, so the two of you can sniff the breeze and watch any snow that might fall, and then you curl into your sleeping bag and lay your chin on the back of Erskin's neck.
It's fully dark by the time you wake up enough to stick your nose out of the tent— a damp, cloudy night with no moonlight, for all that you can feel it out there somewhere. You flop outside, stretch all your paws, and go nibble Bel's snout until he comes to join you.
