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It’s the barren dead of night. Nothing is awake, except maybe the wolves in the woods, and Apo, in her empty cabin.
She misses Truffle already. She hates that she had to get rid of him. She hates that she knows what it felt like to have desperate fangs push up against the hollows of her cheeks and beg placation first. She hates the memory of Cleo hissing get it together, and her insisting that she has it together, and Cleo muttering, could’ve fooled me.
She’s hungry. She feels sick.
She wishes they had told her it would make her nocturnal. Scott hadn’t told her anything at all, of course, in the moment - just gave her a sickening smirk and asked if that felt any better, and then stepped back smartly just in time for Drift and Avid to come in with knives in hand and none the wiser. She’d picked up a little more in the day that followed, with their little conversation away from prying eyes, right before Owen’s frankly chilling monologue. But she still feels clueless, and out of her depth. And hungry. And a little scared.
Okay, very scared. And terrified for what she’s gonna say to Cherri.
God, Cherri -
There’s a shadow at the window. Apo’s fangs snap into place, defensive.
It’s a bat.
A bat that turns into Pyroscythe, and struggles with the gate latch, and climbs inside the house.
Apo watches his boots hit the floor. In the darkness, it’s uncanny how well she can make out his hesitant gaze.
“So, er,” he starts, “how are you feeling?”
Apo scoffs. “How do you think I’m feeling, Pyro?”
“Hey, hey, keep it down! Do you want the humans to hear you? Find out what you are? Because I don’t think you do.” His tone is clearly threatening, but it’s all under his breath from across the room. To her surprise, that doesn’t make it any less audible.
Super vision and super hearing, then. Figures.
Okay. Quiet. She can do that.
“I feel pretty goddamn terrible,” she mutters. “Your buddy turned me into this - thing. And you cornered me. And threatened me. And now I have to lie to everyone I know.”
“Well, hey, you don’t have to do that,” says Pyro. “You could just come with us. Come be one of us.”
“I don’t want to be one of you,” Apo spits.
“Fine! Suit yourself. But you’re gonna get hungry soon. And when you do, I won’t be there to listen to you complaining.”
She leans back against the wall. From here, the corner of her vision fills with Truffle’s empty pen. “I’m already hungry,” she says, and jerks her head towards it.
Pyro turns, and takes the absence in, as if he’s just noticing for the first time. “Oh, god, you didn’t eat Truffle, did you?”
Apo raises testy eyebrows. “What if I did?”
He pauses. Runs his tongue along his teeth. Clicks it. “... I’d understand,” he says eventually. “I came pretty close, there. Some of the other pigs were not so lucky.”
“I - yeah,” says Apo, “me too, I didn’t… Legundo thought it was you who killed them.”
His eyes flick from Truffle’s pen to the ditch where the other pigs’ drained-out corpses lie. A patch of dirt from elsewhere in the room has been hastily shoveled atop them.
In the silence, Apo pushes her lips together. She feels like shit for what she did to those pigs, a memory so blurry she can’t parse out which one went first, a thought that leaves her weak in the knees from revulsion at the blood that’s in her stomach right now. It’s horrible, knowing that she did that, knowing that it didn’t make her feel any more full.
“Did you?” says Pyro. “Kill Truffle?”
“No,” says Apo, “I didn’t kill Truffle. We took him out to the woods. He’ll be happier there.”
Pyro makes a face. Whatever comment he’s biting back, he’s all the wiser for it.
“So why are you here? To gloat at me? Try and make me feel better about being like this now?”
“No!” He takes a few steps forward, not quite boxing her in, not quite respecting her corner. “I wanted to see how you were doing, honest. Maybe offer you some help, if you need it.”
Apo doesn’t respond.
“Listen - listen, Apo. It's hard. It's really hard. Trust me. I was - Scott and Owen... basically left me alone out there, when I was just turned. So I know better than anyone how hard it can be when you start to feel the hunger kicking in.”
She doesn’t know that story, she realises. Two weeks living under Pyro’s roof and there’s this whole big chunk of his story that she hasn’t heard about. “What… happened?”
“It wasn’t too bad. A lot of animals died. Most people weren’t hurt.”
“Most people,” she repeats dryly.
“Shelby was… not on purpose.”
“Right,” Apo feels the tide of irritation start to rise in her chest. “Because it’s just a - a silly little accident, huh, killing somebody? It’s fine, then, ‘cause you didn’t do it on purpose?”
“Keep it down!” he hisses again. “Look, all I’m saying is - I don’t want you going through all that alone like I did. Trying not to hurt people and having no one else to turn to. No one you’re not afraid of.”
“I have Cleo,” she argues, but her heart’s not all the way in it. Cleo doesn’t seem to be scared of themself. Pyro, though… is kinda lame. She can believe that, while she wasn’t looking, he spent a few days fearing the thing he’d become.
“I just think it would behoove you to put your anger aside - which I’m doing, very well, I’d like to mention, notice how I haven’t been getting on at you for pushing me? - put your anger aside for the moment, and just... please just let me help you through this. Because it's so hard doing it alone.”
Apo eyes him for a moment.
She liked him, for a while. She’ll admit that much if very little else.
“I’m not sorry,” is what she ends up saying. “For pushing you.”
Pyro lets out a little animalistic noise. “You should be.”
“Well, I’m not. I wasn’t gonna let you and Scott get Drift and Avid too, not so soon.”
“... So soon?”
Ah, right. He wasn’t there, he doesn’t know. “He turned me maybe two minutes before they made it to the castle. I was barely back up on my feet. He just - he wouldn’t die, and I kept stabbing him, and he would just let me, and he wouldn’t die, and… eventually… I gave up. And so he bit me. A-and I let him. And then he was saying, isn’t that better, and I was… and then Avid walks in and it’s like, how can I tell him he’s too late?”
Pyro hums. “That would be why you managed to punt a man of my stature into the water from standing like that. Didn’t know your own strength any more.”
“I guess.”
She hates the way the moon cloaks the building in disconcerting red. It’s like nothing she’s ever experienced before, and it makes her feel like something’s missing from them both.
(There is, really.)
“Are you feeling okay?”
She must look like shit, huh. “I feel ill.”
“Is it just from the shock, or do you need some…?”
The last thing she wants is more blood. She’s starving, but she’s not desperate yet. “I’m not going to spill any more blood tonight, Pyro.”
“Okay,” he says, audibly disbelieving. “You know I didn’t want to either, right? You’ll feel it soon.”
She gives him another glare.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” says Pyro. “Two pigs will keep you going for a little while, but you don’t wanna be running on fumes. It makes you look at people different. That might honestly be the hardest part.”
I don’t wanna look at anybody like I was looking at Truffle, she doesn’t admit.
“It gets a lot easier to manage after you properly feed. Makes you feel a lot less like a walking corpse, for a while.”
Because that’s what she is now, isn’t it. What they both are. Walking corpses, leeching off of everybody else’s blood. Blood that she needs to send down her throat, now, that will stain her hands to filth if she’s not careful.
“Look. If you need me to bring something in for you - we can work through it together, okay? You can close your eyes if you need to, I'll do the dirty work. Raw meat works, even if it's not the same as proper human blood. It's good enough to start off with.”
“I’m not going to kill anyone,” she asserts weakly. “Not now, not ever.”
Pyro doesn’t argue. He just looks at her.
Somehow, that’s enough to make her believe him.
“I’ll get you some steak,” he says, and like that he’s a bat through the window again.
Apo is alone with an empty cabin and the light of a moon that looks like blood.