Newsies One Shots

Hackles - Sprace

Prompt - None
Au - Modern, werewolf Race
Triggers - Mild blood detail, minor suicide mentions
~Requested~

•••

Lycanthropes, or werewolves, as they're better known, were extinct. Everyone knew that. They'd died out nearly seven decades ago due to violence and over hunting. There were none left alive and anyone who remembered them, who had ever encountered them preferred to pretend they didn't. It was better that way, without them; they had been dangerous, vicious creatures that had no place among humanity.

At least, thats what Race was told. He knew better, of course. He knew better than the 'experts' who claimed that the stain of the werewolf species was dead and gone.

Because lycanthropes aren't a race. Lycanthropy is a disease that no one bothered to study and diseases are harder to wipe out than a species, especially when no cure exists. Especially when the disease is good at hiding itself, good at lying low and spreading not like the plague like it once had, but like a forest fire after a particularly bad rainstorm. Slowly, and with little to draw attention to it.

Of course, the disease was a nasty one, an all around demonic thing that drove those who caught it insane with anger or fear or shame. Most of them, though there were fewer and fewer as time dragged on, ended their lives before their first lunar cycle that would elicit the change and bring the disease to the surface like a rabid animal, all claws and teeth and foaming mouths.

Of course, that was another thing Race knew not to be true. They weren't like raving animals that needed to be put down anymore. No, now they were just people who lived in hiding with an affliction that was passed on through generations more than it is spread, and who have more to fear from the human population than the other way around. Race knew all of this and yet he somehow managed to keep his mouth shut about it. He someone managed to not snap when in school he was taught about how vicious, about how dangerous his people were. Had been.

It was infuriating to an unexplainable degree.

He knew though, that he had to keep his mouth shut. That his life and that of his family depended on his ability to keep a secret, to keep his big trap closed. So he did. Because he was scared, he was scared of being discovered and of being slaughtered like those of seventy years ago, of his existence being nearly scrubbed away like a stain on someone's bathroom wall.

So he went to school in his small village and he lived his life like a normal teenager, with a constant, twisted pit of fear that churned in his stomach. That fear always got worse around the full moon, when his senses started to heighten and with it his emotions and his awareness. He was twitchy and his temper was thin and cracked so easily. His eyesight sharpened and his hearing was amplified, along with his sense of smell, which bugged him more than anything. Thankfully, there were no physical changes until the moon was completely full and those only lasted for as long as it hung in the sky.

Race sighed a ran a hand through his hair, walking with his head down. The sun was casting long shadows across the pavement and his was near blinded by its intensity, with his eyes as sensitive as they were. The full moon was tonight and he intended to spend it alone, as deep in the forest that lay behind his town as he could. He preferred that to locking himself in his basement and going insane for hours on end, cooped up.

"Racer!"

Race looked up quickly, locating the footsteps of the person who had spoken before he saw then. He reflectively stiffened before he forced his shoulders to slacken. It was Spot. Of course it was. He put a grin on his face as the other boy jogged over to him.