I Can Hear Your Voice

f i v e

March 20th.
7:32 a.m.

[Luka's POV]

My arms burned.

And my thighs. And my stomach.

I burned a lot, and it wasn't an unfamiliar feeling. It's just the first time in a while that it's burned this much. I don't hate the feeling though. It makes me feel in control. I have all the control in the world; I even control my own identity, right? But no amount of pretending would give me more control than the burning on my skin.

My skin stung and chaffed as I walked the familiar sidewalk to my school. Fear pounded my nerves, shot from my stomach to my chest and buzzed my mind, but I could trust Luka to be forever happy for me. Werewolves hate mutts...Ugh, who chose such a derogatory name for my...species? Well...I began looking through my memories and compared them all. The girl I had yelled about yesterday was probably a Vampire. Smells like blood...which means she's probably fed recently, and I know this sounds weird, but she also smells cold. Dead, just without the rot. Him and most of the people at school smell similar...so they're probably werewolves. Does that mean mom is half-vamp?

I'm not stupid (I know, it's my favorite catchphrase). I don't have to question what a werewolf or vampire is because it makes sense. There's always a grain of truth in anything, or maybe it's hiding in plain sight. It's probably that the stories I've read on Wattpad were actually written by werewolves, and most likely tons of other stories were heavily romanticized and sexualized by humans. It's not impossible. Although that Drarry fic I read is most definitely impossible, fingers crossed...

It didn't take me long at all while I was stuck in my sea of thoughts to come to terms with these things, I've seen the signs, the hints, and everything else so it'd be dumb for me to deny it. I didn't want to have a cliche emotional breakdown for 10+ chapters wondering a werewolf was when it's fucking obvious. No, I had no trouble over processing that.

It's Matteo.

How would he react?

He said it, right?

Werewolves hate mutts, loathe them too. Maybe as much as I despise him. So does that mean Matteo would hate me too if he found out? Does he hate mutts more than others? Oh god, what if he has some wattpad teen drama traumatic backstory where mutts murdered his parents or something...I shivered.

I knew that Matteo and I were mates...but that was something I least understood out of everything from last night. It isn't that I can't wrap my head around it, it's that I've read way too many werewolf stories where mates are entirely different things. Some want to fuck upon first chance meeting. Some are psychotically possessive over their mate and chain them their bed...some wait and keep silent and do the, "I'm too scared 2 tell mate bcuz my hunnies human and I hungr wolfie who is big scry and mate don't kno wut big wolf is" type of trope...I can totally see Matteo doing that. A warm feeling dispelled some of the ice lodged in my chest as I thought of Matteo sweating nervous buckets trying to tell me his life secret.

The March air was still unbelievably cold as I tried to distract my mind with random thoughts and profound revelations about the universe, like, "What if I actually don't exist? Like a sim in a game? Or someone inside something like the Matrix? Or a piece of code that suits the plot of a transmigrating/world hopping main character? Maybe I'm inside a book, or that the author of my book is also in a book so it's about someone writing a book about my author writing a book about me...and then if I wrote a book it'd be about..." but no matter how much I thought, it never distracted me from my fear and uncertainty. He was right. If anyone found out, would I really have the...will?