He pinned down his wrists and roared in his face as he felt his muscles spasming, twisting under his skin like angry snakes, the taste of blood in his mouth making him both enraged and hungry. The roar seemed to rip through him, up his throat with a force that tore tissue and stretched muscles, and blood dribbled out his mouth and down his chin. The guy was already wincing from the volume, trying to twist and squirm away, but Roan had the steroid monster nailed to the pavement like a butterfly on a mounting board, knees bracing his broad chest, hands pressing his wrists down so hard he probably should have been surprised they hadn’t broken yet.

(And wasn’t one of his own hands broken? It was odd, but he was so overload on pain right now he couldn’t feel any of it - the system was short circuiting and nothing was getting through.)

Drops of his own blood spattered down on the man’s face, and he made a noise of disgust. “You fucking freak! What the hell is your -” he didn’t finish the sentence. He opened his eyes and just stared at him, his eyes wide, pupils contracting with fear, and Roan couldn’t even imagine what he was looking at. All he knew was he wanted to tear this man’s throat out with his teeth, dismember him, rip his limbs out and gut him like the fucking beast he was, spread him out for the vultures to pick clean -

“Roan!” a voice shouted, briefly distracting him. He looked towards the noise, and saw a familiar looking guy standing maybe fifty feet away. There was another guy beside him, less familiar looking (although he smelled enticingly like blood), and as Roan looked at them, the smaller man actually jumped and ducked behind the larger one, the sharp smell of fear a further enticement.

“Roan,” the bigger man said. “The cops are coming. Calm down. Don’t let them … pull yourself together.”

He snarled at them, sure the bigger guy was making sense, but the words didn’t seem right somehow. They sounded funny, or maybe he wasn’t hearing them right. They meant something, right?

“Get him the fuck off me!” the man beneath him screamed, partially enraged, but mostly just scared in a wonderfully pungent way. “He’s a fucking monster!”

“Shut the fuck up!” the big man snapped, then dropped his voice. “Roan … c’mon man, I don’t know how to talk you down …”

“What, um, what’s wrong with him?” the smaller man asked the bigger one, quietly, but Roan heard it.

“He’s infected.”

“Umm … yeah … infections don’t work like that -”

“His does. Now be quiet.”

Again, this probably all meant something, but right now he couldn’t understand it. The sound of his own breathing was like bellows, the growling a non-stop counterpoint that rumbled through his head like the sound of thunder. His muscles felt like coiled springs with electricity coursing through them, sparks flying off the surface and burning his blood. He needed to sink his teeth into something, dig his fingers in warm flesh -

“Paris,” the big guy said suddenly. “Roan, what would Paris think of this?”

The name struck sparks in him, even though he didn’t recognize it at first. But it meant something that left him feeling almost dizzy. His mind started making connections, and things started making sense. Suddenly he realized he had gone way too far; he’d let his rage get too far ahead of him. His jaw ached terribly, nearly as much as his broken hand, and his head was throbbing like an infected boil on the verge of bursting. Even his eyes burned, like the sockets were full of salt.

He then realized his blood was dripping onto the prick cops’ face, where he had broken skin thanks to his broken nose. Oh shit.

Roan released the guys’ wrists, but put his good hand on his forehead instead, pressing down with all his weight. “Move and I’ll rip your fucking arm off,” he growled, his voice gravelly with damage and the problem of trying to speak with vocal chords that had started changing into something else.

“Roan - “ Holden began, taking a step forward.

“Shut up,” he snapped, closing his eyes and trying to will back the molten anger that threatened to burst the confines of his fragile skull and spill out all over. The lion didn’t want to go back in its cage; it wanted to tear and rip and bathe in blood and flesh. The real problem was how tempting that thought was. He concentrated on the pain, which was jagged and hot and filled his body like shattered glass. If his bones were all broken, he wouldn’t be surprised.

“You’re a fucking freak,” the cop began, using anger to cover the fear that Roan could still smell, as sharp as adrenaline and vinegar. “They should lock you up and throw away the key. You’d probably enjoy that, queer boy -”

Roan grabbed his throat with his broken hand, almost relishing the way his bones ground together beneath the thin layer of skin. “One more word, and I gut you like a trout,” he grated through gritted teeth. He could feel the pain of his fangs in his mouth still, the blood still oozing from his gums, metallic and salty.

He must have believed him, because he shut up.

The more the adrenaline and the lion faded, the more he ached; the pain filled him relentlessly, his head pounding as bad as any migraine he’d ever had. He wasn’t sure he could move; it hurt to breathe. He wished shape shifting was as easy as it looked in Terminator II.

He heard the hiss of tires against asphalt, and Holden said, “They’re here,” as headlights burned through the paper thin skin of his eyelids, stabbing deeply into his brain like knives. He heard a car door slam, and shortly afterwards heard Murphy exclaim, “Jesus fuck, Roan! What happened to you?”

He opened his eyes and the light made his eyes tear up as he looked up at her. “Got a little angry,” he admitted, really not feeling well at all.

He really wasn’t surprised that she barked at someone to radio in for an ambulance. He bet he looked almost as ugly as he felt.

****

Demerol was one of the greatest drugs in the world.

They took the cop - whose name was Russell Hakes - to the emergency room along with him, although only Roan got the ride in the ambulance. Hakes was checked out at the scene by EMTs, and then taken to the hospital in a patrol car, cuffed and everything. Along with Murphy had been Wilson and Lozano, who actually had the hustler beater case in the first place.

Hakes it turned out was a traffic cop, one who got busted down because he got in a fight with another cop, so you knew he was top drawer material. But now he was pretty fucked. Not only was Roan happy to press assault charges against him, so was Kai, who knew he wouldn’t be arrested retroactively for admitting he was a prostitute. Kai also decided to make it worse for Hakes by claiming he tried to rape him, which made the homophobic dickhead fly into a screaming rage that required Ativan sedation and probably added charges to his already interesting charge sheet (he destroyed some equipment in the emergency room and smacked a nurse and an orderly; he also threatened to murder the “little faggot” loud enough that everyone in the waiting room and down in the MRI wing could hear him). At this, Kai only grinned in a really disturbing way and turned towards the wall to laugh. When a female cop came to check on him, he suddenly started openly sobbing. It was creepy how quick he was able to turn it on, but child abuse victims were often fantastic actors - they had to pretend to be whatever their abuser wanted them to be so they would get hurt less. Kai was probably loving having some power over someone else for once.

The puzzled EMTs - whom he didn’t know (thankfully) - handed him over to one of the ER doctors on call, which happened to be Doctor Singh. He knew her in a vague sort of way, having encountered her several times over the years. She had a matronly figure but an attractive face, round and dusky, with large dark eyes and black hair always pulled tightly back in the most microscopic ponytail he had ever seen on anyone this side of a ‘90’s record company executive. She gave him a weary look, and said, “What exactly happened, Roan? Clearly you have some contusions and a broken hand, but that doesn’t explain the blood that was on your shirt or your pain response.”

Luckily it was just her beside his gurney, so he told her quietly, “Look … and I know this is gonna sound crazy, but … I partially transformed. The blood’s from my jaw changing and my teeth growing out. You may want to make sure Hakes is tested, because he has a broken nose and I don’t know if my blood splashed on the wound or not.”

Her already weary expression seemed to grow even more tired; it was like she was going to collapse to the floor, but she didn’t. “Partially transformed?” she repeated, with the blasé’ disbelief of an ER doc who has heard and seen absolutely everything at least twice, sometimes on the same shift. She seemed to consider and discard about a half dozen responses or questions, then turned away and barked at a nearby nurse to give him a shot of Demerol. The nurse questioned the dosage she ordered, but Singh shut down the argument with, “He’s an infected. He can take it.”

When the nurse came over to give him a shot, she looked down at him like he was a bit of potentially perilous fungi. The orderlies who moved his gurney to a recovery room off the ER at least joked with him about being an action hero. A big guy with a white boy ‘fro who partially resembled a thinner Seth Rogan in scrubs cracked, “Man, you took down a cop. The other cops are gonna love you even more now. Hope you kept your Kevlar.” He was joking, but there was a sad kernel of truth in it.

Usually the recovery rooms had a couple of patients in it, but he was all alone, which was kind of nice. Either it was a slow night for the ER, or Singh had given orders that he was to be put in one all by himself. Because he partially transformed? Because hiding him was the best thing for him now? Hard to say really, especially since the Demerol was taking hold and slowly carrying him away on a wave of tidal warmth, to a place where the pain was obliterated under a calming layer of narcotics, and he didn’t give a flying fuck about anything.

He was sort of asleep and sort of not, a strange drug induced state that he was reasonably familiar with. He knew he was asleep, which actually meant he wasn’t asleep. The gurney was far from comfortable, he could feel it beneath him like an ironing board, and yet it really wasn’t all that bad. Of course it had the smell of all hospitals everywhere - disinfectant and blood and sickness and vomit and piss and something totally unidentifiable, maybe soap mixed with flop sweat - but pumped full of Demerol, it was surprising how acceptable it was. Or maybe not. Hospitals still freaked him out terribly, but there was no way to feel freaked out on Demerol; it was impossible to feel anything but good and sleepy on Demerol. He wondered if he could get Singh to give him a sample to take home.

He didn’t know when he ceased being alone. He was laying on the gurney, sure he was asleep and yet sure he was awake at the very same time, when Paris slipped his arms around him and kissed him softly on the neck, murmuring, “We have to stop meeting like this.”

He was laying on his side, facing a wall painted a pale blue that he imagined someone thought would be soothing to patients, but it reminded Roan of cyanosis, someone not so much dead as moldering, their flesh no longer a shade considered remotely human. But it didn’t really seem morbid. He could feel the heat and weight of Paris against his back, feel his body conforming to his, and it felt so good he would have cried if not for the drugs in his system. “You always say the corniest things.”

“Hey, I have no shame. I thought we covered that.”

“I miss you so fucking much.”

“I know.” One of Paris’s hands cradled Roan’s broken hand in his own, the cast so fresh he was surprised he wasn’t leaving prints in the plaster. “You could heal this. Why aren’t you?”

“Evidence. Holden lived up to his Fox nickname and concocted this surprisingly plausible story about how I intervened to save Kai from an assault, and was assaulted by Hakes in turn until I overpowered him. Hakes supposedly threw me into the car door so hard it shattered the passenger window, and when I was on the ground he stamped on my hand and broke it. The breaks in the bones, according to the x-rays, could be consistent with that. They also couldn’t be; really there’s no way to say one hundred percent. Hakes denies this series of events, of course, but everybody thinks he’s fucking asshole right now and no one cares. They’re testing Hakes right now to see if matches up with the little physical evidence they found on Michael Gilpin. I’m sure it’ll match. Hakes had some sort of psychotic break. He never should have joined the force.”

“How much time will he get for all of this?”

“That’s the bitch of it. Assuming a plea bargain and the dropping or downgrading of some charges, probably a year or two. But at least he’ll be off the force, and the guys on the street will know who he is. He’ll also be banned from the S & M clubs for life, as no one likes a guy who ignores the safe word.”

Paris rested his head against his, he could feel it, and covered his broken hand with one of his big, warm hands. This wasn’t real and he knew it; Paris wasn’t actually here and talking to him. But he still felt better having him here with him, which is probably why his brain coughed up this hallucination. Your own mind was actually more than happy to placate you when things started to go totally fucking wrong. “You know why I’m here,” Paris said.

To make him feel better, to make him feel less alone in this special level of hell known as a hospital … but no, those weren’t the real answers. “I need you back because I can’t control it,” he admitted. “You always understood it better than I did. I thought I could use it, you know. If I’m a total fucking freak, then there must be some way of using it to my advantage. But I can’t control it as well as I thought. I almost … I was going to kill him. I was going to let the lion out and let him just do what natural selection should have done to him before we got to this point. I was just going to rip his throat out and be done with it.”

“You don’t need me to control it. I didn’t understand it at all. I understood you. You just admitted the whole problem, Roan. Listen to yourself.”

“Do I have to? I’m an asshole.”

Paris slapped him on the shoulder, just hard enough to get his point across. “Knock that off. The problem was you wanted it to happen; you wanted the lion to come out. You’re the stronger one; you only totally lose control when you allow yourself to do so. The only reason you almost lost control tonight is because you wanted to.”

Roan closed his eyes and sighed, sure that was probably the truth. How could it not be? His subconscious was talking to him in the guise of Paris, a man he wouldn’t fail to listen to. “I’m crazy, aren’t I?” There was a certain liberation in crazy, a freedom from responsibility. No one expected much out of the crazy.

“No. You just need to start talking and keep talking. Stop bottling up things until they burst. I mean, taciturn is kind of sexy, but then it gets annoying.”

“That’s me in a nutshell.”

“You are so lucky I can’t punch you.”

“The pain is supposed to fade, right? Why isn’t it? I still miss you so much I can barely stand it. I keep expecting to see you every time I open the office door.”

Paris wrapped his arms around him and gave him a squeeze that he could almost feel. “Oh sweetie, it doesn’t fade. No one should know better than an infected that pain doesn’t ever really fade - you just get used to it.”

He knew that was probably true, but he didn’t want wisdom right now - he wanted to be miserable, or as miserable as Demerol would allow him to be. Which wasn’t actually, come to think of it.

Roan was vaguely aware of noises in the real world, and he resented them, because it meant he’d have to pay attention to them, and Paris would go away. But just acknowledging the existence of a real world had made Paris go away, although the ghost of his warmth lingered. Roan held on to it as long as he could before he was forced to open his eyes. Holden was in the room, near him but not so near that he could reach out and touch him. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Roan thought that was a funny question. No, he was not okay; he had never been okay. He had been born not okay. “I ‘m completely stoned.”

“Yeah, you look it.” He gave him a very serious look, and then said, almost kindly, “You are the scariest fucking dude I have ever met.”