Everyone has a First Time, Right?
Everyone has a First Time, Right?
I wonder sometimes what it might be like to forget your nightmares, to get the luxury of moving on from the voices in your head screaming at the monster you’ve become.
It always starts the same way. Darius, lying on the cave floor, smiling up at me with the same coy smile he’d had the first time he kissed me, the first time we fucked. This time though, the smile was cold as the light in his eyes died and poured itself down my sword in thick gurgles of red. The cold of his smile oozed into the bite marks on my abdomen and the claw marks dug into my thigh and gnawed with vicious fangs at the pit of my stomach.
“My last gift to you,” he said, his voice the whisper wind makes through a cemetery, “spend it well, my precious wolf.”
In real life, days passed, hours spent feverishly wishing something would kill me, wishing the howling in my head would stop, wishing the fangs would have gone just a little deeper. In the dream, his words scream in my ears as the full moon burns the sky.
There were two of them with me, watching over me in the small camp they’d made. They’d given me food, water, calmed my fever with a wet towel, and utterly ignored my poorly mumbled warnings. I couldn’t tell you then how many days had passed, but it had been enough. She was a sweet Dunmer in the middle years of her life, eloping with her forbidden love, the male Argonian who’d done so much for her.
She’d told me stories about all the sweet things he did. I could see it between fever dreams, the way he watched her, the light in his eyes when she would look away, the smile that danced on his lips when she was near. They were the same looks Darius and I had shared, back when I was stupid enough to believe things like love and happiness were things I deserved to have.
Honestly, I wish I could remember what they sounded like while they cared for me. I wish I could remember their faces as they were in those moments where all that mattered was each other and caring for the poor Imperial girl they’d found collapsed outside of a cave.
But the only bits of her I can picture are her arm, lying on the ground, ripped from her body as my claws squeezed and pulled. I can hear her scream, wet and gurgling, filling the tent and covering the sounds of my fangs ripping open her stomach, the sickening sound my tongue made as I licked the blood from her skin and devoured her insides.
Of him, I remember the horror on his face, the way his scream sounded as it hit my ears. His blood was different on my tongue, but his ribs split open the same way hers did, his heart tasted the same, warm and still beating as I swallowed it. His head made the same wet gurgle as hers had when my fangs snapped through his neck and pulled it away, a garrish plaything for a wolf bored of prey that was so easy to slaughter.
And it always ends the same way, with me bursting out of bed, howling, a mix between screaming and whimpering, staring down at the claws slowly sliding back into my hands, feeling my teeth slide back into place as my fangs hide, wondering how long it will take for the taste of Dunmer to leave my mouth, collapsing into a ball and sobbing until I can’t tell which pieces of me are left underneath the monster that’s swallowed me whole.
