ZERO PUNCTUATION ☆ red

[wormwood.]

When Red had first collapsed back over the border of the town of Tanglewood, Worm's concern had been very far from focused on himself. For someone who usually had anxiety going off in every different little direction to worry about practically every single member of Tanglewood, Worm's anxiety had been surprisingly focused on just one person when the gorilla had returned from his torture in the Pitt. He wasn't sure why he had sp desperately pinned for the day that Red would once again be in town and be safely near him, Wormwood was infinity glad that day had come sooner, rather than later. Sure, Red hadn't exactly been in tip top shape when he had been dropped off by Bai Shi to be tended to by the Tanglewood medics, but at least now he was home, and Worm didn't have to spend at least a portion of every day pacing back in forth, trying his damnedest to figure out some way that he could go and rescue the other without getting captured himself, and usually coming up blank without a single good idea to his name. Worm had ended up crying when he had seen the state that Red had been in, despite his best efforts not to do so because this wasn't about him, or what he was feeling at the time. But he hadn't been able to stop the tears rolling down his cheeks, or the desperate sniffling and ragged breath, and he was pretty sure that Red had heard that before he had finally lapsed into unconsciousness, but thankfully he hadn't mentioned it since then.

In the few times where Worm had gone to visit Red while he had been under Selby's close supervision, one of the first things that Red had asked about was the hellhound's strange new form. Wormwood had been surprised by the line of questioning, figuring that it was far from important in the grand scheme of things, but he had ended up answering honestly, explaining that he had just woken up one morning in the new rotting canine form, and he hadn't been able to change back since. Red had looked vaguely concerned when Wormwood had told him this, his brow ridge drawing together and a faint frown coming to his face, but he had brushed it off when Worm had asked him about it, just saying that later on he would need to talk to Worm more. This had confused Worm even further, since it seemed like the perfect time for talking to him about it more was while Red was being taken care of by Selby and had nothing better to do, but when he had given Red a questioning look, the gorilla had just motioned his head over to Selby, and suddenly it clicked that Red wanted a bit more privacy for whatever he wanted to talk about. For some reason that he couldn't exactly place, this made Worm's face faintly heat up beneath his newly blueberry colored fur, his mind racing with all of the different possibilities of what Red could've wanted. Never once did it cross his mind that Red could want to monitor him because of his transformation.

Ever since that particular little event, Worm had been visiting Red fairly often, just talking with him and joking around while keeping him updated on clan events and watching Red's progress in healing. Eventually Red was able to not be under the strict supervision of Selby, and he was sent back to his bunker so that the could rest some more. That had happened a couple of days ago, and Worm hadn't had another chance to visit Red until now, and honestly he was a bit nervous. Not only because it would just he the two of them and he would learn what Red wanted to talk about – well, Mikolaj was technically in the bunker as well, but he was borderline a cryptid, and Worm was fairly sure Red didn't know where he was half the time – but also because of the fact that he had only been to the bunker once before, to deliver Red's jacket. Something that he had noted several times that Red greatly enjoyed wearing, which made him pretty happy. The friendship bracelet had gone over a bit less well – Worm hadn't actually given it to Red face to face, instead opting to leave it with a note – but he could've sworn that he saw Red with it hidden away under a sleeve occasionally.

Walking up to the large door of the bunker, Worm hesitated before pressing his paws to the cool metal, moving to pry the door open with a bit more effort than it probably took Red most of the time. Once it was open just far enough, the hellhound moved inside looking around in slight awe at the section of Tanglewood territory that he had never actually laid eyes on. Or at least not the inside of it, anyways. After a long moment if just looking around, the canine cleared his throat and called out curiously, his ears perked to pick up the sounds of any approaching footsteps, "Red? You here? You said there was something you wanted to talk to me about when we were alone? Er, it was something after we talked about my new form...?"

( [member=6878]RED[/member] )

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[RED]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]He feels like he’s trapped in his own mausoleum. Selby’s got him bedridden, holed up in the bunker because Crow doesn’t have much room for houseguests. His head is wrapped, stumps of horns still leaking blood where Jervis nearly tried to pry them out of his head; a thick bandage covers a few stitches across his nose. His torso is heavily bound, and while Selby had tried hard for the first few days to keep the bandages rotated, the wound still continued to bleed through the seams. His bed is heaped with extra blankets, extra pillows, extra everything - he recalls Selby’s fretting, telling him to keep this and that elevated, apply heat to this, apply ice to that, don’t touch this, don’t do that. It’s an excess he isn’t accustomed to. He feels more or less smothered.

The pain in his chest makes it hard to breathe. Selby had said that he was lucky to not have pierced any major organs, or he’d be dead by now. He wonders if he can die, or if he’s like Beck - doomed to wander the Earth until either of them decided to succumb to the will of the forces they could not control. He wonders if the kid hates him now, hypocrite that he is for following in the poltergeist’s failed footsteps. He wishes someone were here to talk to - Beck, to yell at him, Selby to worry over the slit hole in his torso, even Wormwood, tenuous as their relationship was, if only to ask why he bothered being so kind.

The longcoat hangs from the bedpost of his bunk, alongside his utility belt. The sight of old blood on his blade stirs a strange, sickly feeling in the back of his throat. He closes his eyes and thinks he ought to clean it once he can get himself out of bed. The coat, he studiously ignores; what to think of Wormwood or his peace offerings, he isn’t sure. At some point during treatment, during his initial recovery at Selby’s, the lion must have slipped the little bracelet onto Red’s wrist while he was under. Now he just fidgets with the colored string and pretends it had been there all along.

He recalls the day of his return in hazy, half-there images. He was only teetering on the edge of consciousness at the time, too beaten down to do little other than lay on the ground and bleed. But Wormwood was there - and frightened, upset in a way that didn't make sense. Red digs through his memories and recalls when Worm first snapped at him for questioning why he'd visited the Pitt to meet with his "spy". Then, between the flickers of anger that blinded him in the midst of battle, he sees Worm crying out to a Pittian as they slammed into the body of their leader. Now Wormwood had stood over him and bit back tears, the memory a mere blur as his head hit the ground. Now he was some kind of monster, something undead or close to dying that reeked of an aggressive aura, something he never associated with Wormwood before. Connecting the dots didn't lead him anywhere positive.

He isn't sure where the Chaser's loyalties lied these days, not anymore.

But speak of the devil and he shall appear - a creak of metal grinding against concrete, tentative and slow in a way that was unlike Mikolaj's own mode of entry, jerks him away from his thoughts. Red braces a hand against the thin, vinyl sleeping mat and pushes himself up a little. An uncomfortable warmth spreading across his chest tells him that he's bleeding again. "Uh, yeah." Red winces a little at a twinge of pain under his bandages, but ignores it in favor of swinging his legs over the side of the bed and forcing himself upright. The floor spins and he rubs a hand across his face; Selby's been giving him a steady supply of herbs, and he found some pills in the storage room of his safehouse that kept the worst of the pain at bay. "Been... Thinking about that. C'mere. I can't yell too much." The words come out as a low, raspy slur. Under the frame of his bed are a few bottles of something strong he'd found stashed behind a wall socket, between the sheet rock and thick concrete walls of another bunker room. They're nearly empty.

Part of Red wants to hammer him about the battle, or what he could remember of it. The rest of him is pensive - about the undead creature standing in front of him that used to be Wormwood, about the Pitt's activity and if that had something to do with it all. He's been dancing around it for days, only because Selby would have an aneurysm if he had to deal with any more stress. Now, the two of them were alone for better or worse, and he could address it properly - as properly as he could, hovering just to the left of agony and still bleeding from a gaping chest wound. Maybe he'd hit up Selby for more herbs before the day was done. "...Tell me what happened again. From the top."

[wormwood.]

The battle at the Pitt was no longer fresh on Worm's mind, although the after effects of it certainly were. He was still anxious over the injuries that had been caused to so many of his friends, and he was still ready to fuck over ant Pittian that came near him, but the entire encounter was no linger crystal clear. He could still remember charging into battle, Draekon attacking Jervis, shouting praise to his lover, and then getting into a battle with Jervis himself. The remnants of the battle were still quite clear, with the scars from his wounds still etched clearly into his left leg, even in this new body, but things had changed pretty significantly since Red had first disappeared. While Red was suffering within the dungeons of the Pitt, being brutally wounded at the claws of Bai Shi and Jervis, Draekon had not only showed up at the border, but had disappeared as immediately as he appeared. He'd filled Worm with hope for a bright future for the briefest of moments, but had then immediately snuffed out that hopeful light, filling the male with sorrow and wrenching away one of the only things that had kept him happy in the aftermath of the fight. Contrary to what Red was still thinking, Worm now had no affiliation to the Pitt besides a deep seated hatred and a vigorous desire to dig his jaws into the flesh of any Pittians that came too close to Tanglewood territory. Roman had been a prime example of that, the Mexican wolf suffering under Worm's dire hatred that he hadn't been able to stop.

Ever since the fight, Worm had steadily felt a feeling of anxiety form in his chest and grow larger with each day that passed that Red didn't come back. His and Red's relationship had been understandably strained before the battle, but even under the circumstances, Wormwood had missed the other male dearly. Truthfully he wasn't even sure himself why he was so desperately concerned about the horned gorilla, but he hadn't wanted to look any deeper into it, because he knew that if he did, he would probably find feelings he really did not want to confront right now... or ever, probably. He hadn't really known what to expect when Red came back, since the other had certainly missed a lot of things while he was gone, including Draekon's arrival and disappearance, Leroy's diagnosis of his cancer, and the death of Pastel, which had effected Crow and Selby brutally hard. It wasn't Wormwood's place to tell Red about all of the things that had happened in his absence, but there were certain things that he could clarify, so that he wouldn't be forced with a fury filled gorilla that was probably still somewhat pissed off at him. He couldn't say he blamed Red, but he certainly needed to explain, and do it quickly.

However, his explanation of earlier events had been interrupted by the arrival of his strange new hellhound form. That had been a relatively recent development in his life, happening only maybe a week before Red had finally returned, but it was still a pretty damn important one. Worm still couldn't figure out why the hell the form change had happened, but it certainly wasn't convenient. The male couldn't seem to shapeshift back into his old lion form, which he missed very dearly, and he still wasn't sure if the change meant something deeper. It certainly seemed as though something had snapped, considering what had happened when Moth had been attacked. But truthfully he couldn't remember much of what the hell had happened during that particular incident. He was pretty sure he could understand why Red was concerned about the sudden change, though. Red had always seemed pretty experienced when it came to dealing with their more supernatural clanmates, and while Worm didn't know entirely why Red was so knowledgable about these things, he could only assume it was because Red certainly didn't seem non-supernatural either. He was a pretty odd mutated gorilla, and Worm was pretty sure that anybody new in the group who looked at Red would be pretty wigged out, at least at first.

When Red's voice echoed off of the long halls of the bunker, Wormwood blinked in surprise and looked around, feeling exceedingly small compared to the winding bunker around him. Following the sound of the other male's voice, Worm eventually found himself in front of the gorilla, a soft frown coming to face as he eyed the other's injuries. Even if he couldn't have gone charging in to save Red, he still felt horrible as he thought about how Red must have suffered while he was trapped there, and he wished that he could've done something more. Eyeing the sleeping mats and piles upon piles of pillows and blankets and various other things, the hellhound's gaze flicked down temporarily to the bottles beneath the gorilla, and he felt his ears pin back disapprovingly for a moment. When Red asked him to take it from the top, he blinked up at him and hesitated for a moment before barking softly, "Well... it's not too exciting of a story, if I'm being entirely honest. I was just... sleeping. I needed some rest after what happened with... Pastel, and Crow and Selby and everything, cause I was feeling like shit. I went to sleep, and I guess while I was sleeping I felt kinda weird? There was this weird tingling feeling, and then when I woke up I was like this. I didn't realize what had happened at first..." He winced at the memory, remembering Feza shouting at him because she thought that he was some sort of intruder in his own home. He shook his head quickly before continuing, a heavy sigh leaving him, "I was so exhausted that I didn't even realize that I had shifted at all, but then Feza came and started screaming at me cause she thought I was some sort of thief. Then I realized, and, well... that's the end of it. Ever since then I've been stuck like this. I've tried to shift back, several times, but it never works, no matter how much I concentrate. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what caused it, or how to reverse it, but it certainly wasn't intentional." He felt bad that he didn't have a better explanation, but honestly the entire change had been nothing but a complete surprise, and Wormwood didn't know how to express it.

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