Chapter Text
The Four of Swords… a time for rest, a time to lay down your weapons and catch your breath. A pause from the chaos to find your center once more. This is a respite, not an end, there is still conflict to come. So, rest and regroup or you will find yourself ill equipt to meet the trials to come.
***
The silence that coats the drive back to the lodge is a tattered, tired thing. It lays heavily on Ryan, Laura, and Travis with the intangible and claustrophobic weight of a thundercloud. Ryan isn’t sure what there even is to say. Where do you even begin with a night like last night?
“Sorry, about most of your family being made up of werewolves?”
“Sorry, at least two of them are dead?”
“So, do you think your boyfriend is still alive?”
Yeah, that’s why none of them are saying anything. Anything they could say feels like it might be the thing that undoes them. Safer to stay silent and live under the weight of this wordless void.
Ryan’s feet thump on the floor of the battered car in a frenzied staccato of disquiet. He isn’t sure what it is that he’s feeling so uneasy about.
Well, trauma, obviously.
But there’s something else that he’s having a hard time putting his finger on. Relationships and emotions have never really been his strong suit. All he knows is that he needs to get to the lodge. That they aren’t going fast enough. They are going to be too late!
Those thoughts are like breath on campfire embers igniting these emotions he cannot name back to life, kicking them up and into a flurry. Those embers flock out through his lungs like a swarm of bats and start to burn in his chest making his heartrate immediately thump like a bass drum banging inside the talons of his ribs. The result is that breathing is feeling increasingly more of a challenge.
His hand drifts to his side where he’d been stabbed. The wound seems mostly healed. But maybe there’s some kind of internal injury. Perhaps that’s the source of this feeling. Or maybe there’s some kind of lingering side effect from the whole “bite of the werewolf” thing. Like, who knows what kind of shit something like that does to the body!
All he knows is that he needs this car to go faster.
He needs to get to the lodge and he needs to get out of this car.
He needs…he needs…
“Hey, kid,” Travis barks from the front seat. “You mind not stomping a hole through the floor of the car? It’s banged up enough as it is.”
Ryan snaps his head up and immediately stills his feet. He hadn’t realized he’d been going that hard with his nervous tapping.
Laura turns and looks at him from the passenger side her eyebrow quirked.
“I’m good,” Ryan mutters. “Sorry.”
Travis grunts something from where he’s gone back to being hunched forward over the steering wheel, hands gripping it tightly and turning his knuckles white. He has the look of someone who is only driving on instinct rather than with any actual intent. He looks haunted.
Ryan pushes his hands down on his knees trying to keep them still. He doesn’t want to push Travis. He doesn’t really know the guy. He helped them and Laura seems to have started to trust him, which says a lot actually, but he doesn’t want to test the guy.
When they finally pull up to the lodge everything looks normal at first glance in the full light of dawn, which isn’t great for Ryan’s fraying sanity seeing as he is still trying to digest everything that’s happened since yesterday. But the longer he looks at it, the more apparent the damage becomes. He can see it in the crumbling remains of the chimney, the claw marks on the front door, and the broken windows on the east side.
Travis kills the engine and for a moment the three of them just sit there, the only sound of their breathing. Those embers in Ryan’s chest flare and start making it hard to swallow. The car feels too confining and the breathing of Laura and Travis is making it worse, pressing in against him. He needs to get out of the car but he paradoxically feels nailed to the spot.
It’s the double doors of the lodge creaking open a peak before swinging open. That’s what breaks the spell. That’s what gets Ryan to finally move. He shoves the door open so hard it rebounds back at him as he pushes out of the backseat bumping him back a bit but he barely notices as he barrels out.
Up on the deck, Abi and Emma look out over the rail down at them in a mix of disbelief and relief. Ryan feels even more frantic at the sight of them because something is missing. It fills him with a foreboding, a promise of something terrible. He rushes up the steps eyes fixed on the door. When Kaitlyn steps out her face somber and tired he feels his heart sink, time slows, and goes strangely mute in the space between one heartbeat and the next. His pace slows to a halt and he forgets to breathe.
It’s panic. He knows this despite his long history of chronic emotional illiteracy since he has become intimately acquainted with this particular feeling over the past twelve or so hours.
Kaitlyn gives him a soft knowing smile before stepping aside making room for Dylan to shamble out, skin looking ashen even under all the blood and grime. He looks exhausted but the corners of his mouth still lift and his eyes brighten when he sees Ryan.
It isn’t until that moment that Ryan even realizes what it is that he was waiting for-- who he was looking for. As previously noted, he really can be slow on the uptake when it comes to emotions and relationships. All at once, he’s in motion again bolting forward and throwing his arms around the other young man.
Dylan lets out an “ oomph ” and Ryan remembers the severed fucking hand.
“Shit, dude, sorry,” he releases his grip and starts to step back but Dylan tightens his grip around him pressing his face into his neck. Ryan gives in and goes back to hugging him, albeit with a little less force this time.
Those embers of burning panic in his chest sputter and flicker out. His lungs no longer feel like they are a wet trash bag incapable of inflation. His heartbeat doesn’t slow so much as the rhythm shifts into something even. Ryan feels steady for the first time in what feels like years. It’s like his feet are finally planted on the earth. He feels a hand on his back and looks over and sees Kaitlyn smiling at them. He manages a smile back and reaches out and pulls her in with them. Her arms go around them both and she holds them tight for a moment before letting go with pats on both their shoulders.
“I’ll just give you two a moment,” she emphasizes playfully before stepping away to join Abi and Emma.
“Are you okay?” Ryan finally asks.
“You mean, aside from bodily dismemberment and the wild amounts of sepsis raging through me right now?”
Ryan jerks away and immediately pushes back Dylan’s sweat-soaked hair and presses the back of his hand to the other young man’s forehead. He’s definitely warm--or maybe Ryan is warm? Maybe he can’t accurately gauge it because of all the shit that is coating his own skin and Dylan’s.
“Fuck,” Dylan guffs. “Sorry, I’m fine. Bad joke.”
“So, you don’t feel like you’ve got an infection?”
“Well…my stump is starting to feel like it might actually be on fire and I am definitely more tired than I think I have ever been in my entire life.”
At the mention of Dylan’s severed hand, the hand Ryan had cut off with an old fucking chainsaw! His stomach drops and a cold rush swoops in to take its place.
Dylan notices and immediately starts to reassure Ryan. “ I’m the one who asked you to do it. It was a shit situation and we both did the best that we could with what data we had at the time.”
It’s a nice thing to say and, on some level, Ryan knows that it’s true but that doesn’t mean he believes it. He understands it conceptually but he doesn’t feel it. The logical part of his mind can grasp that as truth but his emotions are something altogether different. The result is a very uncomfortable dissonance.
He shifts his grip to place his hands on Dylan’s shoulders. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, I definitely have a fever,” Dylan mutters. “Ryan Erzahler just hugged me and he’s still touching me. Hundred percent experiencing a fever dream.”
Ryan groans and rolls his eyes. He does not understand how Dylan can make him feel so many soft and wonderful things while simultaneously exasperating him so profoundly. Which…even the exasperation is somehow nice. Dylan is an anomaly.
“Shit, more bad jokes--sorry, I can’t control it. Joking is my main way of coping.” Dylan apologizes with a wince.
Ryan sighs and smiles and lets his head fall forward and rest against Dylan’s. Dylan survived the night. Laura ended the curse. He can hear the commotion of Jacob and Nick rejoining their group as the others greet them. The police and an ambulance are on the way. They made it. It is all going to be okay.
***
“It’s not going to be okay,” Travis Hackett lectures in a tone that is dripping with a backwater sheriff drawl. “You survived but this is only the beginning. How do you think this is going to look to the police--the fucking Feds!?”
“Can you cut the scary cop schtick,” Kaitlyn demands crossing her arms over her chest, mouth parted, and eyebrow lifted in a display of abject impatience. “Just get to the point.”
“She’s right,” Laura joins in, sitting next to a guy wearing a jogging suit that is waaay too small for him.
This guy turns out to be her boyfriend Max who had been stranded out on the island after he’d been freed of the curse when Ryan killed Chris. Laura had taken the golf cart out as Ryan had been running up the steps to the lodge. Since she returned with Max, Laura hasn’t let go of his hand. Max is a lucky guy. Not many people can say that their partner would literally kill for them, much less go to the lengths that Laura did.
Ryan presses closer to Dylan who is seated next to him on the couch. Dylan smiles softly and looks down at his feet.
“We know how this looks,” Laura continues. “So, let’s cut to the chase. What’s our story? What’s our plan?”
Travis’ eyes roll towards the ceiling dramatically. “Lord, save me from teenagers.”
“Stop being dramatic,” Laura retorts.
“And some of us aren’t teenagers,” Max notes.
“The story is that my brother snapped,” Travis states so bluntly it’s a bit like being slapped.
Ryan’s whole body tenses, joints locking up, muscles and sinew coiling around his bones. Pin it on Mr. Hackett? Ruin his name? Travis Hackett was casually asking him to say that a man who had been a mentor--a father figure--had been a brutal, sadistic murderer.
“He became obsessed with the belief that there was a werewolf stalking his family in these woods,” Travis continues mercilessly. “He decided to use you all as bate and eventually believed that his own children had been bitten and killed them.”
Ryan can’t take it, the words erupt from him before he can check them. “You want us to lie and say Chris was some kind of monster?”
“I mean,” Emma intones. “He kinda was…”
“Not like that!” Ryan snaps.
“You think I like it?” Travis growls. “You think I’m looking forward to painting my brother as a demented murderer? Someone who could kill his own kids?”
Ryan swallows hard.
“This is my fucking family. I hate myself for everything I’m suggesting.” His eyes circulate around their group. “But Chris, Kaylee, Caleb, their suffering is over. The rest of us have to go on living and this is what he would’ve wanted. He wouldn’t want you all to go to prison for the rest of your lives. He’d want you all to not only survive this but move past this.” He looks away and out the window, voice going so quiet Ryan can barely hear him. “Even if it means him taking the fall.”
They all go silent then. Abi curls her legs up onto the couch and wraps her arms around them, hiding her face against her knees. Jacob wraps the blanket Kaitlyn found for him closer around himself. Nick stays huddled in the corner wrapped in his own blanket still unwilling to talk or look at anyone.
“The evidence does point in that direction,” Kaitlyn finally breaks the silence casting an apologetic glance at Ryan.
“And it’s not exactly untrue,” Emma agrees.
Ryan turns to glare at her.
“In the most basic sense,” she says bringing up her hands in placation.
Travis sighs the sound coming from deep in his gut, “exactly…my family’s hands aren’t exactly clean here.”
“You mean drugging and holding people illegally in jail cells?” Laura asks bitterly.
Travis takes a breath and it is like he has to regurgitate the words. “Among…other things.”
The painful concession seems to satisfy Laura and she visibly resists saying more.
“What about Dylan’s hand?” Ryan demands. “It’s gonna be my fingerprints on the chainsaw.”
“Chris made you do it,” Travis replies as though it’s obvious. “Dylan was bit by the animal that’s been roaming these parts and he was convinced the limb needed to be severed. The more truth we can bring to our narrative the more believable this will be.”
Beside him, Dylan snakes his ankle around Ryan’s in lieu of holding Ryan’s hand given that Ryan is on his left. Ryan looks over at him and Dylan gives him a soft reassuring smile. Ryan closes his eyes and nods feeling a little guilty that Dylan is the one comforting him when Dylan is the one who’s been permanently maimed.
Travis seems to take Ryan’s silence as agreement. “Great, there is also the matter of fingerprints on the guns. So, let’s take it from the top. Chris sabotaged the van to keep you all here--”
Jacob lets out a miserable sound from inside his blanket but says nothing more.
Ryan isn’t sure how long they spend laying out their story, he’s lost all sense of time since last night. All he knows is that he is simultaneously feeling anxious about how long they are delaying getting Dylan actual medical attention while also being worried that they don’t have enough time to develop an airtight narrative.
Beside him, Dylan’s head lilts before tipping and resting against Ryan’s shoulder.
“Sorry,” Dylan lifts his head. “Tired.”
“It’s fine,” Ryan assures. “I’m cool being a very uncomfortable pillow.”
Dylan breathes out a soft laugh before dropping his head back down on his shoulder squirming a bit to get comfortable before letting out a contented sigh. Ryan feels heat blossom at the back of his neck. Across from him, Laura’s lips quirk to the side as she looks down at their linked ankles, then up to Dylan’s head resting on Ryan’s shoulders, and then over to meet Ryan’s eyes. That heat at the back of his neck spreads to his face and Ryan quickly shifts his eyes away. Laura snorts a laugh.
“All right, look alive, police and EMS are pulling up,” Travis informs like he is preparing them for battle. “Everyone remember your stories and stick to them no matter what they say. Once you’re all taken to the station for questioning you don’t say anything until your parents and a lawyer is present. They’ll say this makes you look guilty but don’t listen, it’s just a scare tactic.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jacob mutters to himself.
Abi’s teeth dig into her bottom lip.
“You guys,” Kaitlyn pipes up. “We got this.”
It’s three words. But it has the desired effect and they all perk just a bit and prepare to meet their fate.
Almost immediately things turn into minor chaos. Dylan is swept up and taken to the back of an ambulance while the rest of them are checked out. Then Caleb’s body is found in the lodge and the shape of the previous night’s events becomes more apparent and they are separated for questioning by the officers on site.
As Ryan is relaying his part of the agreed-upon story he catches sight of Dylan being prepped for transport in one of the ambulances from over the cop’s shoulder.
“Hey, wait!” Ryan calls out rushing towards the ambulance.
“Whoa,” the cop says trying to stop him but the fatigue Ryan had been feeling slushes away in another rush of panic.
He honestly hadn’t thought his adrenal glands had it in them but apparently he can still squeeze a little more out of them.
“Where are you taking him?” He demands, already trying to step into the ambulance after Dylan.
“Hold up, kid,” the paramedic puts a hand to his chest and holds him back. “We gotta get him to the hospital.” She says it like he’s an idiot for asking--which, he is. Of course that’s where they’re taking him he’s missing his fucking hand.
“Can I go with him?” The request comes so quickly and with such earnestness that it even surprises him.
It softens the paramedic but she still shakes her head and continues to block his way. “Family only.”
“But he’s my…” Ryan finds himself at a loss for words on what exactly he and Dylan are at this point.
Friend definitely doesn’t feel like it fits. He knows that Dylan has a crush on him…and they kissed at the firepit--but that was also just a stupid game where he got lucky enough to choose Dylan for said kiss. They were only just beginning to maybe…
“Friends and boyfriends aren’t family,” the woman informs, kindly leaving their status ambiguous.
“C’mon, son,” the cop who had been questioning him saunters up like a goddamn cowboy.
The use of the word “son” makes his skin crawl and anger flare. A wild irrational part of him wants to make a break for it and force his way onto the ambulance.
From where he is getting poked for an IV Dylan seems to see what’s going on inside his head.
“It’s okay, Ryan. I’ll see you over there.”
Ryan takes a deep breath and rationality returns. What is wrong with him? When did he become so reactive? A night running and fighting for your life against werewolves and a crazy family of hunters clearly changes you. That and the adorably obnoxious guy you met at camp apparently.
Still, he isn’t so sure he’s going to be going to the hospital or if they’ll let him see Dylan if he does go. He’s getting a very “you’re all suspects” kinda vibe from the authorities here.
He ignores the cop and turns to the paramedic and gives her what he hopes is his most pleading expression. “Can I please just say goodbye?”
“You can say it from here,” the cop barks.
But the paramedic presses her lips together and exhales through her nose. “Quickly.”
Ryan jerks away from the cop’s hand on his shoulder and swiftly jumps into the ambulance before anyone can change their mind.
“Ryan,” Dylan starts.
“You got your phone?” Ryan asks.
Dylan’s eyebrows furrow. “Yeah…”
“Let me see it.”
He reaches into his pocket which takes a little maneuvering given the IV and the missing hand but he manages and passes it to Ryan. Ryan takes it and navigates to the contacts icon and types in his phone number. He names it “Ryan Ryan”. He passes the phone back to Dylan who immediately looks down and smiles the same bashful grin he had at the bonfire after their kiss.
“Did you really just give me your phone number?”
“I figured you earned it since you survived the night.”
Dylan laughs still looking down at his phone like Ryan has given him the best gift in the world. “Is that all I had to do?”
“Plus I figure you owe me that date,” Ryan continues. “On account of me helping save the day and ending a decades-old curse.”
Dylan looks up suddenly his eyes wide with shock.
“All right, son, times up,” the cop demands.
Ryan glares back in irritation at the interruption. “Just a minute.”
“I said--”
“Just a couple seconds longer,” the paramedic cuts him off.
Ryan hears the cop grumble to himself.
“I guess that’s our cue,” Ryan sighs.
“Yeah, that guy looks like he’s wound tighter than Mister H on the last day of camp.”
“Dylan,” Ryan groans.
“Defense mechanism,” Dylan hums.
Ryan shakes his head fondly. “Okay…so, call me…I guess.”
“A swarm of bears couldn’t stop me,” Dylan replies.
Ryan laughs and he decides that he can be brave. He’s survived enough to take this risk.
“Can I…can I kiss you?” He asks more timidly than he had intended.
“Yes,” Dylan’s response is immediate and eager. “Like, yes in all the languages.”
Ryan doesn’t wait. He cups Dylan’s jaw gently and leans over him and brings their lips together. It’s different from the campfire. For one, the audience is very different. Definitely not the kind to cat call or whistle. But more importantly, this time there’s no pretense to hide behind. They are also covered in blood, sweat, and mud, and their lips are chapped to hell. But there is something more honest about it, something raw and alive.
Ryan intends to keep the kiss chaste and starts to pull back but Dylan’s hand reaches out and grips the back of his neck yanking him back in for a decidedly more adult kiss, tongue and all. The experience leaves Ryan completely without air in his lungs and his face burning hot. Leave it to Dylan to push the limits even when there is a cop and two emergency responders watching their every move.
“Sorry,” and thankfully Dylan sounds just as breathless as he does. “I just…I just don’t know when we’re gonna see each other again and I figured I better make the most of it.”
Ryan is smiling like an idiot. Shit, I’ve got it waaay worse than I thought.
“That’s it,” the cop growls and Ryan feels himself being yanked back and out of the ambulance.
“Homophobia!” Dylan accuses loudly.
Ryan is deposited outside the ambulance and they shut one of the back doors. He raises his hand in goodbye as the paramedics get ready to depart. Dylan, the asshole, lifts his bandaged stump in response, and then the final door shuts.
The sirens kick on and the ambulance peels out. Ryan tries not to think that this is the final time he’s going to see the other guy…or at least the last time he sees him outside of prison.