Title: Four Times
Author: Val Mora
Rating: PG
Summary: There’s a saying, among the werewolves in Chicago, that you bleed four times for the one you love. On two different werewolves, in two different eras, who have nothing in common except that they did.
Notes: I don’t own A) Lord of the Flies, B) A Separate Peace, C) The Pearl, or
D) Finding Forrester. I do, however, own "him", "her", "the werewolf", "the Hunter," and "the vampire."

There’s a saying, among the werewolves in Chicago, that you bleed four times for the one you love.

First is when you meet them, because you’re distracted by how beautiful or handsome they are, and you get clumsy because you’re blushing, and you hurt yourself. A papercut, a careless scrape of a knife, a dropped package, catching your hand in a door.

Second is when you realize you’re in love with them, because you deny it. You’re a werewolf, and they usually aren’t; they can’t know. You can’t tell them, because you’ll lose them, so you bite your tongue or your lip or dig your nails into your palms to hold your silence, and you bleed.

Third is in your marriage bed, on the night of your wedding; the night you consummate it. There is no need to elaborate; everyone knows. Even the men do, but not for the same reasons. Women draw blood with their nails and their teeth, and they aren’t wolves if they don’t.

Fourth is when you die. It doesn’t matter which one goes first; blood is for the death, and it’s for the heart. You die in your soul because you love them and they’re gone, or because you are dead and in the ground, six feet under and cold as the earth around you.

You bleed four times for the one you love. Every were in Chicago who’s worth his scars knows it and tries not to show that he does. The girls giggle behind their hands and are careful around the boys they have a crush on, because they know that if they get hurt around him, that he’s the one for them. The boys are stupid and they swagger, and some of them get hurt, and some don’t. It doesn’t really matter. Nobody believes in it, anyway, except stupid old grandmothers whose pups all died in the War.

He sees her in the bar, the first night out with his friends; they all do. He’s the one who swats his best friend for offering to go have her himself, and goes over to flirt with her. He decides to be charming and slick, because that’s what they like nowadays.

"Hey," he says, and she turns towards him, and there’s something about her he notices but can’t place.

"Hey yourself," she says, and smiles, her blue eyes reflecting the red light of the beer-sign behind the bar, next to the shelves of exotic drinks that only the truly drunk are willing to try.

"I’ll buy you a drink," he tells her, and she smiles.

"All right," she agrees, without any sign of offense, and he does. They sit there, talking, for what seems like hours, and he doesn’t notice his friends watching him with an amicable jealousy. He’s just bagged himself a hot lay, that’s for sure, they tell themselves.

Until he drops the glass when he hears her laugh. It’s warm and crystal-clear, and reminds him of ice cracking in spring, cold and solid, until it warms just enough – just enough to send the strong-seeming ice at the top whirling into the water, floating listlessly until it melts. Her laugh is like that, but it isn’t cold at all. He has no way to describe it; maybe he’d find a poem by one of the masters, like Tennyson or Hughes, that would work, but he hasn’t read poetry since he was in seventh grade and his teacher told him he might as well go work in a gas station, since it would benefit him more.

The glass chips on the bar; one of the bits cuts his hand, and he pulls the glass out gently before sucking at the wound. It’ll heal in a couple of days, anyhow; it’s not like he hasn’t gotten glass-cuts before. Werewolves in Chicago gotta take that much damage anyway, just to be normal.

"Are you all right?" she asks, and the bartender takes the shards from him.

He grins at her, and says, "I am now."

They met in France, in ’44; eighteen and a few months, and five-hundred-some. The werewolf and the vampire; New World and Old. It would have been the kind of thing that made the romance writers sigh and pull out their pens, but it really wasn’t all that amazing. More like something out of Dracula than Romeo and Juliet.

Too long since feeding, the vampire had been in the camp, looking for someone out alone, late – had found someone. Hadn’t noticed the feel of werewolf, or perhaps just ignored it.

"Don’t yell," said the vampire. "I won’t hurt you."

But the werewolf didn’t; just clamped down on the joining of neck-and-shoulder with rapidly-sharpening teeth and said, indistinctly, "Neither will I, if you let me go."

So the vampire did, because you didn’t play games with werewolves who were with you against the Nazis. Not for blood, you didn’t.

It wasn’t till hours later that the werewolf noticed the indicative throat-marking; noticed where it’d scabbed, after being scraped by fangs. It looked like being stabbed with a two-pronged fork, not like a love-bite.

The werewolf didn’t even bother to try to hide it; the uniform could, if one tried hard enough. And no one noticed small wounds, then, not with the war on and with men dying all the time.

He meets her at least once a week, now. Sometimes two or three, even. They sit together on the hood of his car or in the bar or at the restaurant where he takes her, and they talk, and every so often – once every two weeks, maybe – they go home to his empty apartment to have sex.

He realizes, one day, that he likes her. Really, quite a lot. That he’s been neglecting his friends for months, just to be with her.

He watches her sleep, all breaths and light, and he gets up, putting on something to make him decent and goes outside to have a cigarette. She won’t let him do it inside, but he doesn’t mind all that much, even though it’s already November in Chicago and it’s

damn cold out.

Standing on the front stoop of his apartment building, he looks around, seeing his breath on the cold air. The air smells of rain, and he can smell the chemicals in the cigarette, too, but he’s used to it. Addicted to them, even, as she would say if she were there, though he tells himself he could kick the habit anytime he wanted. Werewolves don’t get addicted to cigarettes, he tells himself, but he knows it’s not true.

She’s not In the Know yet, and she probably won’t be until the week before he proposes, or something. Not like he will – it’s only been six months, and he knows better than to get married on a whim. It usually just degrades into a divorce ten years later.

He’s been thinking, lately. About her, about life. About this stupid cesspool of a housing district, and the gangs that are probably going to take his life within the next couple of years. It’s Chicago. If you’re in a gang, you’re likely to die; if you’re in one of the werewolf gangs, your chances of surviving it all are slim to none – close to twenty-to-one if you’re a good shot and fast, fifty-to-one if you’re mediocre. He buried his brother last year, dead from a silver bullet from a crack dealer who owed him too much.

He vows that he’s gonna buy her a ring, as soon as he gets his next paycheck – he’s been saving up – and then save up to move somewhere. Springfield, maybe, or something. Somewhere where the gangs aren’t so bad and he can make a living and she can work in a bookshop like she said she wanted to, the last time they talked about what they wanted to do with their lives. She’s a waitress right now, working at a low-price diner that gets held up every two or three months by novice robbers. What she doesn’t spend on living expenses she spends on books. She’s so smart it’s humbling, when she talks and says things like, "It’s like in Lord of the Flies, you know, the battle with your inner beast" and he has no idea what she’s talking about except that he thinks he understands, because he’s battling with an ‘inner beast’ every time the moon hits first quarter.

He drops the cigarette as it burns his fingers, rubbing at the blisters absently as he stares out at the grey street.

He hears the door open, feels the warmth of her body against his back. "Coming back inside?" she asks. "It’s cold out."

"Sure," he answers, following her through the entrance and up the stairs.

When they’re back inside, alone, not in the hall where everyone can hear, he asks, "Can I borrow a book from you?"

She looks at him curiously. "Of course. Which one?"

"Any one." He looks down, at the cheap carpet, and then at the off-white wall with the picture of New York City his cousin sent him for his twentieth birthday that still has the World Trade Towers in it. "One you liked, though. Something good, not the shit my teachers would have wanted me to read."

"All right." She seems to think for a moment. "The Pearl, then? You might like that. Or A Separate Peace."

"Whichever," he says, and when he drops her off at her house later that morning, she gives them to him. He sits down in a library halfway across the city with a dictionary at his side, reading them, and gets a total of four papercuts from turning the too-thin pages of the dictionary. They leave faint brown stains on the edges of the pages of A Separate Peace, but he doesn’t think she’ll mind.

The werewolf realized, sometime in ’45, that there was more joy in being around that vampire than there was in being with anyone else. It was a shock more than anything else, and required several minutes of thought to process.

It wasn’t till the next day, when the vampire smiled, revealing just a hint of fang, in response to a vulgar joke – something heard from a British soldier, though the werewolf didn’t really listen, and couldn’t have repeated it later – that that knowledge solidified and grew into a realization that was utterly new, utterly foreign, and more than a touch frightening.

The Hunter knew; smiled, and said to the werewolf, "You’re queer," and meant it like "strange," though it no longer implied such to the majority. The urging was there, if not explicit, to share this realization with the vampire around whom it centered.

It almost happened; the werewolf came close to speaking, and stared into the vampire’s face, and decided against it, digging sharp nails into palms until there were little half-moon runnels of red against pale skin.

The vampire kissed the marks away, and half-smiled to see the reaction, disbelieving and hopeful at once.

And the werewolf, who was from Chicago, thought, Four times, and then realized that the path was half-walked already.

It’s been a year and a half since that night in a bar, and it feels like forever, but it really hasn’t been.

He looks at her, not for the first time that night, and her face is half-lit by the television screen she’s watching. It’s this movie she likes, Finding Forrester, though he doesn’t understand it himself. Whatever makes her happy.

Checking the clock as the credits start to roll, he realizes it’s still pretty early in the evening – only nine-thirty.

"If I told you something really strange and that made no sense, would you still believe me?" he asks, because that is, in essence, what he’ll be doing.

"It depends," comes the answer, "on whether or not you believe it."

So he tells her. About most things, like the werewolves in Chicago, and how most of them are in gangs, at least the mortal ones, and he tells her about the old vampires who give them money for weapons and drugs, and about the immortal werewolves who act as vigilantes and try to stop all the bloodshed, here in the city.

She laughs, when he finishes, and says, "Oh, you were asking me about that. I thought you meant something truly hard to imagine." And her smile has a touch of blood to it, now, that he hadn’t noticed before, but he doesn’t care because it doesn’t actually change who she is or how he sees her. Really. Besides, well, knowing that there’s no point to taking her out for dinner anymore.

So a week later, he’s down on one knee with a ring in a box in one hand, watching her eyes as she watches him. She takes the ring and cries, but he knows it’s from happiness, and not that knowledge that lingers at the back of his mind that he’s going to get old and die, and she never will.

They get married a month later, in a small church, and she wears a deep red dress she bought at an insanely low price that looks good on her. No one would believe her in white, anyway.

His mother and father are happy for him, and they are glad that he’s found such a wonderful woman. They like her, very much, and his little sister, who’s sixteen, pops a bubble from her gum and says, "Yeah, she’s cool," and goes back to watching TV.

They live in her apartment, now, because they feel as though there ought to be a transition, somehow.

The first night of their honeymoon, on a lake in northern Wisconsin where nobody lives except for a bunch of Swedish-American descendants of miners, he learns what it’s like to have his blood drunk by a vampire.

It’s intoxicating; it’s horrifying. He loves her and she’s beautiful, but he finds that he is human enough, still, to not want to watch her feed, even off him.

He says nothing, because it is not worth it, and holds her close afterwards, and realizes that she loves him for himself, not what’s in his veins.

The three of them were on a week’s leave, in ’46, in France, when the werewolf took the Hunter to a French bar and managed, with mangled syntax, to hook the Hunter up with a warm body for the night, or at least a drinking companion.

Five minutes into the conversation, the Hunter had consumed three glasses of wine and was fuzzy enough not to notice a lack in the werewolf’s presence, and the vampire was not surprised to open the door of the rented room to see a completely sober lycanthrope waiting on the threshold.

The door closed softly, making a noise against the wood of the doorjamb reminiscent of a footstep on Slavic forest floors, and there was an exchange of a kiss or four that would have been embarrassing in any other situation.

The vampire woke in the morning, near dawn, to the Hunter pounding on the door in a need to be admitted into the room.

"You did it," said the Hunter, shocked, when it opened partway, "I can’t believe you did it."

"Neither can I," said the vampire, and smiled.

"I’ll just leave now," was the response, as the Hunter walked away. "I’m hungry, even if you aren’t."

The blood on the vampire’s tongue was the werewolf’s, sweet and dark, as though drinking shadows was preferable to any other source. Two marks at the werewolf’s throat were remnants of the night, as were memories of flesh and spirit, blood and soul. The marks would not scar, but perhaps the mind’s keepsake-box would hold all else, when the body could not.

The vampire fell asleep again, and did not wake with the werewolf, who felt the throat-wounds and murmured, "Thrice."

He does not cry when it happens, when his wife is killed by a Hunter-child whose name he does not, and does not wish, to know.

He does not cry when they hold her service, and he does not cry when they cremate her.

He cries when his foster daughter, who is four, pulls on his sleeve and asks, "When is she coming home?" Because he cannot bear to say to her, "She isn’t ever."

He says it anyway, and holds the little girl in his arms until she is sleeping, worn out by grief, and then puts her to bed, under the teddy-bear blankets she uses.

Springfield’s a lovely town, and their neighborhood is friendly and full of happy children.

He does not go to a bar to drink to forgetfulness; he is a father, and will not set such an example to his daughter. Perhaps, ten years ago, in Chicago, he would have.

Instead, he stands in the bathroom of their small house, and looks at his face for a long time, thinking of loss and love and life, before taking the toothpaste and brushing his teeth, and goes on to live the rest of his life without her, and waits for the wound in his chest, where his heart rests, to heal.

In 2004, in Athens, Georgia, the werewolf said, very calmly, "I hate you, you know."

There was really nothing to say to that, because things had been going wrong for over a decade by then, and the vampire was not surprised to hear it. They had fought the week before, a shouting match that ended with the werewolf throwing the vampire out of the house. They hadn’t spoken to each other since then, and the vampire had come to apologize, but had not yet had the chance.

"Yes. I do know," said the vampire.

"And I also love you." There was a kind of anger to it, but also a kind of warmth.

"I know. I’m sorry."

"It is not your fault," said the werewolf, and turned away. "I suppose I shall see you in five years."

"Where’re you going?" The vampire’s heart sank to somewhere low in the chest, or perhaps near the earth.

"Appalachia." It was not so far away, then, that there was no hope of return. Had the werewolf responded with ‘France,’ then, perhaps, there would have been reason to worry.

"Why are you leaving?"

There was a very long silence, and then the werewolf responded, in a way.

"Where I come from, there is a saying, that a werewolf bleeds four times for the one he loves. The only way to be certain is for one of the two to die. I would rather not be reassured as yet, and certainly not by the actions of my own hands."

"Is it true?" Those who say that the heart of an undead creature does not beat are wrong; the vampire’s pulse was so loud that both of them could hear it.

"What do you think? I don’t believe in it; it’s superstitious and foolish. It sounds like something my old German grandmother would say, trying to scare me with Slavic tales when I was small."

That would have been more convincing, if the werewolf’s old German grandmother had not said, when the one who would become the werewolf was a child, You are like my ancestors, who watched the moon to find themselves, and who bled not to show that they were alive, but to keep that life.

Das Ende.

A/N: I’m quite proud of the way I did the vampire/werewolf/Hunter sections, in which I used no gender-specific pronouns. It was intentional, as I used only gender-specific pronouns to refer to the couple in modern-day. There are no names in this fic whatsoever, and that was also intentional.