[ Steve still reached up to thread his fingers through the back of his best friend's hair, despite Bucky's grasp. His body was wound tight at Bucky's closeness, the cellular choice between fight or fleeing swinging wildly towards the former and tusks locked with his conscious mind knowing that the creature breathing along his throat was someone trusted more than anyone else in the world. He stared up at the drift of the sky, waiting and waiting, only lulled when Bucky hummed and crooned in the same sort of aching melody as his howling songs. His heart clattered on, striving faster and faster to match something--
--and stuttering with a full-body seize when Bucky sunk wolf's teeth into his neck. Steve was no stranger to pain. He knew aches and cuts, bruises, coughs and fever-ridden agonies but this? This was sharp, fast, digging and ripping. Bucky's hands on his shoulders were all that kept him upright, he felt his legs go right out from under him as he struggled in a blind clamor to get away.
He didn't scream. Couldn't.
He choked wetly with eyes flying open.
In pure moonlight his blood looked black on Bucky's howling lips. It looked black on his own skin, his chest and Bucky's chest. The rush of his life smeared over them both. There was something hot and wrong spreading from the deep gouges of Bucky's bite created, something that tore at his muscles and started twisting to reform him heaping on a fresh new agony world's worse than the pain of the bite. Distantly, he realized this was what would kill him -- not bleeding out or any normal infection.
The bite was the curse.
The blood was the cure -- smelling healthy, strong, and familiar right under his nose. Steve opened his mouth, responding to the command pressed upon him and set his blunt teeth in gnawing frantically until the wrong searing pain crawled up his jaws and made them sharper. Blood burst onto his tongue, iron and wine and salt and earth. It filled up his mouth and he groaned, swallowing it down while dragging them both to the forest floor.]
no subject
--and stuttering with a full-body seize when Bucky sunk wolf's teeth into his neck. Steve was no stranger to pain. He knew aches and cuts, bruises, coughs and fever-ridden agonies but this? This was sharp, fast, digging and ripping. Bucky's hands on his shoulders were all that kept him upright, he felt his legs go right out from under him as he struggled in a blind clamor to get away.
He didn't scream. Couldn't.
He choked wetly with eyes flying open.
In pure moonlight his blood looked black on Bucky's howling lips. It looked black on his own skin, his chest and Bucky's chest. The rush of his life smeared over them both. There was something hot and wrong spreading from the deep gouges of Bucky's bite created, something that tore at his muscles and started twisting to reform him heaping on a fresh new agony world's worse than the pain of the bite. Distantly, he realized this was what would kill him -- not bleeding out or any normal infection.
The bite was the curse.
The blood was the cure -- smelling healthy, strong, and familiar right under his nose. Steve opened his mouth, responding to the command pressed upon him and set his blunt teeth in gnawing frantically until the wrong searing pain crawled up his jaws and made them sharper. Blood burst onto his tongue, iron and wine and salt and earth. It filled up his mouth and he groaned, swallowing it down while dragging them both to the forest floor.]