Chapter Text
It takes not one, not three, but two screaming voices to rouse David enough for him to finally squint into vague awareness.
It’s still dark out, but he’s reassured even before his eyes adjust by the mixed smells of the ever-musty woolen blankets of the Counselors Cabin and the cheap ink from the pens Gwen favors. I’m home , he thinks, with heart-squeezing relief, even as his exhausted brain starts to work on distinguishing the voices in the background.
His body aches all over, which he supposes is an improvement from the needle-sharp agony he’d been in two weeks ago. The lump on his head has shrunk to nearly nothing, but the bite on his arm still has him wincing; even twitching in sleep is enough to send pain radiating from the breaks in his leg. Mostly, he’s just tired: two weeks of living in the woods with no supplies, a broken leg, and the responsibility for an injured, wild wolf left him without a lot of energy to spare.
And now he’s home, in an actual bed, and the only thing standing between him and sweet, restorative sleep is... a shouting match between Gwen and the Quartermaster?
“— bitten when the seal was weak, and then defended by his attacker —”
“— don’t know what David said he’s okay with but when I lock the door I expect it to stay locked —”
“— can’t you feel it, girl? That’s not human anymore —”
David reaches out with his uninjured arm. The bedside lamp comes on with a flick, casting orange light onto the scene.
The Quartermaster has replaced his hook with a menacingly long, scarily sharp knife that glints along its silver edge. His single eye bores into David with more emotion than usual, violent and… regretful, almost? Gwen’s back is to David, standing between him and the Quartermaster. She’s in her camp uniform, though it’s seriously sleep-rumpled; after two weeks as the only counselor at Camp Campbell, David can easily imagine her collapsing into bed without the energy to even change into pajamas after a long day. He winces in sympathy even as she turns towards the light, looking frazzled and jumpy and maybe, in the lamp’s glow, a little bit like a defending angel.
A distant part of David’s brain notes that this is maybe a little more dramatic than most of his wakeups, before Gwen shrieks and pulls David’s guitar out of nowhere , lifting it over her head in a familiar move. His brain recognizes it and automatically initiates Self-Defensive Move Gwen-Alpha.
“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—!”
He flinches and the guitar stops a half inch from his nose. Gwen, holding the other end, gapes at him.
“ David ??”
“He’s awake,” Quartermaster announces, lowering his knife-arm.
“Hi,” David says, a bit more squeakily than he’d prefer. To be fair, though, he’s only spoken to wild animals the past few weeks, and his heart is pounding faster than a rabbit’s at the barely-stopped attack. Some part of him is a little touched, actually, that when Gwen needed defending she went for his guitar.
Then she drops the instrument with a discordant clang that has him wincing all over again — guitars aren’t exactly inexpensive, and they take time to carve, after all! — before she launches herself at him.
“I’m sorry,” he manages on instinct before her arms curl around him and he realizes he’s being hugged .
This… might be a dream, actually. Maybe David never made it through that bear attack and now his brain is throwing up comforting nonsense as he bleeds out in the forest. If so, at least that means Wolfie didn’t have to step in; David couldn’t be that mad about dying if it meant she lived.
Aware that reality might reassert itself at any moment, David cautiously brings his arms up to return the hug — and Gwen pulls away to snack him on the shoulder, her expression thunderous. You missed the opportunity for a Gwen-hug! part of him wails, but he’s more focused on trying to understand the complicated emotions flashing across her face -- of course she was angry, but was that fear ?
“Where were you?! What happened? Are you okay? Do you have any idea what you left me with? Is this beard real? Did - did something maul you? David, say something, I swear to God —”
“Sorry,” he says, as she pulls away — not to scoop up his guitar and wield it with righteous fury, but to check him over, hands light and analytical as she searches for wounds. The adrenaline from nearly getting smashed over the head is finally fading and he hisses as she shifts, bumping his left leg. “Ow. Um, I fell when I was putting the canoes away and hit my head. The current carried me downstream. I - ran into some trouble, haha.”
He gives the best smile he can manage after days without doing his smile exercises, and by the look on Gwen’s face he can tell that she can tell that he’s out of practice. He’ll have to get back into the habit as soon as he can.
“Er, everything’s healing, anyway! So I’m okay. I am sorry about leaving you with the kids alone for so long — were they really that bad?” It belatedly occurs to him that he never even finished going over the last adventure’s lesson with the kids — no wonder Gwen had had such a rough time of it! He makes another mental note to bring that up with them as soon as possible.
“David, as always, they were absolute hellions,” Gwen replies as she hurries over to where they keep the first and second aid kits. She cracks them open and sets immediately to flashing a penlight in his eyes, checking for a concussion. “Is this thing on your leg supposed to be a brace ? QM, go get a real one from storage. David, untie this unless you want me to cut it off.”
She plucks at the yellow t-shirt he’s got wrapped around his arm as she searches the kits for gauze. He obediently tugs the knot free and glances at the Quartermaster, who hasn’t moved. He just stands there, his expression even more unreadable than usual.
David folds up the little yellow shirt and sets it aside; he’d been pretty religious about washing the bloodstains out while in the woods, but he’s definitely going to need to hit it with some bleach if he really wants it clean. His mental to-do list is getting longer and it’s not even… well, he has no idea what time it is, actually, besides being the ideal time to be sleeping.
“Where’s the bite?”
“Hm?” he says, blinking. He’s so tired .
“The bite , David, the one that was clearly bleeding through the shirt on your arm. Where did it bite you? And what bit you? Please tell me it wasn’t rabid.”
That wakes him up a bit. He glances down at his injured arm, where nearly two weeks ago Wolfie, healthy but angry, had bitten through to bone, leaving a vicious open wound which had been oozing consistently as it slowly, slowly healed.
The thing is, besides some blood that wipes away with Gwen’s brisk cleaning, his arm looks totally unscathed.
He blinks. Then, stupidly, he checks his other arm, as though he’d somehow wrapped the wrong one. They match, in that both seem perfectly uninjured.
“The wolf,” Quartermaster says. Gwen jumps, whipping around to glare at him, but the man’s focus remains on David. He feels the hair on the back of his neck start to stand up at the intensity in his eye. “Willingly sacrificed for her pack, while the fabric between dimensions was at its weakest. An ancient ritual, one not repeated since—”
“ Quartermaster ,” Gwen hisses. The other man finally breaks eye contact to look at her; David realizes with some shock that she’s seething, worse even than when Max had been blackmailing her. “I said . The brace .”
David glances at them both, wide-eyed, as electricity seems to crackle in the space between them. Finally, and against all odds, Quartermaster huffs and turns towards the door. “Be back. Don’t get bit.”
The screen door creaks behind him and closes with a sharp thwack . Gwen mutters to herself as she scrubs at his arm, wiping away dried blood until it’s clean and clear that there’s no bite wound. Stunned, David flips it over, but all he sees is pink skin and a few freckles. It’s as if the bite were never there.
“ David ,” Gwen says, like it’s not the first time she’s tried to get his attention. David startles, blinking rapidly as he focuses on her. She looks almost worried, the way she rarely is without accompanying anger.
“Yes? S-sorry, I was just. Um. Arm,” David tries. The furrow between her brows deepens, and she checks his eyes again, like she’s suddenly doubting her first diagnosis. To his shock, she even slides a hand carefully though his hair, checking his skull for bumps or cracks. David nearly falls over when she pulls away -- he’d been leaning into it without even realizing. Gwen hardly ever touches him, and it’s been a long two weeks since he’s seen anyone human.
“Well, you don’t seem to have a concussion, or any other new brain trauma,” she finally announces, closing the first and second aid boxes. “We’ll need to get your leg in a real splint, but besides that you’re pretty much as patched up as we could have gotten you here.” She fingers the yellow shirt for a moment, thoughtful. “I don’t know what this is from, but you’re not bleeding now. How do you feel?”
David pulls his focus away from his apparently unbitten arm to catalogue everything else, which is to say… not much. Even though he could swear that just a little while ago his whole body was twinging in pain, even though this afternoon he lived through a bear attack , David actually feels… pretty alright.
“I’m fine, I think. Just the leg hurts, and I’m pretty tired, but… it wasn’t really that bad.” Gwen squints at him with suspicion, and her David-you’re-pissing-me-off-somehow-but-I-haven’t-figured-out-exactly-how-yet expression starts to make an appearance. He winces. “I really am sorry, Gwen. I got back here as fast as I could, but it took me longer than I would have liked. You’re a really great co-counselor; thank you for taking such good care of the camp while I was gone.”
In the gentle light from the lantern, he can see her expression soften for just a moment before she rolls her eyes and shoves the aid kits away. “Yeah, well, someone fucking had to.”
Gwen refuses to let him take breakfast duty the next morning, and in fact insists he stay in bed for more rest. To ensure that he doesn’t have to get up, she even brings him a tray of food, along with a steaming mug of hot chocolate. He’s touched when he realizes that the cocoa mix must come from her own personal stash, considering that the camp itself ran out during the last summer snowfall. He maybe scares her away a little by crying on her, but, well. He’s just feeling particularly grateful after his time in the forest.
He really is so glad to be back, and even though he knows that resting is a good idea, he also doesn’t want to wait to see the kids. So after he eats every last crumb of his breakfast, David showers, shaves away his beard, and gets dressed.
Good thing I kept all my t-shirts from when I was a camper , he muses as he folds a fresh yellow shirt into a bandana. He puts his hands on his hips and gives a practiced, sunny smile at his reflection. Besides the (blessedly decent quality) leg brace, he looks just the same as he always does on workdays. It’s practically like the past two weeks never happened.
The smile on his reflection fades a little bit as he rubs his left arm. It’s just as smooth and unmarked as it was last night, despite the fact that yesterday morning the bite wound had still been bleeding intermittently enough to merit being wrapped.
David sinks onto his bed for a moment, reaching for the shirt he’d used to bandage it. Dried blood stains it in a pattern consistent with the bite wounds he’d had, but his arm is totally unscarred.
“Hmm,” he says aloud. The pack he’d fashioned in the woods rests at the foot of his bed; he pulls out the second half of the shirt and compares the two.
He’d cut the front from the back when he’d realized he needed more material to bandage both himself and Wolfie. While he doesn’t regret it, it does sting a bit that the little shirt can’t be salvaged. Still, there had been no point in leaving it after Wolfie had healed, and now he compares the two halves in his hands.
Wolfie’s half is more torn up — unsurprisingly, given her initial mistrust of David’s attempts to help. She’d poked a number of holes through it with her sharp teeth; David fingers these thoughtfully as he checks the faded bloodstains, their pattern indicating two deep stab wounds rather than the clear bite the shirt’s other half shows.
In the shower, he’d checked the scratches on his back: still there, if mostly healed. He still needs the brace for his leg, and although it maybe isn’t as bad as it had been the other day, it still hurts terribly if he puts too much weight on it. Only the bite wound has disappeared like it had never been there.
It occurs to him that if he really felt the need, he could find his way back to Wolfie’s grave — but he dismisses this, pressing the shirt halves together and folding them as one.
“Weirder things have happened this summer,” he reassures himself, and sets the little shirt aside as he stands. There’s no point in questioning this odd little mystery when its effects are harmless and there are more important things to do.
He aims his best smile at his reflection, fueled by his gratitude and confidence that now that he’s back at Camp Campbell, everything is going to be fine. It’s time to say hello to his campers.