#bite wound

long headcanon-y story short; Waluigi's the youngest of his family, and was usually the one causing the most trouble around the town he was raised in.

he DID mellow out at least a little bit in his teens, since he had an outlet for his chaotic energy via various high school projects he got into.

(though that was also the time his growth spurt kicked in, and he basically became a human spider plant so-)

also say kind of hello to his older brother (well, his arm) in the biting bit.

i still need to HEAVILY work on him + the rest of the family's concepts. so if i ever do show him fully and he looks completely different from this small tease uh- oh well.

it also goes W/o saying, but just in case-

i'm going w/ current/public Nintendo canon as of posting and don't consider Wario and Waluigi brothers

(in fact i headcanon Waluigi as the older of the two + Mario Bros by a least a few years-)

so that's the main reason Wario's not here. since at this point they haven't met or know abt each other at all. (and not for a while. since Waluigi's like…5? in the main two doodles here?)

Its fur was a kind of grayish-brownish-reddish mix, the exact shade of a sun-dappled grassy meadow. It could use those hind legs to run and jump and hide, faster than Killan could ever run. Its little nose twitched in his direction and he wrinkled his nose back at it, grinning around the food in his mouth. At least they mixed berries in - now and then a bite was nothing but sweet. It made the rest of the bitterness easier to handle.

“What do I smell like, bun-bun? Huh?” The rabbit didn’t answer, of course, but Killan watched with surprise as it shifted slightly closer to him, an oddly thoughtful look on its fuzzy little face. “Do I smell like prey, too? Or like wolves? I’m not like them, I promise.” 

The rabbit’s nose kept twitching, and Killan leaned in closer, moving down into a crouch so he was eye-level with the cage where it sat stacked on top of another one. Somewhere behind him, the men who owned his life were laughing and joking as they set up their camp for the night, for once giving Killan a little rest instead of making him do it all himself.

Ren had felt bad about the fox bite, currently hidden under bandages wrapped around Killan’s left wrist. I’m not a cruel man, Matti, Ren had said, and Killan hadn’t argued with him. Hadn’t pointed at the scars on his back and his legs and his front, or the little scar on his head from the first week. He could hide that one with his hair, mostly.

He hadn’t even mentioned how cruel it was to take someone’s name away, so almost three years on he had to remind himself of what his name was every single day, had to wake up whispering I’m Killan Josta, I’m Killan Josta, I’m Killan Josta as he got more and more afraid he’d become Matthias, not just answer to it.

He’d only nodded, and tried not to scratch at the itches under the bandage, and Ren had given him the night off, then. Didn’t even have to cook, it was Beron chopping away with his big heavy knife, cleaving meat from bone to toss into the stew. He would’ve felt nice about that if it didn’t mean Killan probably wouldn’t get to eat tonight.

Killan shifted, blocking the rabbit’s view of the cooking-fire, not that it mattered all that much if it saw what had happened to another rabbit it probably never knew. Who even knew if a rabbit could even see so far?

It shifted closer then. And closer again.

They were so close Killan’s eyes crossed a little trying to look at it. He stuck a finger into the trap and it held perfectly still as he traced a fingertip over the fine soft fur at the top of its head, the silken feeling of its long flat ears. He expected it to start shivering - he’d seen shaky little scared rabbits right before their necks were wrung.

This one didn’t shake. It looked at him calmly, like it knew him. It looked at him like, hello, you belong out there with us, not here with them.

Killan bit down on his lower lip, then winced as that pressed on a busted spot from the last thing he’d messed up. “I wish I was out there with you,” he whispered, leaning in close. “I wish I was in the woods somewhere. I wish I could go destroy all their traps instead of helping build them. I promise.”

“Wish?”

Killan stiffened, looking up and blinking. “What?”

The others were busy, no one even heard Killan speak, and none of them had heard it - a hissing sibilant whisper-sound, that seemed to be as much inside his mind as outside it. He turned to look over his shoulder, seeing nothing around their little campsite but the trees, looming eerily overhead at the sun went down. 

“Make wish.”

Killan slowly turned back to stare at the rabbit, which held itself so perfectly still under Killan’s petting fingertips. He leaned forward, as close as he could get, until his forehead rubbed up against the twisted wood. The rabbit leaned slowly forward too, and Killan caught his breath as its soft, cool nose brushed, with little twitches, against his own.

“Pretty,” The voice said. “Pretty human boy.”

Killan had been living for years with Beron’s stories of nature magic and the dangers of the mountains and the monsters who lived there. He’d been raised on his own mam’s stories of wild women who could change shape and sneak into bad childrens’ houses and steal them from their beds. But he was grown now, or as good as, and he had no fear of those stories.

Right?

“Are you the one talking to me?” Killan whispered to the rabbit, which nudged forward against him again with its little twitching nose. Killan held his breath as the rabbit pushed its head up into his two fingers pressed to its soft ears, which no wild rabbit had ever done that he knew of. “Do you want me to make a wish?”

“Make wish, pretty human.”

Killan smiled - small so the others wouldn’t see, but there all the same. He leaned in as close as he could get, lost in the way the rabbit looked at him so calmly, so sure of itself even though it was trapped in a cage, to have its neck wrung to make a good dinner soon enough, just like the other one that Beron was tossing into the stew while singing to himself, just a dozen or so feet away. 

“I wish that you would be free,” Killan said, as low as he could speak and still be audible. “You don’t deserve to be soup.”

The rabbit didn’t speak to him again, but it did nuzzle up against him once more, to Killan’s delight. 

Then Beron yelled at him to stop being lazy and do some damn work for once in his life, and Killan pushed himself up on aching legs to stumble over and help Beron put together the bit of ground-up dried treenuts and water and salt for the dumplings to cook on top of the soup.

They’d given him the day off work, but if you don’t work you don’t eat, so Killan ate the bit of treenut-bread they’d given him out of mercy and watched them with their bowls of rabbit stew jealously from his bedroll, stomach growling, and determined himself to work even harder to get more food tomorrow.

He was so hungry it took forever to get to sleep, the fire banked and Ren and Vanya on first watch, and he only got a couple of hours before it was his turn to sit up with Beron, who was in a foul mood. Bad dreams, he said.

Killan mostly didn’t dream any longer - sleep was too precious to waste on dreaming.

Killan took his ill-tempered ‘jokes’ in silence and thanked him with real gratitude when Beron got tired of that fucking kicked-dog look like we don’t take better care of you than a lazy arse deserves and gave him more of the fur-rat and berry bars to eat.

Killan made it through half of the bar and then looked up, into the dark woods that pressed close around them. The horses were restless tonight, ears flat against their heads and shifting until their ropes were pulled tight from the trees, but they never liked the woods much so that wasn’t unusual. 

The animals in their cages were restless, too, shivery little rabbits and and the fur rats clawing at the edges of their cages.

Killan checked on his favorite rabbit - it was perfectly still, but alert, head head and neck stretched, looking away from Killan entirely. When he turned around to follow the direction of its gaze, he could have sworn he could the glint of yellow eyes watching him in the dark.

He should have been afraid, but he wasn’t.

Instead, Killan stood up, walked to the edge of what little light the fire still gave off, and set the uneaten half of the bar down. A gift for-... for the woods, maybe, they’d taken better care of him than any person ever did, anyway.

His watch ended and Killan fell asleep more quickly with the heavy weight of at least some food in his stomach. He curled in his bedroll as small as he could make himself, and he did not dream.

When he woke up the next day, to Beron’s shouting and Ren kicking him awake gasping for air and scrambling to stand, one of the cages had been busted open. Only one cage, all the others still held the trapped animals shaking and shivering. But Killan’s favorite, the rabbit that had kissed him the day before and been so still, was gone.

So was the half-bar of food he’d left at the edge of the camp.

Killan’s eyes were wide as saucers as he stared at the wood twisted back out of shape or broken, somehow done in silence while they slept, never waking them at all. 

He could have sworn he heard a kind of laughter whispering through the trees above his head.

Travis goes on tons of quests and all those times, he made it out a-okay with little to no problems. Facing chimeras, empousas, cyclops with his brother by his side and Katie on the other, their success rate is near 100%.  Why is it, when he finally got a quest with Will, everything goes wrong? 

First, the car they were using to get to California broke down midway. 

Second, while stranded in the middle of nowhere Utah, a harpy stole their ambrosia reserves (well, his). 

And now, third, a hellhound has his leg in it’s maws and is currently dragging him through the shadows going who knows where. 

Definitely not his best day. 

He tries to stab his celestial sword into the hind leg, but the hellhound’s canines dig deeper into his thigh and the sword falls from his hands. He tries to stab his Swiss Army knife into the joints, but the skin is too tough for a normal blade. Then he tries to bite and that did absolutely nothing too. So he resorts to his very last tactic. 

Hermes is the God of animal husbandry. Hellhounds are just big dogs! Big, cuddly dogs just like Mrs. O’Leary except this one destroying his leg is more on the wild side. Yeah… just a big dog. 

“Down, boy!” he screams and he feels a tug in his chest cavity, but the hellhound continues running.

Travis takes a deep breath, willing the fear to leave his voice, and say it again. “Down!”

The hellhound falters, but barely and Travis yells again, the tugging becoming painful. This time the hellhound exits out of the shadow. 

Cold. That’s the first thing he noticed. The frigid air, the biting wind, the snow softening his fall, but is quickly becoming stained with his blood. The hellhound still have his leg in it’s jaws and he orders the hellhound — henceforth known as Bolt for his favorite Disney dog — to let go of his leg. Bolt whines and his ears flop back. Travis didn’t know hellhounds can be so cute. And if it isn’t his leg in it’s jaws, he might have gave in. 

But he steels his voice and say it again with more force. “Let me go now.”

Bolt lets go. His leg fell on the snow. Pain wracks his body and almost renders him unconscious. It is only the sound of Iris the Rainbow Goddess saying he has a message that keeps him awake.

“I accept,” he groans.

“ —  avis?! Travis!? it picked up! Will, it picked up!! It actually worked!” 

“Travis? You’re alive. I can’t believe it. I — your … leg.”

“How bad does it look?” he asks, not daring to open his eyes. 

“It looks fine,” Connor fibs the same time Will says, “You are going to lose your leg.”

He thinks Connor might have shush Will. But he isn’t sure. He can’t hear anything above his gasping. Ahhhh… it’s so hard to breathe. The air is too thin. 

“Travis, where are you? Wait, is that snow I’m seeing?”

“Yeah,” he hisses out. The pain is starting to dull. He rolls his head to the side and opens his eyes to see the vast field of white with a few pine trees in sight. He can hear Bolt panting and pacing, the snow crunching under his massive paws. Placing his elbows underneath him, he pushes himself up and ignores the black dots dancing in his vision. 

He very pointedly not look at his leg and instead looks at his surroundings. Snow. Trees. Snow. More snow. Lots and lots of snow. His teeth chatter. The flimsy camp shirt isn’t enough. 

“I’m somewhere without civilization,” he chatters, “I-I don’t see any houses or buildings nearby.” 

“You need to find shelter,” Will stresses. “Or you’ll die from hypothermia. But first, you need to stop the bleeding.” 

“I don’t want to look at it,” he whines, tucking his hands under his armpits. 

“Well, you’re gonna have too.” 

I don’t want too.

He gestures for Bolt to come closer, but forgot to say the crucial order to not eat him. By the time he finally did, Bolt had already tackled him, pinned him on his back with a paw on his chest, and has its jaws around his shoulder. 

“Get off!” he commands, pushing at the neck. 

Bolt withdraws, but a paw is still at his chest and Travis need to give a separate order for that. 

“That hellhound is still with you? Stab it!”

“I lost my sword,” he whines and orders for Bolt to come beside him. “Lie down, Bolt. Lie down.”

“You named it!?” 

Bolt listens quicker this time, plopping down onto all four. Travis tries not to whimper as he claws his way onto Bolt’s back. The Hellhound is cold. Not as cold as the snow, but still very, very cold. 

“It listens to you? Make it take you back to us.”

Oh what a great plan. He was originally going to make Bolt take him to a hospital, but to his brother and Will is much better. 

“Bolt, let’s go back to my friends,” he says, watching the puffs of air. There’s a whine that sounds almost like a ‘what?’ and he says it one more time, concentrating, “Back. To my. Friends. Bolt. To… to Utah.” 

Bolt didn’t whine, but it didn’t move either and Travis is losing his focus. He doesn’t have the strength for this. “Bolt, come on, please. Move.” 

Bolt breaks into a running start, but it isn’t shadow traveling and god, please help him. Every jolt shakes his leg and sends a mind-breaking shock to his brain. Please pass out, his brain begs him. But his heart and the mini-Connor on his shoulder tells him to tough it out. He digs his fingers into the fur, taking a deep breath, and screaming, “Go to Utah NOW!” 

The tug in his chest felt like it broke a couple bones, but Bolt finally jumps into a shadow and Travis closes his eyes and wills the nausea down. This second trip feels very short. Just a few seconds in and they are out. 

Travis opens his eyes and finds himself in a dirty alleyway, not the full parking lot where Bolt snatched him from. He wants to sob. “This isn’t Utah. Take me back to my friends, Bolt.”

But Bolt sits down and paws his shoulder — his bitten shoulder. 

He shoves the paw away and rubs it’s chest, muttering, “Okay, okay, good job. You… did a good job taking me out of the cold. But I need … I need to get to my friends. Please, Bolt. I think I’m dying.” He wonders if that's such a great thing to say to a monster itching to eat him. 

He’s dimly aware of a woman’s voice saying something. Something about a … a … mail? Message? Whatever it is, he hopes she understands his slurred, “I accept.” 

He hears two panicked voices, but he can’t understand what they’re trying to say. It’s so cold. And he’s so tired.