#k1tkatt

Somewhere in the very back of her mind, she registered someone (Dylan, maybe, but just as easily Ryan) reaching out to stop her. She ignored them, though, ignored them wholesale as she'd heard Mr. H say on more than one occasion, half powerwalking and half knee sliding over to Abi, her arms still held up and trembling despite the shotgun having long since fallen to the ground.

"You're okay," Kaitlyn said, and while the habit felt deeply rooted after a summer of shushing kids beside Nurse Kelly, it felt different, too, "hey, hey...you're okay, you're good." She expected resistance as she pulled Abi close, but resistance was the last thing she got; instead, she folded against her, her whole body shaking when she lowered her arms, and it was all Kaitlyn could do to angle them away from the window, away from all those shards of glass, away, too, from the space heater and rolls of towels they'd set out for Nick like a sick cat, and -

"Don't you think - " someone (Dylan, Ryan, the ghost of Christmas Fucking Past for all she cared) started, and she shot them a look over the top of Abi's head to shut them up again.

For the six sentence weekend maybe Jacob reuniting with Kaitlyn in the morning/after the game events?

The banging on the door was a little too little to scare her (if that made any kind of sense), but the fireplace and its chimney were crumbling wrecks, the floor was slick with blood and rain, there was a freaking werewolf locked in the freezer only a few feet away from her, and Kaitlyn...Kaitlyn wasn't taking any chances. She tightened her grip on the shotgun, trying desperately to will her hands to stop shaking, and slowly - so fucking slowly - approached the door.

"Who is it?" she called, praying she sounded authoritative enough to scare away whatever hunter had come calling to scavenge what was left of them, and after straining her ears for a second, two, three, four...

"Yeah, uh, hi ma'am, I've been trying to reach you about your car's extended - Jesus tittyfucking Christ, Kaitlyn, who do you think it is?!"

She wasn't aware of dropping the gun, but she must've; she wasn't aware of unlatching the door, but she must've done that too; Kaitlyn wasn't aware of much of anything that happened in the next few seconds, her body acting on adrenaline and hope and exhaustion and relief, but when she came back to herself, her arms were around Jacob and his were around her, and both of them smelled so fucking terrible, but they were there, and they were together, and they were alive.

"You wanna give it a try?"

"Oh, um, uh, give...give what a try, exactly?" Caught dead to rights, Abi did her best to act natural, covertly shutting her sketchbook before Kaitlyn could see what she'd been drawing, but since it'd been, well, her, back straight and shoulders back and chin held high as she held court over the shooting range, natural was a little easier said than done.

She didn't have time to dwell on it, though; no sooner had she shut the book than Kaitlyn was helping her up onto her feet and plunking the shotgun into her hands, pretending not to hear her anxious protestations ("I, uh, I don't know, I'm not really...I mean, guns don't...I...") with a sideways smile.

"Take a chill pill, tiny toon," she teased, and suddenly she was behind her, her arms guiding hers as she showed her where to put the stock, how to balance herself, how to aim, "chamber's empty and the safety's on, buuut if you play your cards right, maybe we can go hunt some watermelons after this, just you and me."

There was nothing gradual about the way he woke up, he was just gone one moment and there the next, surging up off the ground with a drowning victim's gasp as his faculties returned to him. His eyes pulsed in his skull, his lungs felt too big for his ribcage, his heart was pounding so hard and so fast that it almost didn't feel like his own...but the worst, the absolute worst, was the heavy, metallic taste in his mouth.

He stomach twisted, heaved, but he managed to fight his gorge down before he could retch, the pieces-parts of the night before creeping in insidiously from the very edges of his mind: there were hunters hunting werewolves, and werewolves hunting hunters, and both of them, dear God, were hunting him, too.

When the dark spots cleared from his vision, a flash of yellow caught his eye, and despite the storm raging inside his body, there was a moment of relief so palpable, so fierce, that he felt his sinuses begin to prick with tears.

"Hey, sun's out, gun's out," he said, laughing at the strange sound of his own voice, the nonsensical glut of words spilling out of him, the ridiculousness of the idea she'd survived the night by hiding behind a pile of (what? two, three?) scrapped tires.

She missed the shot. She missed the shot and time seemed to slow, to stretch, to become so thick and syrupy that she could replay it in her mind over and over again on loop - racking the gun, pointing, aiming, bracing against the kickback, the spread, the spread, the spread, she'd missed the shot she'd missed the shot she'd MISSED THE SHOT! - until it drowned out the hot rush of blood in her ears.

What it didn't drown out was Dylan's voice, his call of "Kaitlyn?!" from wherever he'd hidden (coat closet, she knew without understanding how, her ears perking and pinpointing), his panic obvious, his hope louder still, and if she didn't do something he was going to poke his head out, he was going to give himself away, he was -

Too late, she saw; she wasn't the only one who'd heard him.

The werewolf - the one she'd missed, the one she hadn't been brave enough to let closer, maybe the one that had bitten her out in the scrap yard but maybe not, how the hell was she even supposed to know - took a single slow-motion step towards Dylan's hiding place, and, gun forgotten, she leapt.

It wasn't like she woke up gasping, her eyes shooting open from a nightmare, but Abi felt her stomach drop in the moment before she well and truly came around, all of her body's check engine lights flashing, flashing, flashing in an awful reminder that something was wrong.

Her mouth tasted weird - bad - and her hair felt greasy in her face; her feet ached and she'd never been so hungry in her life; her skin was too tight on her bones, her blood was too hot in her veins, she had the most horrible feeling she'd gotten into a fight with someone last night...and holy moly, was she only in her underwear?!

That got her up - in theory, anyway. There was a weight keeping her on the floor, a warmth flush to her back that she was only just now noticing, but even before she could startle or yelp or curl in on herself to hide how much skin she was showing, the sound of Kaitlyn's sleepy voice calmed her down again.

"Mmm...five more minutes," she mumbled, and Abi felt her cheeks go hot as she felt her breath tickling the back of her neck, realizing all at once how close they were, how Kaitlyn hadn't just tucked her head against her shoulder but wrapped herself around her completely, her arms and legs enveloping her, holding her, keeping her safe.

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