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Thorne felt the flux between here and there, felt everything shifting and the nausea that shifted inside of him too. I've got you, Lucas said, and more than anything Thorne wanted it to be true. He wanted to think that he was beyond it, that this and the memories and all of it had been something he'd been able to walk away from all those years ago. That this, now, was something else. A world bright and brilliant with potential. With a cat named Millicent and a neighbor named Lucas.

He jolted at the contact, every touch like someone scraping over his nerves run ragged and raw. Pain laced everything, the memory of it still digging like shrapnel beneath his skin. But Thorne hissed in another gasp, and another, the iron in his lungs weighing a little less as Lucas pulled him into his arms and out of the light and out of the sight of the shadow still whispering his name.

There was a pause, a staccato moment where Thorne was paralyzed. He'd been kissed and ******** and pinned down until he couldn't breathe while the memories ate away at him, but he couldn't remember a time in recent memory before Lucas when he'd been held. His hands found Lucas and he dug his hands into the other mans shoulders, a deep shuddering breath pulling from his lips. His entire body was in atrophy, shaking and violent, but he held on like Lucas was an anchor, and more than that he listened to the sound of his voice.

"Lucas," he hissed, the name finally shattering the vivid images of the bedroom and the house and his father. "Lucas." And then, wretchedly, helplessly, "I'm sorry. It hurts. I thought I - I thought it was gone. He was gone. I'm sorry." He turned his head, pressing it against the other mans collarbone, trying to ground himself in the reality of this world, this place. "It wasn't you. It was - "

It was me. It was my mongrel blood.

He wasn't able to gasp the words out loud, but they lingered, singed and burning in the air unspoken.

And the remembrance of pain still echoed. And it hurt, and hurt. And his nails still bit into Lucas, and he still held on like he was drowning. And for that he was sorry. But he wasn't able to let go.

The more Lucas tries to recall what happened, the more he realizes that the memory, while visceral, terrifyingly complete as a sensory experience, doesn't seem to ring true.

He isn't in his apartment in that memory. The man beneath him is... Yes, it's Thorne, but different. His tattoos are a different pattern beneath the gore. His hair is longer. His eyes (glassy, staring, a burst of red in the whites) are wrong somehow, but the memory fuzzes when he tries to focus.

Something is very wrong.

The memory is too fuzzed by pain and adrenaline to determine much except: teeth. Except: blood. Except: claws. Except: ...claws?

In this memory, Lucas (it is clearly Lucas, not Thorne's father, no one else) has two flesh-and-blood arms.

Thorne's mind stuttered on the image. This wasn't another flashback, this wasn't another memory. It couldn't be. It couldn't. But he closed his eyes and the visceral taste of blood and the scent of metal came against him like a tidal wave, and Lucas looked at him soaked to the elbow in red, painted like a portrait of something fallen. Something terrible and cruel and hungry, wild eyes just like his.

You would know, a terrible voice in his head snarled, sharp, you would know what is it to be an animal.

But then he felt the impression of teeth, blood, claws. Burning into his skin, rolling against his flesh. It wasn't his father that had caused the pain, but it couldn't have been that either - right? - right?

Thorne jerked, violently, the spasm crashing awake the voice in his head screaming. This isn't right, this isn't right!

"Lucas," He snarled, and his voice was full of adrenaline and sick fear, something hot and furled with terror snapping beneath the strength he found to claw through it all, to the present. To reality. His hand slid and caught on the prosthetic, grounding him into it. Into this Lucas. The one sitting with him here and now.

"Tell me what you are."

A monster.

Thorne's mind stuttered over the remembrance of pain, the sight of Lucas, two arms - two human arms. But he was holding the prosthetic. He felt the heartbeat of another human singing against his ears. This wasn't a monster. And maybe the mind was lying to him - or maybe - maybe this entire world was ******** with him -

Maybe -

He looked up, shoving, fighting, tooth and nail, to get past the images in his head, the ghost of his father still beating down on him from the darkest corners of his mind. He pushed past it all because he might have been terrified, but he wasn't dumb. Because he wasn't the only one in this room.

Outward, someone had once told him, not inward.

Thorne lifted his hands until they were holding Lucas's face, thumbs pressed to the corners of his mouth.

"A monster?" He repeated, his voice snaring on the words with violence, with a tremor, deep and rocking. "I don't see any fangs." He exhaled sharply, inhaled sharply. And then - "Alright." He closed his eyes and the images shunted in him like shards of glass. But they weren't real. Maybe they wouldn't ever be. Maybe not yet. Thorne opened his eyes again and looked at Lucas.

"So you might be a monster. Alright."

Would Lucas kill him? The scent of metal, the remembrance of pain, two arms coated in blood, flashed through his peripheral. Not yet, not yet.

"There isn't any blood on your hands."

Thorne watched the other man, swallowing his own demons down, forcing them away. He'd won the battle only because of this man - this guy he'd only met twice - and if he didn't push them into place so that he could do - do something to stem the terror running like a livewire through both of them, then everything he'd ever been told was right down to its core.

Thorne bared his teeth at Lucas, the tamest form of a snarl rising low in his throat. He tilted his head just slightly into the touch, allowing Lucas to take what he could from it. Laughter, slow and sharp, rang out at the words.

"It's alright, Lucas. I've been through worse." There was a raw irony to the words, and Thorne's eyes flickered down for a second and than up again, another laugh curling in his throat before his expression faltered and he shook his head. "I'll - I can move. I can get it."

But before he unwound, before he could force himself away from the touch, he bent his head forward, so that Lucas couldn't see his expression, only the messy locks of his hair.

"Something's happening." He paused, his words slow and uncertain. "I don't know what. But - " And then, "No. Nevermind."

He thought of the blood on Lucas's hands in the false memory, or the makings of the future, or a trap or a lie. And viciously, cruelly, hungrily, he wanted to wash them clean.

But how did you say that to someone out loud?

"You underestimate my talent at landing on my feet from great heights," Thorne teased, his voice a husk of sound. It was weak and barely fit the mood, but he lifted his head and gazed at Lucas, searching his expression for something before saying, "You're better than - You're better. Thank you."

And there was nothing else he could say, nothing else that his exhausted mind knew how to handle tracing into words. His attention turned to Lucas with rapt attention when the utterance of his name pulled him back.

He felt lethargic and pulled thin, like every part of him had been put through hell. But Lucas still grounded him somehow. Pulling him down and down and back. It was frightening. It was nothing he'd known before, let himself know before.

He listened to Lucas, wondering why - why this wasn't so hard to believe. He'd been dreaming, recently, of a place just like Ashdown only different, only altered. And the town itself had not welcomed him kindly, not without the whisper of something off and off and off. So somehow he couldn't consume surprise or allow it to burn through him like he thought it would. Instead - he only - looked at Lucas. And wondered what would happen to them both.

"Me?" He uttered softly. "This is a two way street. I'll promise if you do as well." I've never been known to run from danger, he thought. But he didn't say the words out loud. Instead Thorne dipped his head, only slightly closer to Lucas than he'd been before, close enough that their foreheads brushed for a second, searching the other mans gaze. For what, for what - that was the question. His mouth worked, stinging from where he'd bit it so hard. "But I'm not going to run away from you. You're not - the real threat here."

And Thorne forced himself to swallow down the memory, the falseness of it beyond the realism it provoked in his mind and think, and force himself to think that something had shown that to him in the first place.

"I know." Thorne glanced up at Lucas, his eyes sharp and wild-bright at the mention of his full name. He cocked his head, lips parting slightly, but he couldn't think of anything more to say. "I know you are, Lucas." He swallowed another breath - they came easier now, but they still made his throat protest in pain from the bout of hyperventilation, the terror that had sent him breathless and animal.

He sighed, eyes half-lidded, and watched Lucas, allowing himself to see nothing but the other man. To try and push every dark thought, terrible feeling down by grounding himself in the present, in every part of them where their bodies touched. Because that's what this had started as - a game of touch and go, of exploring a person through a different language entirely. He didn't know where it would take them now - with the world or at least Ashdown as it was against them both in its own ways.

But he knew he was stubborn enough not to stop.

"There are these things," Thorne said softly, "called leaps of faith. But alright - " He tilted his head, just slightly, not breaking the contact between them, only enough that he could see the others eyes more clearly, the glassiness of them. What was happening in that head? Thorne's gut twisted with an emotion he couldn't name, couldn't pretend to know intimately at all. "I suppose I'll just have to prove you wrong."

Thorne watched the pain cross Lucas's expression, the turmoil inside of him that was a mystery. Beyond his reach. It rankled Thorne, scratched at him like nails on chalk. He wanted more than anything to reach inside of Lucas and take away that hurt and confusion and deprecation. He never wanted to see Lucas with that expression again.

And then he spoke, and Thorne didn't know what to do. He was just a guy with a lot of problems and a bad habit of climbing through windows. Who was he to save anyone? Who was he to save Lucas? The animal urge to do so lashed through his veins, nearly making it hard to breathe for a different reason entirely. Because he already knew what the answer was.

Without thought, Thorne slid his hands to Lucas and pushed. Pushed until they were falling back, a tangle of limbs, and Thorne let himself fold up against Lucas's chest, down at him with an expression like the splintering of need and want - want to protect, because he knew he couldn't. Not like this.

Not while he was in the dark like this. Paralyzed like this by a past he thought he'd swallowed and burned.

"And then what happens to you?" Thorne asked. "Do you devour yourself? You think that will save anyone? You think I'll like it, knowing that you're in here killing yourself?" He paused, sucking in a breath but held Lucas's gaze. "You're not poisoned, Lucas. Maybe you're - maybe you're something, but I've met monsters. And you're not one. Even if you grow claws."