The Beast I AU

The night outside hit him like a blow to bare nerves, cold and wide and painfully open. The lab lay behind him, bursting, burning, but even that fire couldn’t keep up with what raged inside him. Aiden Caldwell existed only as a distant idea now, a name someone else had once given him. His body no longer belonged to him. He only lived in it, locked away, while something greater had taken control. The world smelled different, his senses sharper, and yet the only ambition left to him was survival.. and what he had become demanded blood and murder. He ran through the nights, through the days, because standing still had become impossible. His body would not allow it, and the power that had developed wanted to unfold. In his beast form, thinking was fragmented.. thoughts didn’t come as sentences, but as violent pressure throughout his body, as impulses and images. Scraps of memories, needles, belts, voices behind glass. The voice of a child calling his name, a potpourri of other voices trying to soothe him, sounding trusting, tangled with the malicious words of another man until they could no longer be separated. Hands that held him while claiming to save him. Anger was no longer an emotion, but a state, a permanent, stable instinct. It held him together, and yet beneath the surface a cold fear buzzed.. not that stupid fear of death, but fear that there was no turning back.

He felt his humanity as something fragile, buried deep, protected by layers of anger and instinct. On the rare occasions when he paused, it flared up. The city no longer recognized him as human..  it reacted to him like a natural event. Doors splintered, roofs gave way, infected people instinctively retreated or were simply wiped out. He was no longer part of the system, no survivor, no Night Runner, no savior, no player. He was the consequence of something many could not understand, the monster to be hunted, chased by an environment alien to him, offering no peace and no time to reflect. But neither should he reflect. He was merely the weapon that had escaped, the ravening beast meant to be an improvement on man… and yet how could he still be called human?

Weeks passed, weeks in which he lived in a kind of permanent blackout. He didn’t know what he was doing; he just did it. He didn’t know why he killed some people but spared, or even saved, others. He didn’t know what he was feeding on, or whether he drank enough, whether he slept at all, or whether he was simply still functioning. Something kept him in this environment. He couldn’t escape. Even when he was free, he was locked in, always following strange smells that lured him onward, fleeing when he realized the scent was bullet casings and male sweat mixed with chemical testosterone, filled with stress and rage.

But then, one night, deep in the forest, he smelled something else. Something familiar, something that smelled similar to himself. The beast wouldn’t let him look closer, wouldn’t let the presence affect him, even though it didn’t smell like a threat... Too close. ,this man had come too far into his territory, and that meant only one thing: danger.

Aiden stalked, blood pumped through his muscles  were shifting beneath pale, tattered skin. He didn’t hesitate, he attacked immediately, claws tearing at clothed flesh, his body slamming the other into a tree, rage surged, he saw nothing but the silhouette of a potential enemy, and he knew he could not stop the fight of his own free will.

The beast wouldn’t let him.

@Kyle Crane <3