Fic: "Romanticus Interruptus" Chapter 2

[foolish_m0rtal]

Romanticus Interruptus (5033 words) by foolish_mortal
Chapters: 2/6
Fandom: Big Wolf on Campus
Rating: Mature
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tommy Dawkins/Merton Dingle
Characters: Tommy Dawkins, Merton Dingle, Lori Baxter
Summary: Merton and Tommy try to fall in love, but the supernatural world keeps getting in the way.

Notes: Blame saucery and their Teen Wolf fics for the escalation of pop culture references and smut in this fic. 

They stopped going on dates after that, because they figured they had been doing just fine without them. Tommy thought what technically counted as their two hundred and tenth date was starting to suck. They were both supposed to be at their graduations, Tommy for his bachelors in sports medicine and drama and Merton with a masters in chemistry. Instead they were in the old university cemetery trying to get rid of a poltergeist infestation that had been plaguing freshman housing.

They had figured out that the poltergeist was the ghost of a WWII era colonel named Amelia Parker of the U.S. Women's Army Corps. She had been an alumna of their university and her bones were buried in a mausoleum in the university cemetery. She had apparently died evacuating a hospital during a bombing raid. Merton had determined that they could only exorcise her on the day of her death, which incidentally happened to be the same day they were supposed to graduate.

So Tommy found himself trailing behind Merton carrying a salt shaker from the dining hall and wondering how he was going to explain his absence to his parents. His mother had showed up with a video camera practically glued onto her arm, and he knew she would be disappointed that she wouldn't be able to tape the three seconds it would take him to ascend the stage and take his little fake rolled up paper diploma from the dean. Merton had decided to skip graduation long before despite the school-sanctioned opportunity to wear what amounted to black occult robes because his skin didn't do well in the bright sun, and he could just go pick up his actual diploma from the office later anyway. Tommy didn't have the heart to ask him if his family would be disappointed that he was absent, if his family would be showing up at all.

"I still don’t know," Tommy said. "Doesn't it seem a little weird? She was a hero. Why would she want to hurt anyone?"

"Spirits tend to hang around when they have unfinished business," Merton said. "And if they hang around too long…well, sixty years is a long time. She could have gone a little crazy. Or something could be controlling her."

"I don't like the sound of that," Tommy said.

The cemetery was closed, so they jumped the fence, and Merton whipped out a map he had printed off the school website.

"There, that's the one," he said and pointed to a tiny building in the corner of the cemetery. A bronze statue of a woman in uniform was standing at attention in front of the door. The base of the statue had Amelia Parker's name, her dates of birth and death, and the inscription 'for valorous service and the utmost sacrifice.'

Merton stopped in front of the door and waved. "Well?"

"Well what?" Tommy asked.

"Use your…you know, your werewolf powers and open the door," Merton said. "They look heavy. You think I can open them?"

Tommy sighed as he transformed, and it came out as a growl halfway. "Fine," he said and waved Merton away from the door. "You're lucky I lo—"

He stopped before he finished the sentence, and one of his canines nicked the tip of his tongue. It hurt, and Tommy felt a few drops of coppery blood fill his mouth before the analgesic and natural compounds in his saliva closed the wound. It was one of the more useful properties about werewolves that Merton had discovered in his research. A literal 'lick your wounds' factor. Merton had started burning his tongue on his food suspiciously often after he found out that particular tidbit, which had in turn resulted in the two of them making out a lot on top of the dining room table. Tommy was A-okay with that.

That had landed them into trouble a few times, most famously when Tommy had volunteered their house for his fraternity's weekly Saturday brunch. To be fair, Merton had burned his mouth on the coffee completely on accident, Tommy hadn't expected his fraternity to come over early, and neither of them had realised they had left the front door unlocked. Tommy still couldn't look at banana walnut pancakes without cringing, and his grinning fraternity brothers always made sure to order him a stack whenever they ate at the local diner, because they were bastards like that.

Tommy glanced back to see if Merton had heard him, but Merton was too busy fussing with his book of incantations to pay attention, and Tommy breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn't that he didn't love Merton. He did, god he did. He and Merton had been dating for a year and a half now and had been best friends for much longer so of course Merton had to know, but Tommy had somehow never been able to say it. He didn't think they really needed to. Sharing life-or-death experiences with a guy had a way of defining a relationship in a way words never could. But Tommy still hadn't told Merton, and that sort of bothered him. He blamed the cheesy romance films he and Dean watched sometimes when the rest of the house was asleep. Tommy still swore to this day that he didn't cry at the end of An Affair to Remember, and Dean still unwaveringly supported his claim. Dean was an awesome big brother.

The heavy mausoleum doors opened with a horrible screech, and Merton breezed by to begin drawing out a trap on the floor with the salt shaker and chalk. It just looked like a bunch of concentric circles with some squiggly lines to Tommy, but he assumed he knew Merton knew what he was doing. If the university had offered a degree in the supernatural and magical arts, Merton would have been on his way to getting tenure by now.

"Now we just have to summon her," Merton said and clapped his hands together. "Should be easy. Her bones are in that coffin."

Tommy leapt away from the thing as if it had burned him. "Why is there a coffin in here?"

Merton gave him an exasperated look. "After all the things we've faced, don't tell me you're afraid of a few bones?"

"Dead people freak me out," Tommy muttered. Merton's expression softened a little, and he ran his fingers through the soft fur on Tommy's cheek. It felt really good, and Tommy found himself humming. He really had to stop turning into putty whenever Merton was around.

"Don’t worry," Merton reassured him. "I'll be done before you know it."

 They should have known better than to say that by now, Tommy thought, because Merton shouted a few strange words from his book and in the next second a woman with curly bobbed hair and an old WWII uniform was glaring at them from inside Merton's circle. She looked royally pissed, and Tommy wondered how easy it was really going to be for Merton to convince her to stop haunting the dorms.

"You must be Amelia," Tommy said to the ghost.

"That's Colonel Parker to you," the woman cracked back. "Don't get fresh with me."

"Yes, ma'am," Tommy answered back before he even knew what he was doing. Then Merton elbowed him in the ribs, and Tommy wolfed out a little more so that she could see his long claws and the points of his teeth. They had an efficient good cop-bad cop system to grill culprits when they caught them. Merton always wanted to be bad cop, and Tommy had to remind him which one of them was the werewolf. Enthusiasm and a steady appetite for campy 70s buddy cop shows only went so far.

Parker raised an eyebrow."Do you really think you're my first werewolf?" She put a hand against the invisible barrier of the circle and leaned forward. "You seem to be on our side, though. How interesting."

"It's a long story," Tommy said. "This werewolf bit me in high school. Merton and Lori and I just ended up—"

"We'll be the ones doing the interrogating here!" Merton cut in.

"Uh." Tommy glanced at Merton, who made a sharp go-ahead gesture. "Yeah. Yeah, that's right, lady!" Parker raised an eyebrow. "Um, I mean, ma'am." Merton elbowed him again. "Why are you destroying the freshman dorms?"

Parker looked surprised. "Destroying?"

"Don't even try to pretend," Merton said. "We've seen all of it: the flickering lights, the flying furniture. People have been hurt."

Parker sneered. "Where's your proof?"

"You used a sleeping girl's fingernails to scratch your own name into the wall," Tommy snapped. "This isn't a social call. We're asking you politely to leave or we're doing it by force." Parker's face was a mask of shock, and she didn't reply. "Colonel Parker? Do you understand?"

"It's him," Parker whispered. "That thing, the poltergeist. It's after me. It's revenge. It killed me once, but it didn't get my spirit. It's out to try a second time."

"Wait, a second time?" Merton asked.

Parker's dazed expression faded, and she glared at him. "Did you really think that hospital blew up in a bombing raid? It was miles away from the London Blitz. There wasn't an aeroplane in the sky."

"You've been running," Merton breathed. "All your postings across the European continent in under three months. They thought you were restless, but you were running from it."

And of course Merton had researched Amelia Parker's entire military history in his spare time. Tommy didn't even know why he was surprised. "What is this thing, exactly?"

"Not a thing, a man," Parker said. She reached into the breast pocket of her jacket and pulled out a little book to read from it. "When the Romans invaded Brittany, a soldier from their battalion betrayed them to a native tribe in exchange for his life. The tribe left him for dead in the woods. I found his spirit still roaming the woods when I was posted abroad and tried to exorcise him. He was old and powerful, and I wasn't able to erase him entirely. A piece of his spirit attached itself to the silver in my ring and followed me out. I kept trying to get rid of him, and he kept evading me. I suppose he saw me as his biggest threat to being sent back."

"Sent back?" Merton asked. "To where?"

"Traitors have a special circle in hell," Parker said.

"Hell doesn't exist," Merton replied.

Tommy decided to intervene before the conversation dissolved into a theological argument. "Okay okay," he interrupted. "But how did you know he was following you—"

"Tommy, your hand," Merton interrupted.

Tommy looked down and saw his hand had been idly tracing patterns on the coffin's smooth surface, using the curved tip of a claw to scrape into the stone. Amelia Parker, it said.

Parker sucked in a breath. "He's found me."

"What—" Tommy started, and then blackness exploded in his eyeballs. He reeled backwards from the shockwave and landed hard on his back. When the dull disorienting buzz inside his skull cleared, Tommy opened his eyes and found himself surrounded by darkness that seemed to stretch out forever. Tommy wondered where he was.

"You're inside your own mind," Parker said, and Tommy sat up to find her floating next to him.

"Kind of dark and empty isn't it?" he asked and then added, "Don't answer that."

"You've been possessed," Parker said instead. "That's what he does, finds someone and possesses them."

"No." Tommy squeezed his eyes shut and tried to make himself wake up.

"You can't make him leave," Parker said. "Your friend might already be—"

"Don't," Tommy forced out and couldn't make the muscles in his shoulders and back unclench. "Just don't. There has to be a way. Merton's done exorcisms before."

"It isn't that kind of possession," Parker said. "It's a mesmer. You're his puppet."

"Plenty of things can break a mesmer," said Tommy, who knew maybe three, tops. "Fingernails from a hanged man. Um…true love?"

"I don't think—" she stopped when she saw Tommy's face. "Oh."

Tommy felt his face go hot. "Merton. We aren't…we haven't even…" And no, he did not want to discuss his sex life with her. "It's complicated."

"You're afraid of the werewolf," she said slowly. "What's yours is his, and you're afraid to share."

And yeah, maybe he was. Tommy knew that once the wolf got its claws into Merton (Tommy hoped to god not literally) it would never let him go, because the wolf was crazy protective and possessive and scared even Tommy sometimes. When the wolf played at being human, it played for keeps. He didn't know what it would do if he and Merton got around to doing the old horizontal ländler, because it didn't know humans were soft and fragile, and it definitely hadn’t watched the Sound of Music. It wouldn't understand that there were such things as privacy and personal space and taking things slow, that Merton was a young guy just starting out who wouldn't want to get werewolf-married till grisly death do us part. It wouldn't understand if Merton ever decided to leave or find someone else.  Tommy's heart almost gave out thinking about that last one.

"And what does Merton have to say about it?" Parker asked.

"I…haven't asked him," Tommy admitted. "Look, I don't think this is the best time—"

"You don't think he loves you too?" she prodded.

Tommy wanted to say yes. He wanted to, but the truth was that he had spent so many hours and sleepless nights worrying about his attachment to Merton that he had never thought about it from Merton's side. He remembered Merton jumping into his arms and hugging him when they signed the lease on the tiny off-campus housing that was all theirs for only seven-hundred dollars a month as long as they wanted it. He remembered how they had become 'TommyandMerton' to all their friends because people always talked about them together even when they were apart. He remembered Merton saying, "It's okay," when they were making out on the couch and Tommy reached for the waistband of his trousers, and then Merton saying, "Hey hey, it's okay," again more softly when Tommy had a panic attack two seconds later.

Merton had always been patient with him and unafraid of the wolf. Tommy had once almost taken off Merton's ear when he had wolfed out in the middle of petting Merton's soft ungelled hair, and Merton had waved away all of Tommy's desperate stammered apologies. "The wolf is like, the president of the Merton Dingle Fan Club," he said loftily. "I know it would never hurt me." Merton never freaked out when Tommy got a little too aggressive and pinned down Merton's wrists, left red finger marks in the crooks of his elbows. He ran a hand down Tommy's stricken face and said, "Don't worry, it's fine. I like it."

Tommy had never believed him. But maybe he should have given Merton more credit. Maybe he should have listened when Merton had never said anything at all and just looked at Tommy like he was Wes Craven marathons, blue raspberry slushies, and black eyeliner all rolled into one.

Tommy looked up and saw that Colonel Parker had gone absolutely still and was staring at him like she was waiting for something.

"Yes," he said finally. "I think he does love me. And I think…I think I'm okay with that."

He thought he caught the start of a smile across her face, but then the world flashed white and blinded him, and then suddenly he was back in a musty familiar darkness that smelled like dirt and old stone with the echo of a scream in his ears. He shook his head and tried to blink the whiteness out of his eyes, but spots went across his vision as if he'd been staring at the sun.

"Thank god that worked," Parker said.

"Tommy? Tommy!" Merton's hands were on his shoulders, his face, and oh god, Tommy's back was touching the coffin. He had to go home and shower and wash his clothes and possibly have a priest burn them. And then Merton was kissing the hell out of him.

Tommy suspected Merton had seen it in an old black-and-white film once and had a mind to tell Merton that he wasn’t some damsel strapped to the railroad tracks, but then he was not complaining, He was not complaining at all, because Merton was kissing him with intent, like he wanted to show Tommy with his mouth all the things they could have been doing if Tommy hadn't been so terrified of wolfing out and ruining everything. Tommy wondered where Merton had learned to kiss like that.

"Clark Gable," Merton said, and Tommy realised he must have asked the question aloud.

"Who's Clark Gable? And when exactly have you been kissing him?"Tommy asked suspiciously, and Merton burst out laughing.

"This is all very sweet," Parker said. "But I would appreciate it if you let me out of this damn circle and go somewhere else."

Merton scuffed out one of the salt lines with his toe, and Tommy noticed a second exorcism circle beside it. "You got rid of him!"

"Of course I did," Merton said, like defeating a thousand year old ghost was just something to give him an appetite for breakfast, but he was shaking and white as a sheet. "But he kept threatening to take you with him. And I couldn't…I didn't want to—"

"Oh for god's sake, get on with it," Parker muttered and disappeared in a puff of golden ash. And then a muttered, "Thank you, gentlemen," floated out of the empty air.

Tommy grinned and squeezed Merton's shoulders. "Sorry. Looks like you'll be stuck with me for a while."

"I sort of figured," Merton said. "What, with the wolves mating for life thing and all."

Tommy kissed Merton so hard that his lips went numb. "Then why haven't we been mating?" he rumbled.

 Merton pulled away. "Right here? In the mausoleum?" he looked impressed. "Tommy, I didn't know this was your thing."

Tommy thought he heard a small echoing voice from inside the coffin shouting, not on top of my bones, you don't! and he was mortified at the prospect of having an audience, even a dead one. Especially a dead one.

"Come on," he said and gave Merton a slow smile. "Race you back home."

Merton was on him even before Tommy could open their front door. He shoved Tommy up against door like a professional linebacker and proceeded to conduct a thorough investigation of Tommy's mouth and jawline. Tommy had never been one to interfere with the spirit of human inquiry and let his head thunk back against the metal knocker. Merton was kissing him like they were two seconds away from doing it whether they were inside the house or not, and Tommy was having a hard time remembering why exhibitionism was a punishable offence. He managed to open the door behind them and got back to reassuring Merton he was alive via Merton's black thrift store skinny jeans so he didn't hear his family in the living room shout, "Surprise! Happy graduation!" until it was far too late.

Tommy turned, and an ill-timed balloon hit him in the face. Merton's hair was dotted with confetti, and with their faces red and their arms around each other, there was no way they could have said that it wasn't what it looked like, because it was exactly what it looked like, and he was pretty sure his mom had got an eyeful of him trying to suck Merton's tongue out of his mouth when the door had opened. And that was officially the most awkward coming-out ever. Tommy was glad Merton hadn't let go of him, because he was pretty sure he would have fallen over without Merton's arms to balance him.

"Um, surprise?" Merton weakly offered to his own parents. Becky was standing with her mouth open.

Tommy's fraternity brothers burst into applause like they were at the godamn opera, and Tommy decided to look into career opportunities that involved crawling into a hole and dying.

Comments

[foolish-m0rtal.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I didn't even think about that interpretation. I meant to Merton to say 'surprise' to the people in the room. I've corrected that. Thanks for telling me! Sorry about the confusion.

I'm really enjoying writing this story! Hopefully the next chapter should be up soon.

[foolish-m0rtal.livejournal.com]

Looking at it right now, I think I'd download the dewski one because it has more seeds.

[foolish-m0rtal.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll see what I can do. I moved all of the files to my external hard drive, which is acting up. Do you have a Dropbox? I could perhaps move the files in chunks at a time via that utility.