Rage: Ashes to Ashes

Title: Rage: Ashes to Ashes
Author: Neichan
Email: neichan22@gmail.com
Fandom: Original fic.
Warnings: Lycanthropy, magic, historical, slash, bloodplay, gore, graphic, dark fic here and there. Alternate History.
Summary: A killer is roaming the old west of the 1870s. And the world is a very different place.
Disclaimer: None for once!

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Chapter One: In which we meet our heros.

It could be said that I was on my way to meet the grim reaper when he found me. By he I do not mean the grim reaper himself, but my current employer. I hadn't eaten in two days, and that was not a new occurrence for me. Not lately. Gone were the days when I could count on breakfast daily, in fact finding a single slice of toasted bread each morning had come up beyond my abilities.

Things were so bad that I had begun to wonder if being captured by the press gang I'd eluded on the docks only last month was a good thing. On board a ship I'd be fed at least. I wasn't a big specimen, normally I'd call myself small and tough, when I was being generous. But a lack of regular food had done away with the wiry toughness and I was merely small. Slender as a bean, having worked through the none too generous layer of fat accumulated during my trip on board a packet ship to the port of San Fransisco.

I'd been employed as an acrobat in London, a job of a specialized rarity with not many hiring us, but I had prospects, a good name and if I say most humbly, talent. Until I had fallen in love. With the daughter of the company owner, and she with me. We'd gone to her father several months into the love affair, believing in all innocence that he would see how in love we were. He had turned me out with worse than no reference that same day, with a name blackened by the biggest circus and curiosity owner in Europe, and Elizabeth was whisked off somewhere I would never find.

What followed was the worst time of my life. I could not gain employment. No one would hire me for even the simplest of tasks in the acrobatic field. I had committed the terrible folly of looking at my betters as equals. And as such I'd destroyed any chance I had of working in Europe.

It was by the most improbable luck that I stumbled on the chance of a voyage to America, the captain being short of several men, him being rather desperate, and willing to gamble that I might master the ropes so to speak of being a temporary hand on his great ship sailing to America. I was so desperate myself by then I did not even care if the position was temporary or where indeed the ship was going. So I ended up in the roiling insanity that was San Francisco in February of 1873. I had saved the greater portion of my promised salary, which proved to be a pittance when placed against the prices of the gold bloated town.

Securing a room, barely large enough to accommodate a thin and terribly narrow pallet mattress on a raised, rough wood frame and a wash stand, and then feeding myself most frugally, still ran through my funds well before I could again find anyone willing to hire me.

San Francisco had it's own more bawdy entertainments, and only the Chinese were interested in acrobats. The Chinese who tool one look at my white skin, my curly dark hair, Romany brown eyes, and pegged me as not one of their own. It didn't help, naturally that I'd always looked far younger than my years. At the tender age of 23 I looked barely seventeen, and with so little flesh remaining on my bones I hazard I may have looked even younger.

My last attempt at employment had ended with the man pressing a single wheat roll into my hand and telling me he on no account wished to hire a child of my diminutive stature for any kind of physical labor. That was what I'd been reduced to, unskilled labor, which paid only pennies in a city run fat on gold.


Though, there were those who approached me with a kind of employment that I was too horrified to take. There are men who will hire boys, for things I pray my mother never heard existed. I'd turned down those offers with speedy offense. I could not bring myself to do such things as where spoken of in whispers and euphemisms. I would rather die first.

So I had dwindled, with too little food I was no longer strong enough to lift and cart the piles of refuse from the streets. And there were too many already willing to fight for those terrible jobs. So I was left, starving, unable to afford to pay for my one room or indeed food. I had only the shirt and trousers on my back, a simple cloth coat, and my very skin and bones, my few European trinkets had long gone to the pawnshop with no hope of being redeemed.

Tonight I'd be sleeping on the street, having spent my last coin for a bit of cheese and bread. My stomach after the meagerness of my meal, was too exhausted to growl for more, but I felt the hollowness.

I was slowly dying. I knew it. I was starving. I saw my only chance to survive in becoming a thief, against all my principles, in keeping perhaps with my gypsy ancestors, but my mother had turned away from that heritage, and never let me think of falling back into those ways. I had barely the energy to stand and walk by then. Where once I may have easily climbed a drainpipe to a second floor window left unlocked, I now had little chance of grabbing anything and getting away, but I wasn't thinking so clearly as all that.

My mind was fogged and muddled. I understand it is such with those who are starving. The brain itself is trying to conserve every last bit of energy and thoughts are not a priority. I had descended to dreamy contemplation of one of the fat birds roosting up high on a building's roof, thinking how succulent the flesh would be, when ~he~ found me.

He went down on one knee in front of me where I sat against the side of the building. "Boy, William?" He asked. "Are you awake, lad?"

To me, he too seemed a dream, tall as a giant and broad. He was clothed in beautiful, fine fabric, a short black jacket and blazing white shirt beneath a long dark coat trimmed at the neck with a short fur, a dark grey color. I reached out a hand and stroked the softness of the cotton, the richness of the fur. He did not push my hand away.

He was warm, blessedly, wonderfully warm. I moved into his body, while he knelt there, his arms out to the sides, unsure of exactly how to respond I think, hesitant and yet not repelled. His hands came to my shoulders, I think to push me away, but he did not. Maybe it was the feeling of my chilled limbs even through my own thin, ragged coat that changed his mind. It could not have been because I smelled good.


Then he picked me up.

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I was a week recovering, young enough to respond to regular feedings that quickly. The first day I was sure I was dreaming, or perhaps already dead and in heaven where it was warm, and food plentiful, though my stomach had shrunk and I couldn't take much in. The bed I was in was small, but that was the only resemblance to the one I'd had since coming to San Francisco. The mattress was not lumpy, nor thin enough to feel the bracing boards of the bed through it. The sheets and covers were spotless, and smelled of outdoors. And there was a pillow.

Contrary to all things thought at the time the windows had been opened, and fresh air let in the room. Sickrooms in my experience had always been closed, stifling and stagnant. Unlike the one I was in now.

There was also an older woman, grey haired and plump, who bustled cheerily into the room many times a day to check on me. She brought food, and as important she brought humanity. Herself. She poked and prodded and fed me, not at all embarrassed to help me to use the chamber pot, or to wash me most thoroughly, wrestling my unhelpful legs and body with a remarkable ease. I must have weighed next to nothing by then, being barely three inches over five feet and fine boned even when in the best of health. Suffice to say she never needed to call for help with me. Though once I recovered somewhat, I noticed there was a rather large young man who stood just inside the door each time she came to help me. He watched me, but never offered aid except when she asked, which was not often.

Of the man who had rescued me I saw nothing until the end of the first week I was in the house. It was the second day I'd gotten out of bed, and I was feeling much improved. He was there when I opened my eyes, long, black trousered legs stretched out before him, his hands steepled on his chest while he watched me from amber brown eyes that shone, his skin browned by the sun, and short, short hair bleached to a quite pale golden blond.

Romany legends raced through my addled brain, even before he smiled a mild smile that none the less showed rather sharp teeth of brilliant white through his parted lips. And I noted, that even when I wasn't dying, he was still beautiful.

nei