NOTES: A 'Conversion' vignette.

Territorial

Words. Too many words.

Too much thinking, analysing, pretending.

He's not who he used to be. Everything is different now - and they don't realise that.

There's a hunger in him, a thirst that can't be quenched. He fears it, hates it, loves it.

Words again. Too many words.

He silences her words with his hand about her throat. She stares back at him in fear and pleading. If he wanted, he could silence her words with his mouth. He doesn't.

She speaks more words, all of them meaningless, pointless. He doesn't listen. There are too many words and none of the answers he needs. None of the things he wants.

She is dismissed, discarded, disposed of.

He moves on.

He doesn't know where he's going, doesn't know what he's doing, but this place - this city - is no place to hide. It's too open, too angled, too bright.

He seeks the dark, longs for its covering. The world before him is oddly textured, bulbous and shifting with each step he takes. His tongue snakes out from between his lips, and stings with the salt tang in the air. This is not a place he wants to stay; but they will not let him leave. He knows that.

Shadows move below him, shifting, spreading. Their movements eddy the air and he holds himself still. There is commonality there, a similarity, old and faint and little more than the merest trace of memory, but there.

Their lights spear him and their cries buzz through the air, and he leaps.

Beneath the instincts that drive him, an older instinct shouts, trying to break through to the surface. He could kill them easily; he stays his hand.

The ones he throws out of the way are challengers, dangerous.

The one he faces is dangerous, too; but she is not a challenger, not as he knows her.

Words again, too many for him to absorb. But the taste of her is in the air, even as she threatens him. She will do what she must, even if she doesn't want to. Her determination tinges her scent and he licks it from the air. It was absent with the other, lacking the will, lacking the spice of stubbornness.

Part of him remembers her scent; the man that was him tasted it in her mouth, felt the commonality like a finger down his spine - or along his balls. It was enough then.

It is not enough now.

He hisses at her, tastes her determination like bitterness - but also the softer burr of regret. He could leap, take her down, take her as he did not take the other. Something in him wants to take her. Something in him screams to take her. Something in him holds him back.

Something in him is afraid that if he does not hold back there will be no going back.

And she is no longer his goal. He has moved beyond her. What he wanted in that other consciousness has passed and he is reborn.

He doesn't want to be what he has become, but he is what he is.

The man who was John Sheppard is gone.

He is made new.

- fin -

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