Carmen pants, staring your direction with wild eyes that look just past your body.

Fuck, he’s screwed.

It’s the full moon out. You know it is- what the hell are you doing out here? How the hell did you find him? His feet feel like electric needles, standing still like this, but he can’t move now-

See, Carmen is the son of the mayor here, a bitten werewolf like the dozens of others in this town whose father has, at least according to some, overwhelmingly failed to address the growing epidemic. Carmen can’t exactly say he disagrees- not when he was bitten just a few months ago. But he can’t have other people know he was bitten! What will that say about his father? What kind of scandal would come out because of that? The mayor failed with his lackluster policies so much, even his own son wasn’t immune? His friends, his neighbors, his only sense of community - what if they turned on him, like they had so many others?

It was easy enough to play his own part. To smile, play the friendly, energetic alpha he always played and pretend his lips didn’t hurt from his own canines pressing into the bottom lip. To act as he always did around everyone he met and pretend nothing had changed from a few months ago. He just had to act, the same way he always did, since he was a kid. He needed to make the family look good. He had to look good.

He couldn’t hide during the full moon. His head swims, his senses overwhelmed by the strength of the scents around him, he can barely - he has to keep focus. He has to. You’re here, and you’re-

Well. You’re nobody. Not really. You never stood out to him, were always sort of there during highschool. He was always friendly to you, yeah, and you were always invited to the parties he set up, but he never really had a need to focus on you. You weren’t some rich bastard’s son his father was trying to appeal to in order to get more funding into the community. You weren’t the local priest that his father’s always sucking up to’s daughter. Just someone, an average person in the community. But what matters, what he can only really focus on, is that despite you being nobody important, you can still tell somebody- and in this damned town, that was the surest way to make sure that information spreads like wildfire.

It takes five seconds too long before he can actually speak, body stiff with restraint as Carmen fights for words through the fever in his head, but when his words come out, it’s an almost bark of an order.

“You can’t tell anyone.”