Chapter Text
Harry wished he saw it coming before, but in all his relief to finally be back inside the TARDIS with the Doctor, his proper Doctor, and good old Sarah Jane, he became blinded and foolish. And wasn't that usually how it went?
With every rowdy, mortal danger-packed adventure he tagged along for thanks to this old box, there was always a definite ending. Once they got into the TARDIS and left and returned to the correct twentieth-century London, that was it. The adventure was memory. The danger was over. It might bleed into his nightmares later, but it was never made real again.
As he watched them leave further into the TARDIS, he pulled up his scarf further up his neck where a dull ache still lingered. He carefully felt around his neck with his hand. A bite, perhaps? When did that happen? Everything for the last...however much time had passed, it had been in a haze.
That didn't matter. It would heal. It would pass. Perhaps it would even be forgotten like a bruise. The TARDIS flew itself farther and farther away from 1936, and it would be the end of the longest couple days of his life. He was grateful enough to have left it at all.
It wouldn't quite leave him.
* * *
The Doctor, Sarah, and Harry traversed through a thick forest. The Doctor seemed unfazed by the thick bramble and foliage, moving through like a giant and paving the way for the other two. Harry was glad, but wished for a change in scenery. All of the green of the forest had become less charming to him in recent days.
Not just that, but the smell of it all. It was almost overwhelming. He thought he could smell flowers that were meters to his right. Passing bushes, the smell of their leaves stung his nostrils. A small animal—he would have guessed something close to a hare if they were on Earth—rustled the thicket nearby, causing Sarah to nearly jump out of her skin.
The only reason Harry too didn't jump and probably stumble and fall to boot was because he swore he could hear its soft steps in the seconds leading up to it. Apparently, Sarah hadn't heard it. With all the leaves rustling ahead as the Doctor led the way, he supposed maybe she was focused on that sound.
Speaking of Sarah, that was one smell that didn't seem to go away. Floral but obviously fake, he knew. It was constant. He never usually was able to smell Sarah's perfume like that, at least not this close. He couldn't tell if it was irritating or not.
"I say, Sarah, is that a new perfume?" Harry asked before he could stop himself. Bit of an odd question to ask a woman out the gate, wasn't it?
He was about to apologize, but Sarah didn't mind too much to answer, yet not too little to question. "Not really, why?"
"Oh, I dunno. Just smells a bit strong." Then he didn't know if that might come off as rude, so he began to backtrack. "Er, not in a bad way, just—just noticed, is all."
"Really?" Sarah shrugged. "I can hardly smell it myself."
"Hm." Harry brushed it off. Maybe something on this planet was toying with his sense of smell. That must be it. "Maybe your nose is more used to it. Or something on this planet, what do I know."
He kept pondering on it, wondering what weird logic the Doctor would give for a planet causing your sense of smell to heighten. Harry only realized he began to lag behind, lost in his thoughts, when the Doctor was calling for him.
"Keep up, Harry!" He waved to him with one long arm. "Unless you want to still be out here when it's dark!"
Not wanting to find out what might lurk out here after the sun set, Harry jogged back into place.
* * *
The teaspoon stung him.
He couldn't explain it. He and Sarah were making themselves a quick cup of tea in the TARDIS, between destinations and currently hurtling through the time vortex sort of thing. He dropped a sugar cube in his cup. He picked up a teaspoon to stir it in.
The teaspoon stung him!
He dropped the spoon and it clattered on the ground. The "bumbling idiot" reputation had always rubbed Harry the wrong way, especially in the last few days. At this very moment he had to be thankful for it, because maybe it would make fumbling with the cutlery look more normal.
Maybe he happened to pick up the Doctor's hidden super-heated teaspoon made of some undiscovered metal. It had seemed just like silver to him.
Harry looked beside him to Sarah, who was seated at a little table and looking up at the commotion.
"Quite alright?" she asked, a hint of worry in her voice. Bless Sarah Jane, he almost wished underneath that fiery spirit she wasn't also sweet.
"Quite alright, old girl," he replied, though he found that he was more saying that to keep himself leveled. With the uncertain tone, perhaps that was the only reason Sarah didn't immediately reprimand him for the nickname. "My fingers are a little cold, that's all. Fumbled with the thing."
Sarah sipped her tea and smiled. "Then I suppose that warm of cup of tea will come in handy, won't it?"
"Excellent point," he muttered towards the spoon on the ground. He braced himself and bent down to pick it up. It burned again when his fingers touched it. Like boiling water, but worse. Acid, maybe. He looked at his fingertips and found red spots where he had touched the spoon.
He pulled up his sleeve to cover his hand as he picked up the spoon. It didn't burn this time, but the warmth through his sleeve made the hairs on the back of his neck stand. After he placed it back on the counter, he checked his sleeve. No burn marks or anything else to indicate he'd held such a hot item in his sleeve. So it didn't harm his clothes, but it burned his skin.
Harry pretended like nothing had just happened, taking his cup and sitting down with Sarah, who either didn't notice or didn't ask. A rare moment for the attentive journalist, and one he wouldn't usually be thankful for until now. No extra attention needed to be brought to this.
* * *
Despite this night being one of the rarer occasions that he actually had a bed (and a comfortable one at that) to sleep in on the Doctor's latest alien planet of choice, his rest became decidedly restless.
He dreamed of overflowing forests and moonlight and running faster than he ever thought possible and blood pumping in veins and blood spilling on the ground and his bony hands and eyes frozen open in horror and fires and pitchforks and a shotgun pointed at him and...
The gunshot startled him awake so suddenly that he tumbled out of bed entirely, sweating and tangled in his sheets as he thumped on the ground.
At least he had the room to himself. For a minute, he simply sat there catching his breath and grounding himself, feeling the floor under his fingers and crisp air stinging his nostrils.
Then the door opened, and Harry shot up. Still tangled in the blankets, he only flopped forward.
"Still with us, Harry?"
Harry suppressed a groan. He raised his head so that his eyes reached above the bed and met the gaze of the Doctor, who was standing at the doorway, door half-open. "Come to tell me to stop tripping over my shoelaces in here?"
The Doctor smiled. "What kind of person do you take me for? I was going to check that you were here and conscious, first of all. I wouldn't be a very good traveler, letting my traveling companions get abducted in the middle of the night like nothing."
Harry thought of the numerous times any of them were abducted during a trip as he switched to detangling himself. Then, of the fact that had the Doctor not cared enough to go back for him whenever things did go wrong, he'd either be stuck decades in the past, stranded on an alien planet, or dead by this point. Barely a week ago he had somehow wandered outside of the TARDIS while it was still traveling, and the Doctor and Sarah went through the trouble of figuring out when and where he was to get him back.
"But yes, you not tripping about would be preferable," the Doctor tacked on just as Harry was at the end of freeing himself from his cozy prison. Harry then knew he was still waiting for an explanation.
"Well, now I'm conscious," said Harry as he climbed back up onto the bed. "I was just having a weird dream, that's all. Nonsensical one, really, I'm not sure why I woke up like that. Anyway, it's nothing to worry about."
The Doctor listened to his rambling, leaning on the doorframe. Then he smiled widened, "You're sure you don't want to change your story? You weren't valiantly fighting for your life in here against some shadowed intruder?"
Harry chuckled. "Oh, and I was winning! I let him off easy, but I think he got the message."
"Ah. Where would we be without our brave knight?"
He blushed, hoping it was too dimly lit to be visible. He liked the sound of it in the Doctor's low tone, certainly a nice change from being called an imbecile, even if he didn't mean it. "Oh, come now, Doctor. Now you're just making fun of me."
The Doctor stepped forward. "Only a little, but I do mean it."
"Then I hope that doesn't mean you want me to put on a full suit of armor anytime soon." Speaking of armor and putting things on, the Doctor appeared dressed the same as usual, coat and all. Of all this place was, freezing cold was luckily not one of them. Still, Harry almost felt naked sitting in front of the Doctor in only a shirt and briefs. "I say, did you sleep in all that, or have you been sneaking around looking for clues?"
Silent as he closed the door behind him, the Doctor put a finger to his lips. Of course.
"Okay," Harry said more quietly, hands folded in his lap. In a way he was lucky the Doctor was snooping about like usual, because it was this or sitting in his room alone, unable to go back to sleep either way. He much preferred conspiring with his fellow friends over their latest mystery. "At least Sarah can get enough sleep for the rest of us. What've you got?"
As per usual, the Doctor didn't disappoint.
* * *
The library was just about the only room in the TARDIS where Harry believed nothing would go wrong for as long as he was inside. He was a simple man: the smell of old books was a comfort.
He liked to go through some of the books the Doctor kept here. His main point of interest was the array of medical and anatomy books for aliens they'd never met before (or at least only the Doctor did). He never knew if he might stumble upon an alien fellow in dire need of first aid. Could come in handy sometime.
As he was thumbing through something about nervous systems, he noticed an odd thing and lifted his head. He smelled something. Sharp. Metallic. Inviting.
"Oh. Ouch." Even as a whisper to himself, the Doctor's voice still filled the entire room like air. Harry looked up to find the Doctor was looking down at his hand, and he understood without him saying anything.
He must've been turning a page and it cut his finger. It would have amused Harry greatly—the great big Time Lord with a tiny paper cut on his finger—were he not much more focused on the fact that he could smell his blood from here, even if the scent was different from human blood. He could almost hear the Doctor's two hearts beating through it.
The Doctor brought his thumb to his mouth and licked the initial blood off the cut. A quick, mindless gesture. Harry wished it had been him.
He paused.
Harry wished it had been him?
It wouldn't be the first time he had some inappropriate thought about the Doctor. Far from it. He reached the point where he could admit that he was, against his better judgement, attracted to and perhaps even a little enamored with the Doctor. But that matter stayed only within the four walls of his mind, knowing that nothing else would ever come of what was no more than a silly fantasy.
But to wish he was licking the Doctor's cut clean? That wasn't him. It was unsanitary for both people, first and foremost. You have to sterilize the thing first of all, not contaminate it further. Blood was a bio-hazard to be wary of, not to consume for, what, fun? Pleasure?
But he couldn't stop thinking about the smell. Couldn't stop thinking about his tongue on it and how it would feel in his mouth.
The Doctor looked up, and Harry realized he'd been staring at him the whole time.
"Paper cut," The Doctor said simply, raising his hand and wiggling his fingers for good measure.
"Oh," said Harry, as if this were completely new information to him. "I didn't even know you could get those."
"Unfortunately. My one true weakness, I'd say." He flashed him his signature, toothy grin. "Do try not to tell anyone that."
"Of course not, Doctor." Harry shifted, crossing one leg over the other. "Anyway, if you need someone to put a band-aid on it and kiss it all better." Harry's tone made it sound like a joke, but he was still thinking about his lips on his finger.
He swallowed down the shame of realizing he would do it if only he asked. It took Harry too long to even grapple with the fact that he wanted another man that way (though the Doctor would interject that he's not a man, he could hear him now), what the hell was he supposed to do with this, now?
The Doctor, unaware of any of this inner turmoil, only chuckled along and returned to his book. "I'll keep that in mind."
After a few minutes, Harry found that he couldn't tear his focus from the Doctor's paper cut. He set his own book next to his chair and quickly excused himself from the library.
* * *
They were all in the TARDIS control room when the Doctor asked, "Harry, when was the last time you got some sleep?"
Harry could have tried lying, but there was no smile or humor on the Doctor's face when he asked him. His hands were clasped on his shoulders, firm enough to hold him in place but not so much that he wouldn't be able to step back from it.
In the end, he had always been a bad liar. It wasn't worth the trouble. He had quite literally accompanied him on one sleepless night two nights ago, and he didn't sleep much better the previous night.
"I've, er, just not been sleeping very well this week."
"I know that's right," Harry and the Doctor looked over to Sarah, who was leaning on the TARDIS's controls as she piped up. "You fell asleep in the cart earlier."
They had hitched a ride on a cart outside a village, which was their last destination. Quite a bumpy ride, yes, but still comfortable enough that it rocked him to sleep instantly. He only noticed that he was ever asleep because Sarah had to nudge him awake when they stopped.
"It was nice," Harry said quietly. "Anyone could do that."
"It was barely ten minutes!" Sarah shrugged. "Certainly could have been more comfortable, anyway."
When Harry looked back at the Doctor, his blue eyes dug into his soul.
"We have been traveling for a while. Perhaps you ought to go home and rest."
"I thought I was the one giving out prescriptions," Harry joked, but he weighed the idea in his head. He was tired, and he feared even some vacation planet the Doctor prescribed him wouldn't do the trick.
He always felt odd when he decided to stay behind while the Doctor and Sarah went off on their own. Harry knew how their adventures went, and even though the Doctor and Sarah were both well capable of looking after themselves, he still worried if they would come back. And then he felt like the odd one out. Even if the three of them felt more cohesive than in the beginning, in the end it was still the Doctor and Sarah Jane as it had been before. Sometimes Harry was there.
But the Doctor was also correct as he always was. He needed rest, and maybe it was better if he did so in his own four walls and his own bed. Then he'd come back when he felt up to it again.
"But I suppose I ought to, yes. That should help."
"Excellent!" The Doctor raised his hands to cup Harry's face, slightly squishing his cheeks. Harry felt his cheeks heat up, and he hoped the Doctor couldn't feel the difference. Then, he went to the controls like nothing, plotting their next course to 1975.
Surprisingly, it was a direct trip, no detour.
Not surprisingly, Sarah was sticking by for one more trip.
"Don't worry," she patted his shoulder as he stopped at the TARDIS's front doors. "I'll take care of the other idiot over here so you can rest easy about it."
Harry tried not to think about how well they worked together without him, swallowing it down with a smile, because at least he did trust Sarah to take care of him. "You do that, old thing."
As he stepped outside with a quick nudge from Sarah, he had the sinking feeling that he wouldn't be back too soon.
* * *
Being back home rather than planet-jumping helped for a day or two, but then it all went downhill from there.
Harry had to call out of work, citing an illness. Thankfully, the Brigadier could be forgiving when it counted. A sick doctor didn't bode too well for his patients, anyway. At least he wasn't the Doctor: a sick Doctor would practically signal the end of the world.
But Harry was still worried for himself because he was quite feverish, nearly delirious. If he stood up too quickly, he felt as dizzy as a Victorian maiden, so he opted to prescribe himself some bedrest.
He must have caught something from someone somewhere, but what, who, and where? He'd felt a little off for the last week or so, but he had brushed it off as a lack of good rest until now that it had clearly become something else.
Harry flipped through his symptoms in his head, wonder what he could possibly be afflicted by. Fever. Dizziness. His still sensitive nose. The vague pull in his stomach that didn't feel like sickness or nerves but something else. A hunger for meat, which he tried to feed into by upping his intake, but it only ever got worse. Irritability. General restlessness and a lack of good sleep. Strange dreams and nightmares when he did manage to rest. Possible sensitivity to silver or some other metal.
He felt a tingle on his neck, and he briefly remembered the bite that had been there when he first left that dreaded year of 1936. His memory after saving the day was a daze. The bite. Returning to the woods. Waking up to Sarah's voice. There had been a wolf, right? Emmeline, perhaps? He couldn't quite remember now that a couple weeks had passed.
Even if Emmeline was there, if she'd bitten him while she was still a wolf, surely it couldn't have done this. He had his opinion on the existence of werewolves turned flat on its back after being stranded in time with a werewolf among other strange people, but that didn't mean a bite had to make him one, too. Was that how the lore went, anyway? Either way, he should have been more concerned about anything else he could have contracted from a wild animal bite, but it was none of those, he had already ruled it out.
Maybe it was an alien strain of flu, and any second now the Doctor would show up, bumbling in with his big coat and bigger scarf, babbling about the last place they traveled to having a sort of flu epidemic before giving him a strange remedy that fixed everything.
The Doctor didn't show up. He didn't really think he would. There were some battles he had to fight alone.
* * *
Maybe he was just dying. Maybe that was it.
As the last rays of sun filtered through his bedroom curtain, fever became body aches, then a sharp pain that wracked through his entire being, and he was sure it was the worst he'd ever experienced in his life. Worse than any alien pain he experienced on his travels with the Doctor, and certainly worse than his worst case of food poisoning, tenfold. He could barely move, or else it would get worse.
And he was beyond starving. He had eaten that day, maybe not as much as he should have, but it was as if he hadn't eaten for days.
How silly would it be if he were to die right now? The doctor who was so sure he was fine and nothing was wrong, then died in bed the next day? Maybe the Doctor would get a smile out of the thought. Well, maybe not the part where he was dead. He seemed happy enough to find him alive the other week, he was willing to give him that much credit...
His thoughts were interrupted by a crack, which he almost didn't hear over a sudden shock of overwhelming pain, like a broken bone.
Another crack. Another flare.
The agony was so overwhelming his scream was silent. He realized too late the cracks were his bones. A frenzied glance to the window, not a trace of sunlight to be found.
His body began to reshape itself, breaking and mending until it reached its desired form. He could hear his own flesh tearing, his heartbeat in his ears, the ringing—
Then even his thoughts, his mind seemed to melt away.
There was relief when his body finished changing. There was the need to get out, to be free from the room he found himself in. There was the full moon shining above him. There was a bone-deep hunger waiting to be satisfied.
* * *
Harry woke up nude on his living room floor.
His face felt strange, as if he fell head-first in some mud and never washed up.
He found that he was so exhausted he couldn't get up at first. His legs burned as if he'd ran a marathon. Or two. Maybe he ran on his hands too, his arms were so worn. He prided himself on being physically fit, but he was defeated completely. Even crawling felt like a daunting task.
The previous night dawned on him. There was little he remembered clearly, but...
The woods. Running on all fours. Exhilaration and freedom. A cow pen's fencing. Dark fur. A hunger so deep it was in his bones. Red. Too much red.
Of that little bit, he was certain the substance caked on his face was not just mud.
He turned onto his back and stared at the ceiling, praying to whatever could hear him to tell him that he was wrong.
After a few minutes Harry managed to stand up, using a nearby knocked-over chair as leverage. He looked around and found some of his furniture had been toppled over, but he failed to remember why exactly, could only guess it happened as he somehow left his house. He first stumbled to the front door he'd left unlocked last night and locked it. No need for the chance of someone showing up at the door while he was in this state.
He leaned on a table for support as he made his way to the bathroom, hand sliding over rough grooves that didn't exist before now carved into the wood.
He miraculously made it into the bathroom without falling, and he dared to look in the mirror: His short curls in disarray, darkness under his eyes, dirt all over his face and body. A dried red-brown covered his mouth and chin, and he knew it to be blood. It was smeared on his neck, coloring his hands, even stuck under his fingernails. He bared his teeth in the mirror and found they were completely stained.
He began to remember the night more clearly, all the running until he found some farm and seen the cows. They had smelled delicious. Tasted delicious, too. He remembered his furry snout digging inside the carcass, greedily feasting on its bloody innards. When he was the wolf, he didn't regret a second of it, and the wolf was still inside him with that same opinion. Excitement had run through his veins even as he consumed: a creature that didn't even know what the word shame meant.
Harry dove to the toilet bowl and vomited. The taste of that cow still lingered, and it made it worse. He wretched and heaved even when there was nothing more to vacate from his body. The water had a red tint, and he left dirty handprints where he had placed his hands.
Somewhere in the area, a farmer had a strange cow mutilation, and it was him. Harry Sullivan was the suspect, but there would be nothing connecting him to it as long as he cleaned himself up.
He hated this, hated how he was thinking about whether he could be legally tied to a cow mutilation like nothing. A mutilation he had actually committed, even if he wasn't in his right mind, even if his hands hadn't been hands. How could he think about cleaning himself up as if he were stealing candy from a baby, which was another thing he would never do?
Still, he began to clean up, first deciding on a shower. As the water washed away the dirt and blood he scrubbed off, there was only one comfort he found in it:
At least it's not human blood.
It didn't help. He never wanted to kill a cow himself, yet he did. Did that mean he could kill a human even though he never wanted to? If he were lucky, not wanting to kill a human so much more would render it impossible. He wasn't even confident in the idea.
He debated this to himself as he brushed his teeth for the third time in a row, ensuring that there was not a speck of blood left in his mouth. A part of him missed the taste in his mouth. But Harry was in charge now, not the wolf, and he decided he preferred the overwhelming taste of mint much more, so that was what he was going to have.
The clean up made Harry feel marginally more human. As he spit out the rest of the toothpaste, he looked back up at his reflection in the mirror. There shouldn't have been a trace of what happened left, but he couldn't help but think that even the man looking back at him right now wasn't him. Looked like him, sure, but something was off about him, as if he could tear his skin like rubber and find some poor excuse of an imposter.
Maybe that was all he was doing from now on: pretending to be normal and human.
Harry left the furniture clean-up and tidying for later, instead retreating to his bedroom. Finally getting dressed in a shirt and underwear, he sat down on the edge of his bed, finally absorbing what he knew, now that he wasn't busy cleaning himself up.
He was a werewolf. Harry Sullivan was a bloody werewolf. Unfortunately, it meant that the last couple weeks of strange happenings meant something serious.
So it had to be the bite on his neck from weeks ago. He thought of Emmeline, her over-friendliness, her attempts to marry and daresay court him. In the beginning she had just been a woman who wanted an English husband to avoid getting deported to Germany and he had simply shown up in her sights. Would this be her idea of keeping him? Turning him into a werewolf just like her? He had told her they were different people, that it wouldn't work, trying to say anything except that his heart was already occupying itself with its silly fantasies with one of his strange friends and yet...
It probably wasn't that simple, but he wasn't going to ask the Doctor to try and go back to ask. The reason didn't matter anymore. In any case, it was a terrible present for a wedding.
He could still tell the Doctor what happened. That other eccentric, velvet-clad Doctor seemed to know enough about werewolves. Perhaps there was a chance his Doctor knew, too. Maybe he could help him.
But should he tell him? How would he even start that conversation? Hey, Doctor, good to see you! Just a moment. Yes, well, uhm. Last night I turned into a wolf against my will and killed some farmer's cow—Yes, yes, I know, just listen—I'm just a little afraid that next month I might kill somebody. You know a pill that might help with that, old chap?
What if the answer was no? What if there was no cure? Or what if there was, and it was the Doctor shooting a silver bullet straight through his heart? He already believed the Doctor looked down upon him to some extent, even if it was just because he was human where the Doctor wasn't. Add in this, and he would be subhuman to him.
Then Sarah would find out. He imagined she'd be repulsed by it. As she should be, just as Harry certainly was.
If he were truly lucky, it would stay between the three of them. Of course, he could also lose his job. He could also lose his life. There would still be people in the modern day who wanted him dead or imprisoned just like those pitchfork-wielding rifle-bearing men from decades past.
He didn't want to face either one of them. They'd look straight through him like one giant window. Maybe they'd see through to what he saw in the mirror: a Harry Sullivan-shaped thing pretending to be anything but a monster.
But hopefully he was still Harry, at least for every other day of the month. Did it erase all of that?
He thought that perhaps it didn't, that he was just the same, but later he would pick up some lamb chops only to eat them raw in his kitchen. The passing full moon left him too fatigued and sapped of willpower to resist the desire.
Maybe he was still Harry, just with a couple adjustments he could only hope wouldn't be the death of him.