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eruden-writes · 2 days

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Choosing the Bear - Part 2 (Shifter x Human)

Inspired by the Man or Bear in the Woods question/meme.

First Part

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Mercy’s father, Zeke Clements, was a man about two years older than Bambi, though they’d been a part of the same graduating class. He’d been held back once in seventh grade and once in ninth grade, from what she remembered. If she recalled correctly, both times was due to the amount of fights he got into. Though she thought it had more to do with who he fought – the privileged peers and the sports stars – that had gotten him held back those particular years.

Before Bambi could say anything else, Mercy jumped between her and the bear, her arms outstretched as if to shield the creature from the woman.

“Please, don’t say anything, Mizz Bambi! He’s not a devil or a monster or anything like that, I swear!” Mercy blinked rapidly, her eyes glassy under the moonlight. She sniffed loudly, her bottom lip wobbling as she added, “Please! He’s all I got!”

Silence fell between Mercy and Bambi as the latter glanced at the bear. It hunkered down, pained tension wrought along its furry form.

“If that bear is your dad, can’t he just…” Bambi waved a hand, trying to find the right words as both the girl and bear stared at her. “Can’t he turn back into a human?”

“If he shifts back, the bullet might go somewhere vital if it didn’t go clean through,” Mercy sniffed once more as she explained, unshed tears making her voice tremble. Bambi frowned, realizing the girl must have been told or experienced this happening before to have such an answer at the ready. A twinge of guilt flickered through Bambi, recalling how the girl said Zeke was all she had.

The exhausting night was beginning to catch up to Bambi. From being kidnapped to escaping Duke to now. Everything felt unreal and that made a precursor of a headache throb at her temples. Pinching at her nose, Bambi sighed and tried to decide what to do.

What would she do if it was normal for people to shift into animals? To believe humans turned into furry brethren? Would she let a child inspect her father’s gunshot wound?

No, she would not.

With a sigh, Bambi’s hand lowered as she inclined her head to Mercy. “If your dad is okay with it, I’ll take a look at it?”

The bear – Zeke, Bambi reminded herself despite the surrealness of the thought – gave what sounded like a grudging grunt, to which Mercy translated, “He says fine.”

Bambi swallowed as the hulking behemoth turned toward her, still on its – his – rear legs. She took an awkward step closer, as if testing to see if he was simply trying to trick her. When the bear held still, she closed the distance further. Red stained and matted the white fur on his side, under the arm that had struck out at Duke. The coppery tang of blood thickened the closer she got to Zeke, mingling with a sweet woodsy musk.

“I’m going to check to see if it went through, alright?” Bambi heard herself say as she reached and grabbed the bear’s right arm, making certain it stayed aloft as she moved around its side. Her fingers deftly felt through its fur, against its side, tracking bullet and shrapnel. Beneath her touch, the bear’s muscles felt tense and she worried he was in far more pain than he let on.

Her concern flared when she realized there was no exit wound.

“Well, shit. It didn’t go through. We’ll have to dig the fragments out, unless you got a medicine man you’d rather go to?” Bambi peered around the bear’s arm, eyebrow quirking. “Or maybe you prefer a vet?”

The bear gave a disgruntled snort, pressing their held-aloft arm down against Bambi as if to squish her down. The motion was a familiar one, she realized, as memories of a more human-looking Zeke playfully using shorter peers as armrests flickered in her thoughts.

Bambi scoffed, ducking away from bear Zeke’s arm to turn to Mercy. “Is your home close to here?”

“It’s a ways off…” The girl’s worried gaze flicked from the woman to her bear father.

Undeterred, Bambi’s mind traipsed to the next possible solution. “Do you have a first aid kit in your pack?”

Mercy brightened up and nodded as she swung her backpack off her shoulder, quickly rummaging through it. Soon, she procured a kit, which Bambi soon realized was a typical Hartwell hodgepodge of first aid supplies and more. Thankfully, there was a headlamp, alcohol wipes, gloves, tweezers, and – if things got rough in cleaning the wound – a pocketknife.

It took some positioning, but soon Bambi was standing beside a seated white bear, headlamp strapped to her head and bright light pouring over the wound. Mercy lingered at the edges of Bambi’s vision, but she didn’t have the heart to tell the girl to back off further. She had a right to be nervous.

Under the headlamp, the red blood stood out in stark contrast to the white fur. Despite years of handling her own children’s boo-boos and even some of Duke’s own ill-though injuries, Bambi’s stomach churned lightly. Steeling herself, she snapped a pair of gloves onto her hands and began working – as gently as possible – with the tweezers.

“Looks like you packed on some pounds since high school, Zeke,” Bambi heard herself say, more to distract herself than the bear flinching under her penetrating tweezers.

He growled in response, though that may have been because a particularly large shard of bullet had come free with a squelch.

“Mhmn, well, parenthood will do that to you. I got two of my own, and I’m sure that shows,” Bambi laughed, patting the curve of her side with the less bloodied glove, illustrating how much softer and squishier she had become since high school. “I suppose Mercy has told you about Casey, though.”

The two girls hung out a lot and Bambi had hosted a number of sleepovers that Mercy, along with other girls, attended. Though Mercy’s own home had been oddly off-limits for hangouts. Bambi supposed she could guess why that was, after seeing Zeke like this.

A gnarl of a grumble was Zeke’s response, to which Bambi couldn’t begin to parse.

“Mercy’s always a joy to have ‘round. She’s sweet and well-mannered. Well, as well-mannered as kids can be,” she continued on, undeterred by the conversationally-stilted partner. She’d had plenty of years navigating single-sided conversations with Duke. “She’s been raised well.”

Something in Zeke’s body language softened, or so Bambi thought. There was no time to dwell on the realization as her medical auto-pilot trudged forward, “I’m not finding anything else, so I’m going to use the alcohol wipes now. Might sting some.”

And once again, the bear tensed as Bambi brushed the wipes over the wound. Her gaze angled up to his maw, watching how he clenched his teeth. A slight expulsion of air hissed between his fearsome sharp canines. Guilt swam up Bambi’s thoughts, but she had little change to apologize when Mercy popped up at her elbow. “Is he gonna be okay, Mizz Bambi?”

“I think so. I think I cleaned out all the bullet bits and sanitized it the best I can with what’s here,” she answered as she pressed her hand to the bear’s side, trying to feel if here were any errant shards left. For the first time, Bambi tilted her head full up toward the bear. “How do you feel?”

It was strange to be asking a polar bear such a question. Just looking at the furry head with its dark eyes and dark nose, knowing the heft and weight of its arm alone, she couldn’t believe he wasn’t just a bear. But there was something else there in its eyes, she thought. A more familiar understanding as it cocked its head, the round ears twitching a little straighter.

Letting out a low chesty huff, the bear shifted slightly, as if testing a strained muscle. He made another sound to which Mercy piped up with concern, “You sure?”

There was another chesty rumble before the bear melted in front of Bambi’s eyes. Though melt was, perhaps, too much. The bear shrank, muscles compacted and bones shifted. A sound unlike anything Bambi could described paired with the change.

With wide eyes, Bambi watched as fur crept to a more human formation; a scattering of hair across dark muscular arms and a barrel chest, then a trail of hair that dived down a rounded plush abdomen and dipped somewhere Bambi’s eyes shouldn’t linger. But getting into trouble was a bad habit and old habits die hard.

“You’re naked,” Bambi gasped, jerking her eyes away from the nude male specimen in front of her.

“You ‘n I both know you ain’t no innocent, Bambi Barker,” rasped Zeke, his voice as deep and full of gravel as she remembered. She leveled a glare on the man, but he cocked his head and narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “I sure hope you ain’t still Missus Walker.”

“Bite your tongue, Zeke Clements! It’s been Barker for a couple of years now. You should know that. The town hasn’t grown that big.” The fact Duke had been chasing her through the woods with a shot gun should have been another hint, but she set that aside for the moment.

Bambi faintly realized Zeke had a thick curly beard – something she had missed when staring at the rest of him, she realized – which made the flush on her cheeks tingle with more than annoyance. The hair on his head was also white, like his body hair, she noticed.

Her eyes followed the bounce of his textured curls, now an enticing voluminous mass that haloed around his head and fell down the back of his shoulders. In high school, he’d kept his hair relatively short. Not so short she wasn’t familiar with his curls, but definitely shorter than he now wore. Students of color had always been hit with dress code violations for their hair, she recalled.

Mercy trotted over to a tree, where a backpack Bambi had not previously noticed sat. Grabbing the pack, Mercy shoved it at her dad and shot him a peeved look. He held the bag in front of himself, offering some blessed level of censor as he pulled out clothes. “I keep to myself these days.”

“I suppose that’s easy if you hibernate most the winter,” mused Bambi as she turned off the headlamp and leaned against a tree. She watched as he pulled on a pair of jeans, catching sight of his bullet wound. Amazingly, despite shrinking from bear to human, the injury didn’t look terrible. In fact, if Bambi didn’t know better, she would have thought he was shot a few days ago, rather than less than an hour ago.

Could he heal quicker than humans? Wasn’t that a trait in werewolves or something?

As Bambi wondered about the mechanics of lycanthropy to – what would it be called for a bear shifter? ursathropy? – she missed a muscle ticking in Zeke’s jaw. “Mercy, you should go back to the truck.”

Focusing back in on the other two, Bambi noticed Mercy seemed about ready to argue, but Zeke’s cross expression and his glare made her shoulders slump. Without another word, she stomped back through the forest the way she came, her own pack once again hanging from her shoulders.

Quietly, Bambi watched as the girl retreated, hoping she didn’t have far to go in the dark. Although, that made Bambi wonder if Mercy inherited any of Zeke’s furry genes, if that was what it was, and if she happened to see better in the dark than her own peers. Faintly, she tried to file through her memories of the girl, but nothing odd seemed to jump out.

Instead of trawling through memories, Bambi turned her attention back to Zeke. “Why’d you send her away?”

“Because we need to discuss a few things,” he replied, turning fully toward her after watching his daughter disappear through the trees. He crossed his arms over his chest, muscles flexing along his shoulders as he leered down at Bambi.

For a brief second, she realized she was alone with a man who could turn into a bear. Staring up at Zeke, still a behemoth as a human though smaller than the bear he had been, Bambi realized not an ounce of fear stirred in her chest. All she could see was the young man he’d been in high school. Hot-headed, oddly sweet, gruff.

It was probably exhaustion, she thought. She wasn’t afraid because she was just bone tired. Also, she was fighting against the shock and surreality of everything that had happened over the last few hours. From Duke’s harebrained scheme to the revelation about Zeke.

Yeah, that had to be it, she decided, as she stared silently up at the intimidating man.