Name: Malachi Isaac Waters || Only teachers know this is even my name. I don’t ever go by it.
Nicknames: Bo || It’s just what I go by. (Also: Crunchy, Scrub, Scruff, Scruffy)
Age: 18 ½
Species: Werewolf || I used to be proud of my heritage for all the wrong reasons. I think I’m finally getting it right.
Birthdate: August 18th || Apparently I’m a Leo. Given that I can turn into a giant wolf and some of my best friends are merfolk and fairies, I’m not one to chuck astrology in the bin.
Sexuality: ::Arches eyebrow:: || I really don’t like labels. I’m attracted to guys, but I think it should be about more than that. Maybe someday I’ll meet a girl I fall in love with. Who knows? I surely do not. I haven’t had sex in years, anyway.


Likes:

• Cannabis || It keeps me level, keeps me grounded. It makes me see the world in a different way.
• Cooking || I’m a little obsessed, I’ll admit it. I got into it in the camping sense, and now I’m hooked.
• Fitness || Not like, counting carbs and pumping iron. Just being outdoors, doing something. Sports, jogging, sparring, whatever. I know it’s stereotypical, but I always have a hacky sack on me.
• Working With My Hands || I like tinkering, building. Sometimes practical things, like the tree house, but sometimes I get a little artistic. I’m pretty sure I suck, but that isn’t the point. Mostly I work with wood.
• Meditating || Again, it helps me keep my head on straight. Keep the wolf at bay. It’s also just extremely relaxing.
• Nature || My favorite part of being a werewolf is having a foot in the door of the wild world. I don’t know what I’d do in a city, or even a suburb. I hate wearing shoes.
• Music || My tastes are pretty broad. Anything acoustic with strong lyrics, for sure. Ani Difranco is probably my favorite musician of all time. I mess around on my guitar a lot. Nothing special, but it’s soothing.

Dislikes:

• Judgmental Folk || Everybody has their issues. No one is perfect. I used to be like this, always sizing people up and tearing them down, but I saw the light. Nobody should ever have to feel like something the cat drug in.
• Artificial Ingredients || I try to keep what I put in my body as natural as possible. It’s a good thing I like cooking, because I like to know what it is I’m eating.
• Pressure || Don’t tie my hands. Don’t give me ultimatums. Don’t come on strong. I really don’t need any more stress than I already have.
• Conflict || I take a lot of flak for this, but I try to avoid conflict, particularly when the full moon is close. There’s always a better option, especially considering what might happen if I lose my temper.
• Computers || They’re doing more harm than good. Auto-tuning is just the beginning. Soon they’ll be writing songs engineered for commercial viability, generating best-sellers and TV series. Can’t stand ‘em.
• Self-Inflicted Harm || Why? Talk to someone. That’s all it takes. I’ll listen if no one else will.

Fears: The top of the list is killing something that I don’t need to kill in order to survive. The food chain exists for a reason, but the thought of losing control and coming close to how I used to be, well, that turns my stomach. I’m also very leery of transportation. Cars are bad enough. Airplanes? Forget it. I like road-trips anyway.

Personality: I don’t really know how to do these things. Every day that goes by is a battle to be the person I want to be, so I guess I’ll talk about him.

He accepts what he is. Not an animal, not a human, something in between. When you’re two things like that, doesn’t it make sense you should take the best parts of both? The purity and innocence of the wolf, the compassion and reasoning capabilities of the man? That’s what I think. That’s what I try to embody. Sometimes you have to fight, sometimes you have to kill. The wolf knows when. When your territory, your survival, the survival of your pack are threatened, that’s when you bare fangs. He knows that too, but he’s able to extend it to friends, to people who can’t defend themselves, and he feels remorse for what he has to do to ensure their safety and his own.

Remorse is something I know all about. There isn’t a day that goes by I don’t think about things that I’ve done, people I’ve hurt or worse. See. Told you I’m no good at this, I’m all over the place.

A lot of folk think I try to deny my nature, but that isn’t it at all. I didn’t become some pacifist vegan. That probably would have been easier. No, what I want is to be what I am on my own terms. I don’t want to hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it. I don’t want to lose control, ever again. It’s about taking each day as it comes and trying to do everything right as I can, but that’s where it gets hard, because when I can’t be him, when I can’t live up to my own expectations, that’s when I’m in the most danger of backsliding, of giving in and letting the wolf take over.

I try not to keep to myself. Obviously that’d be an easy way to never hurt anyone, becoming some kind of hermit. But wolves and humans are both social creatures, and I am too. Isn’t anything I like better than walking away from a conversation feeling like I know more about the other person, like I understand them just a little better than I did before. Sometimes I just have to be alone though. It gets to be too much, and I’ve never felt more like a coward than when I see a clump of people and know I just can’t be who I want to be in that minute and I steer myself the other way. You could say I’m a little guilty of keeping people at a distance, but it’s more like I keep myself at a distance from people.

I don’t really think about dating or anything like that. I mean, I think about sex. A lot. But, I can take care of that. I just figure I’ve got enough work to do on myself, how could it possibly be fair to me or whoever to drag our problems together? Maybe someday. I don’t know. I don’t want to miss out on something special, but I guess if it’s special enough, I’ll just have to take notice, huh?


History: I wish I’d never been born a Waters. I’d never want to be just a human, or just a wolf, but I wish I was just some mongrel were, you know? I think things would have been better for me and for a lot of people.

Werefolk know it, but most others don’t. When Britain first started colonizing the New World, there were werewolves among the settlers. A single pack of three. The alpha was Timothy Waters, and so they were the Waters pack. Weren’t related way back then, but in the generations since, they kept things pretty exclusive. Paired up their kids in arrangements as elaborate as anything the veela get up to. There were a lot of werewolves among the Native Americans, and it was the Waters and their kids and their grandkids who got them out of the way so that the English could kill or buy off or all that the rest of them.

There’s a couple branches of the family today. Got the Appalachian Waterses, the Rocky Waterses, even some out in Cali, but they’ve gone urban. Traitors, is what we called them. I don’t know all that, but I can’t imagine going Hollywood. The main branch, though, they take up in the White Mountains, and their territory… well, between some dozen packs, they’ve got about a fifth of New England, most of it north.

I was so proud of who I was. My dad was an alpha, my mom, she was more in tune with the wolf than anyone. My older brother Jed, he was an alpha. I was on my way to becoming one. Why not? I was groomed for it since I could walk. It was a different way of living than most people can imagine. The closest comparison I can come up with is really, really rich families. The dad is totally in control, and from the jump, all you hear is about how you’re better than everyone else. You don’t even need to hear it though. You just know it. Better than other weres, definitely better than humans.

I changed early, like most Waters kids do. Seven years old. My family, we have a pretty complicated set of rules, and one of them is that after the change, kids have to leave their core family behind and go off to some other pack in some other place to learn. ‘Course, it was just a tool for my dad. I got sent to his brother Avery. But if someone was giving my dad trouble he could send their kid somewhere dangerous, or to a pack where the kid was basically a hostage. Like I said, it was weird. Almost feudal. Most werefolk don’t live like that. There were plenty of ‘em around our territory, but I didn’t give them the time of day back then.

Uncle Avery was probably the meanest son of a bitch who ever lived. The rules restricted him from being mean to wolves, but they didn’t say anything about humans. His pack, The Harriers, was based out of Laconia, NH. Kind of a tourist trap town. Lake Winnipesaukee, lots of little cottages people could rent, a beach, a midway, ferry rides. But it was surrounded by wild, or what constitutes wild nowadays, anyway. Well, The Harriers didn’t get their name for no reason. They’d harry, and I did too. I know I was being influenced, but I… back then I liked it. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. A lot of things I have nightmares about.

I had this cousin, Jessie. Avery’s oldest. He’d finished his fostering and petitioned The Harriers, so he was on as a gamma or some such at the time. Eighteen to my fifteen. He hated my guts, because he thought his dad should have been calling the shots. He wasn’t man or wolf enough to actually do something about it, so he took it out on me. I was strong enough to take it, most of it anyway, and he saw that and finally figured out a way to break me. He and a couple of his friends kept me tied up and hungry for the whole week before the full moon, and… well, there isn’t any reason to paint more of a picture than that. It was such a mess that the state police got involved, and then my dad did, and he was pissed. He killed Jess on the spot, branded both his accomplices as deserters, and then took me home.

Mind you, I was a complete mess. I wasn’t even worried about punishment. I wanted to be punished. I wanted him to just kill me, like he had Jess. But he didn’t. Instead he lectured me on how, yes, we are superior to humans, and if he had it his way we’d be able to herd them like cattle, rape them, whatever. That was what got me. I realized how sick it all was and I just couldn’t be there anymore. I ran. I deserted.

There isn’t anything more sad or more dangerous, to himself and everyone else, than a lone werewolf, but that’s what I was. I guess it’s kind of what I am. I’m not fit to be in a pack. I tried a few times, but they could always tell something was off about me, and then I was either run off or run off on.

I’d probably be dead if [will insert a teacher’s name when there’s one to insert] hadn’t found me and told me about Devalin. I broke down, talked about everything for the first time, and [he or she] said something I’ll never forget. I guess it’s actually something Winston Churchill said. When you’re going through Hell, keep going. That was… what, two years ago? I’ve kept going. I’m gonna keep going. I’ve found ways to live with what I’ve done and cope with what I am, and maybe someday, I’ll be who I want to be. Until then I spend most of my days stoned and mostly useless, but there are worse things to be.

Other: Bo is very proficient when it comes to fighting, but he does so non-lethally. The nickname he goes by actually derives from his weapon of choice- a long, solid bo staff he made himself. It’s ideal for taking on the supernatural in human form without actually having to go in for a kill, thanks to the reach and stunning potential it has. He’s also been learning submission holds and qinna, a fairly obscure subset of Chinese martial arts that involves controlling and locking the joints of opponents to render them immobile by targeting weak spots, muscle groups, and pressure points that affect mobility and major body systems. It’s his way of taking control of his own aggression. He has the will to fight, but reserves the right to neutralize opponents rather than murder them.

Some werewolves may know enough wolf-lore to recognize him as a fairly pure-blooded Waters by his fur. Nearly pure white fur isn’t completely unique to his family, but it’s extremely common. He’s also quite large in his wolf form, even for a werewolf.