(no subject)

Professor Lyall is the perfect picture of alertness and calm as he follows Biffy to the tea shop, but behind that mild exterior, his mind is a hurricane. Clearly things are not as he had left them when he boarded a train to Scotland; clearly something had changed - or reverted, more accurately. A werewolf cannot live for over three hundred years and become the expert Beta of one of England’s most important packs without honing his senses particularly well. Biffy smells of inexperience the way he hasn’t quite in years, he walks not-quite-comfortably in his werewolf skin, even when in human form, and his eyes - well, they are as warm and attentive as they have always been, but Lyall sees none of the understanding in the pup’s gaze that he has come to expect.

Most people would not make the logical leap, for it is too impossible. But Professor Randolph Lyall is not most people, and he has seen his share of impossible things in his long life. Somehow, this is not his Biffy, the one he left with tears in both their eyes. This is the Biffy he had only barely begun to know, some years past.

The realization hurts like a bullet of silver, lodging deep within him, but Lyall barely lets an eyebrow flicker. When they reach the tea shop, he automatically steps forward to hold the door open for Biffy, removing his own hat with his other hand. “After you."