When he finally turned 'round to face it some thirty or forty paces later, he came to the sudden and abrupt realization that he was not staring at a dog, but a yellow-eyed wolf, and a massive one at that. Boggled both by fear and paint fumes, he stood staring blankly at it for longer than he probably should have. Well beyond the point in time where a reaction like running away would have been prudent, it was on him with rolling eyes and snapping jaws. All he really remembers of the attack itself is pain and having weed himself before a pair of headlights flared bold around the corner, splashing across the beast in a white wave that sent it bounding off down the street before the police officer driving could poke holes in it with his sidearm.
Taking Rick for a drunk or otherwise crazy person, probably owing to the paint and the shivery muteness and the wee smell, he opted to take him into the station rather than to the hospital. Suffice to say, some amount of gun pulling and gore and slimy bits later, they didn't make it there. Rick spilled out've the driver's side door in a roll of muscle and blood matted pelt where the officer had tried to escape and at dawn found himself to be both very naked and very cold on top of being very close to insane panic.
Odds are he was approached not long after by a local werewolf in the library while he was attempting to do research about wtf was happening to him, but the meeting was less than inspirational. Assuming (perhaps rightly) that the woman might even have been the one that bit him, he balked at her informing him of werewolves and vampires and the latter having a serious hardon for the slaughter of the former. He bristled and scowled and did a lot of denial in general despite a sharp increase in his own senses telling him that there was definitely something wolfish about her. Eventually she gave up on him and left when he threatened to call the police (hollowly, we'll note, given that he was still nervous that he might somehow be connected to the canine mauling of the unfortunate officer in the last paragraph) but he couldn't force himself to ignore her warning, and it was only a matter of months before he fled to America, thinking he'd do well to hide himself there. Hard to imagine any kind of timeless mythical beast with an American accent after all.
He found nameless work on a cargo vessel set the transverse the Atlantic and effectively stowed away in plain sight, with deft enough scheduling to ensure that they made it there before the next full moon.
Years passed, mostly without accident. He spent time in New York, where he was eventually able to acquire a false name and fake papers. It was easier back then. He worked the docks for a good while, comfortable enough doing manual labor until the aura of having effectively fled one country and hid himself in another began to wear off. He was getting bored again. Also, restless and tired of working out in the cold once the next winter spell rolled around, so. He spent some time browsing around the papers, found nothing to his tastes, and started hitchhiking south.
He spent the next decade and a half transversing America, a variably insane nihilist British WWII veteran werewolf with no real official documentation save whatever he managed to scrape up in the way of fake information along the way. He got into rock and roll music. He read American literature. He lost a bit of the poncy edge off his accent. He experimented with drugs. He pretended not to notice the Vietnam War. He did odd jobs. Everything from brick laying to washing cars to digging ditches. It struck him from time to time that he had a college education and could likely be hired on as a teacher somewhere if he could bother with getting his shit together enough to get a background for himself, but he lacked the attention span and necessary motivation. The werewolf thing was a subsidiary inconvenience. Every full moon he locked himself up somewhere or dragged his hide out far enough away from human populations that the risk of accident was minimal, and so long as nobody bothered him.
He didn't bump into another werewolf until 1969, when he returned to New York state to attend Woodstock and ran into Steve. Having mellowed out somewhat since 1955, and already well on his way to being stoned out've his gourd, the more they talked, the more Rick realized what an utter bleeding relief it was to have someone else to talk to who understood some iota of the insanity of everything that had happened to him. High himself, and a naturally efficient listener besides, Steve proved to be an amiable companion in almost every respect. They drank together, smoked together, spent a blurry day getting to know each other and then came to the abrupt and uncomfortable realization that they were not the only immortals that had shown up to blend into the massive crowd in attendance. Having wandered off a ways from the main sort've camp that night, they both detected the scent around the same time, and after an uneasy attempt to brush it off as 'probably nothing' despite the chills running up and down their respective spines, they were ambushed.
Rather than phase on the spot to turn and fight, in their infinitely stoned wisdom they flung themselves into a parked hippy van. There was already a guy in the back, but he was high too and the keys were in the ignition and yeah. With Steve driving pedal to the metal and Rick riding shotgun and some random stoned guy laughing in the back, they drove for over an hour in incoherent panic before determining that they'd probably made a clean getaway. Terrified and way too drugged up to think of a rational plan, on the guy in back's advice they knocked over a liquor store (the stoner supplied the gun) and went to the airport.
Twenty four hours later they woke up in Bruges with the clothes on their back, a bag of potato chips, no cash, and the worst hangover they'd ever had in their lives.
Steve took to the place better than Rick, who was confused about why they didn't go somewhere like Mexico or Cuba, where there were at least beaches to be useless and bored on. In any case, he did agree that returning to the states was inadvisable. Steve found work as an accountant while Rick spent a lot of time kicking around the streets and eating people's cats and collecting news clippings of tales of yellow-eyed cat eating monsters lurking in the fog around the canals. And complaining.
It was a good seven years before he managed to get Steve drunk enough to agree to moving again. They spent another ten years in South America between Argentina and Brazil. Their next move was into Alaska for a few years, where there were moose, among other things. Vegas followed, disappointingly uneventfully. Somewhere in the course of all of this, Steve managed to get Rick to pay attention long enough to learn the basics of accounting, and by the time he'd convinced him that the rumors in Forks might have some merit that they should look into, they were roughly in business together under the assumed names of Rick Steveson and Steve Rickson, which Rick found hilarious and Steve found less so.
