Chapter Text
The days wither by as you all try to forget.
You help Natalie drag Jackie’s corpse into the meat shed, and you both say nothing as Shauna starts to spend more hours in there than not. You watch Natalie put an extra pile of blankets just inside the door, and hope it’s enough.
There never is enough these days.
Not food, and certainly not patience, especially not for the fuckhead that keeps shitting in the piss bucket. The second time it happens, everyone is already primed to explode.
“I’m not doing that shit again,” Tai growls, final, and the cabin goes silent.
Nobody volunteers, not even Misty, who just sinks lower into her seat and fiddles with her glasses. The tension grows and grows until you know something is about to break.
You're not the type to roll over for just anybody, but as goalie, you are accustomed to taking hits for the team, so you say nothing as you stand, shrug on the bucket and trudge outside into the bitter snow. The Dumping Grounds (a name bestowed by Mari, which so far none of the have girls protested) is a few minutes away from the cabin, close enough to be convenient for Coach Scott but far enough away that none of them have to deal with the smell. The bucket itself is a different story, and you pile it up with pristine white snow and shake it around before tossing it all out with the rest.
On the walk back, you somehow manage to trip over a tree root - it happens so fast you can't even get your hands out in front of you, tangled up in the bucket handle as they are - and smash, head-first, deep into the snow. Your face lights up in agony, a line of fire burning up your half-healed stitches, blinding flash-bang of pain going off before it all goes blissfully numb from the cold and you manage to drag yourself back up, cursing and spluttering. The tree root itself sits tauntingly at the edge of your foot, big enough that no one but you could have missed it. You shake snow off angrily and glare at it, baleful.
There’s something wrong with your right eye. It fucks up your depth perception, worse even than if it had gone completely blind - it still half-works, giving everything around you a muffled look, a murky, smeared blur that only really manages to pick up movement. Next to useless, another breakage to add to your growing pile of broken things.
Yet you swear, at night, when you squint the other eye – the good eye – closed, your vision is sharper than ever. You wonder, sitting in front of the fireplace at night, if light ever reflects off the iris, remembering the way yellow eyes blinked out from beyond the darkness just before you were dragged away in the night.
Something in you is changing, and you don’t yet know what.
//
Sometimes your jaw hurts so fiercely it takes everything in you not to throw yourself face first in the snow again and cry, cheek burning hot like the flames that had crawled up the side of your face until you managed to wrench yourself out between the death row of seat belts and polished leather, like the pyre you awoke to that cruel, star-glutted night.
You’ve taken to sitting on the window ledge when it happens, knees up and arms folded, staring out into the snow for hours on end. Nobody tries to disturb you like this, not when you stare blankly out with your one good eye whilst the other jerks in fits and starts, still blood red and eerie. The other girls respect your unspoken claim over the spot, and you take advantage of it every time your skin starts to prickle with something untamable, an urge that grows and lurks right under the surface of your skin.
The urge to let go, to scream and howl and cry out and run through the forest on all fours had persisted well after the mushrooms had worn off and you and Tai had stumbled back into the cabin, dazed and still blinking the dream-haze from your eyes, back to Jackie with her disgust and fear and utter confusion at the state of the world around you, crossing her arms and slinging jabs like she still hasn’t noticed that they were in middle of the fucking woods with almost no food left.
Now she’s dead, and you’re not, and you really don’t know who is the lucky one in this scenario.
It pulses again, that rumbling, restless feeling sitting deep in your chest, and the moonlight slanting through the forest canopy outside the cabin window only seems to make it worse, an itch you can’t scratch no matter how much you try.
The moon is full, and your belly is so very, very empty.
//
Your teeth still feel too big for your mouth, cutting into your cheeks every time you speak. It jostles the open wound still hiding in the warm wet cavern of your mouth, leaking copper on your tongue and over your lips until you swallow. The taste of blood is constant nowadays, and instead of repulsing you, like it did the first few times you ate deer meat a tad too undercooked to be FDA-safe, it entices you. It makes that unnamable something in your chest sit up and grumble.
It makes you hungry, but so does everything else these days.
You keep worrying at the insides of your cheek anyway, giving your throat something to swallow, even if its only ever your own blood. Pre-crash, you’ve never learned to let your own wounds lie, constantly picking at the scabs from soccer practice and the bruises from home – its a habit you’ve picked up around the third time you had to clean up your mom’s vomit from the ragged threads of the couch, and while it’s definitely not serving you out here in the wild, where infection is a background but ever looming worry, god knows you’re not about to stop.
You’re used to pain; used to taking it and molding it into something of a comfort. The needles in your fingers from the cold are reminders that you are still here. The circle of fire around your wrist reminds you that you are not alone. That, weak as you are, you can still protect the ones you love. The pain in your cheek – well, that one’s harder to spin, but it's not like you were particularly fussed about your appearance before, anyway. The wolves getting to you first instead of any of the other girls was probably the best outcome you all could’ve hoped for.
Besides, chicks dig scars, or so you joke to anyone who would listen, Taissa rolling her eyes by your side. You grin at her and it hurts, but she smiles back and your chest squeezes .
It’s all worth it. It has to be.
//
You’re out in the forest gathering firewood when it happens.
Tai wields the axe like its an extension of herself, focused and sure and so unspeakably sexy. You snap skinny branches off naked trees and try not to walk into any because you're too busy staring at the little furrow between Tai’s brows as she considers the angle of her swing, or the way the muscles in her neck twist and bunch when she finally brings the axe down. It’s a losing battle.
It’s barely visible under the cover of the pure white snow, but like a third sense you feel the presence of another creature right as the foliage rustles, a few grains of snow shifting with barely perceptible activity.
Somehow the movement catches your right eye and you turn, gaze fixed on the brush, nose upturned as if you could smell – there.
Taissa blinks at your sudden motion.
“Van, what-”
You lunge with dizzying speed at the rabbit, the sweet fear stink of prey invading your senses until it's all you can see, hear, smell. The world has sharpened into crystal clear clarity, the forest alive and you with it, but the only thing that holds your attention is the smooth white of fur, the subtle gleam of red eyes blinking in and out through the snow as it runs, the way your muscles glide over your bones as you give chase, your breath hot and damp and wet with excitement.
With hunger.
It’s a mad scramble through the thick snow, but you relish it the way you do when you finally get to stretch your muscles after a long period of disuse. Your limbs warp with the exertion, you think your teeth grow a little sharper in your mouth. You feel the wild urge to cry out in exuberance, that thing in you finally bursting through its cage and howling with delight at what it finds. It’s euphoria you’ve only ever gotten saving a game-changing goal, or the feeling of running barefoot through the grassy junkyard behind your house when you were a kid, before the steel had overtaken the green and you’d exchanged the running for a mop and a bucket.
Even then, freedom had never tasted so good, so right, pure oxygen in your veins.
You catch up to your prey in three bounds, and there’s a split second of struggle as it tries to kick and wrestle away from your hands, the fluttering hum of its heart ticklish against your palms.
You pull it apart and the scent of fresh blood overwhelms you, fills you with an unbearable frenzy that can only be soothed by the act of sinking your teeth into it, hot and raw and twitching still, its death throes only spurring you on. A distant part of you is screaming, horrified, but nothing makes it past your throat but wet snuffles, grunts and growls of satisfaction. It’s the first real meal you’ve had in weeks, and you’re starving.
You tear and gnaw and rind, swallowing each mouthful with a relish you hadn’t allowed yourself in the real world, and with each bite you feel yourself getting stronger, healthier, more whole. It’s a while before you hear anything besides the sound of your own chewing.
“-an? Van!”
You look up at Taissa and your face is painted red. For a split second her face morphs into something else, something with a pulse and blood and meat , but you blink and your vision resolves itself once more, and it’s Taissa standing there, her mouth a perfect O of horror.
Your stomach, purring with satisfaction just seconds before, drops.
//
You come back to yourself by degrees.
Your hair is a shaggy mess, and you swear some of it is longer than it was just minutes ago, covering the pale skin of your forearms, your throat, russet tinged black with gore.
You try to speak, but your throat catches on the chunks - god, chunks - still in your mouth, and all that comes out is a pathetic whine.
“Van?” Taissa’s voice, hesitant, scared, shifts something in you, and you drop the corpse and scramble away from it, from her, and it’s only the shock of pain from your back hitting a tree that startles you out of the haze of bloodlust for good and you spit out red and gag and your hands are naked and shaking and you are wrong what you’ve just done is so wrong and utterly fucked up but you felt good while doing it and that, out of everything, makes you lose it.
You throw up.
There are hands moving your hair, rubbing your back, and you choke as more blood and bile comes up, along with - the rest of it. Your stomach squeezes, pulses.
“Don’t-“ you shudder, and spit again. “Don’t come near me.”
Now that you’re aware of your body, the trail of red snow that leads from the forlorn carcass to where you are huddled, the thick taste of metal on your tongue; the cold starts to seep in, and your shivers intensify as the wind cuts through your soaked sweatshirt. Your clothes are irrevocably stained, you don’t know how you’re gonna explain any of this to the girls, and the only food you’ve seen in weeks is now a ravaged mess on the forest floor. The grinding hunger has abated, and exhaustion floods back in.
Taissa shudders along with you, but her hands are steady as she helps you up from the ground.
You look down at your own but they’re naked once again, no trace of fur or of claw. Only webs of blood, quickly drying in the cold.
//
“Maybe you were asleep. Like me.”
You shake your head miserably. “I wasn’t sleeping, Tai. I… wanted it. It felt like, I don’t know, a release. Or something. It felt good.”
You can’t look at Tai’s face when you admit it, and the whole of your body is braced against the sound of her footsteps as she gets up to leave, muscles locked like the time you were so drunk on shitty beer and shitter vodka and Tai was looking at you like you were something better than you were and you couldn’t stop yourself from blurting out that you liked girls to her face. You tell yourself it's because you could never lie to her, but honestly you’ve never been very good at lying to yourself, either. It isn’t honesty that makes you say these things. It’s a bad habit you’ve never been able to stop yourself from doing. It’s trying to ruin a good thing before it even happens. Just to see.
You’ve always felt lucky that Tai didn’t leave then.
You don’t know how to feel when she doesn’t leave now.
//
You watch as Taissa paces the length of the attic – one-two-three-four-turn, repeat – while you’re absolutely chuffed that she’s well and awake enough to be making plans and theorizing - between Jackie's death and the increasingly frequent instances of sleepwalking, it's nice to see her return to some semblance of her regular self - you kinda wish it didn’t take you going slightly insane for it to happen.
“It could be a disease. Abnormal behavior is a reported symptom of rabies.”
“Great. Here I was thinking I’m a spirit store Frankenstein, but hey, actually I was a bargain bin werewolf all along! Improvements all around.”
“Frankenstein’s monster,” Taissa says, autopilot. You wave your hands in a yeah yeah, whatever motion.
She frowns harder. “You’re not a werewolf, Van. And you’re certainly not a monster.” You can’t help but scoff at the words, empathetic as they are.
“Yeah, right. Maybe you should be locking me in the attic.” It’s meant as a joke, but comes out a touch too raw to be anything but. Tai gives you a look, like she can’t even believe you could think to suggest something so stupid, but then softens at whatever expression she must see you make in return.
“Nobody’s locking anyone in the attic. We’re in this together, remember?”
You take a breath and let it out slow. “Right.”
In a way, some part of this makes sense. You’ve never quite felt settled in your own skin anyway, even before the crash and the fire and the wolves. There was always something marking you as different, unacceptably so - too loud, too boyish, too much for everyone else. You just didn’t think this would be how it chose to catch up with you.
Tai sits down next to you, giving a sigh of her own. Like this, it's easy to pretend you’re just two girls sharing a quiet moment, nothing visible of the violent and irrepressible urges you think you’ve both carried long before your life became these fucking woods. Just two girls, nothing more, nothing less.
“God, what a pair we make, huh?” You nudge her gently, and she smiles back, tentative but genuine.
“No fucking shit.”
You both sit there in that rare pocket of comfortable silence for minutes, the howling wind outside for once muffled by the thick blanket of snow, taking in the sugar-spun ice quiet that neither of you had known back in Wiskayok. After a while, Tai puts her hand in yours. You grip it with as much ferocity as you dare to muster.
“We’ll be okay, right?”
You think about summers on the field, sprinting across the green with great, gasping breaths, collapsing on the bleachers in laughter after practice, lying on the roof of Tai’s colonial, counting the stars. You think about the whispers and snickers in the halls as you walk by, the constant looks and pointed comments you get from just existing as you are, the stink of your mom’s breath as she shouts slurs at you while you clean up her mess.
You think about the woods, and the moon, and the darkness that comes with unfettered freedom. Of teeth and sacrifice, and the fragility of skin.
“Yeah. We’ll be alright.”