Tori
I waited as long as I could stand it after she went up those stairs. At first, I just paced the cage, wondering if Gwen was still watching, wondering if she'd say anything or if she'd come down to make her offer again. Anger was gnawing at me, and the pressure in my bladder wasn’t helping. I was fuming at how little respect I’d gotten my entire life.
Abandoned by my parents. Fuck them, wherever they were - if they were even still alive.
Abused by the foster system. Fuck every one of them, and especially fuck the predators that took advantage of the system.
Tormented and shunned by teachers and other students at every school I had gone to. Fuck all of them for not being able to get past their stupid primate instincts and see me as a person rather than a threat.
Screamed at by customers or co-workers at the few jobs I did get to have.
Slapped around by Spike and Fang.
Humiliated, chained up, beaten and berated by Alpha.
And now sprayed and caged like an animal by Gwen.
My blood was practically boiling when I couldn’t take it anymore. She never came back down, although I still had no way of knowing how long it had been. It was cruel to not leave a clock. When I was confident enough that she slept, I shifted again, going into the brute form and laying on the floor, planting my feet on either side of the door’s hinge, and grabbing the bars. I thought about all the times she'd called me runt, all the times Spike and Fang had done the same, I thought about smashing Spike's face that very morning. I thought about how fucking sure Gwen was that I was helpless... but she'd been pretty sure with the collar the first time too. She had snatched it out of the cage with a stick like the fucking monkey she was. I was going to teach her not to underestimate me.
I’d show them all. I’d take Gwen with me, back to the cabin. I’d keep her as the pack’s pet and prove to everyone that I wasn’t a runt, that I could carry my own weight and thensome.
I worked myself up, I snarled, and I pulled.
And when it didn't give, I pulled harder, yanking, crouching next to the door and slamming myself into it over and over... when a banshee’s shriek filled the room. I released the bars, pressing my hands to my ears, trying to shut the sound out and being very glad that I wasn't in wolf form... but it didn't stop. The piercing wail kept on and on and I lost it, slipping back to human form.
"Turn it off!" It hurt, it was like getting stabbed in the ear with a sharp stick over and over and over. "Fuck! Turn it off!"
No matter how tightly I pressed my hands against my ears, I could hear it, like it was burrowing through my skull.
Finally, finally the sound stopped and the lights came on.
“Victoria.” She sighed, looking down at me through the bars of the cage. I felt small and humiliated in that moment. “It’s five A.M., what are you doing?”
"I'm trying to escape, you fucking bitch." I spat, slapping my hand against the floor. "How many fucking tricks and traps do you have!? I don't want to be here."
She crossed her arms, shifting her weight to one leg. Being scolded by a woman in a bathrobe was not helping my morale, or my temper. “Didn’t go too well for you, I see? I told you. Humans are the apex predator for a reason. Whine all you want about us using tools and traps. When it works, it works.”
"Rragghh!" I shouted my rage... but it was pointless. My bladder was aching and I had a headache from the piercing sound. Something had to give, and I would rather it be my dignity than my bladder. "Fine. Fine! I'll put on the collar. I'll wear the bracelets. Let me take a shower and a piss!"
“Give me a sec.” She turned and walked away, leaving me alone.
“Wait! What are you doing?” She was gone a lot longer than a sec and I pressed my thighs together, embarrassed and desperate. When she finally came back, she laid the collar and the bracelets by the food-slot in the cage. “It’s not hard to put these on, just snap them shut.”
My face was full of pain as I reached out and took them. I half-expected the bracelets to burn when I touched them, but they didn't... they smelled off though. They looked like watches without a face, just a smooth bar on one side, split open by the latch. With a sigh, I pulled one over each wrist. They were like watches without a face, just a smooth metal surface where the time should have been.
"Gwen... give me a little dignity. Not the collar... please?" It was the first time I had used that word with a human in years. I made a point of never saying it. Ever. "I'm tired and I'm filthy and I have to pee. Please."
“You agreed to wear it.” Without a shift in her expression, she stared down at me. Stone. Unmoving. “And when you’re finished with your shower, I’ll give you something to wear for your dignity.”
I sighed, picking up the collar and staring at it sadly for a moment. I had a strong hunch that the bracelets would keep me from forcing my way through the pain, through the shift and by putting this on, I was going to make escaping a lot harder.
With knots in my stomach, I lifted it to my throat... and I couldn't do it.
The shame was too much. Putting this collar on would be submitting to the human. I struggled against tears as my hands fell.
"I can't."
“Tell me, Victoria. What’s the problem? You already agreed that I was in charge.”
I shook my head. I couldn't say it. If I put the collar on, I was submitting. I was the runt. I was too weak to beat a human and I was no better than a dog.
That my last set of parents had been right and that I was too weak to do anything.
"I don't want to be a dog... "
"Collars are fashion statements, hun." Gwen sat down in the folding chair casually, leaning back as if she expected me to take a while, as if she knew I’d give in eventually. "I've sold four very similar collars to some very happy people. I'm fairly sure they were all humans, too. You're not a dog. And wearing that won't change anything. Putting a goldfish on a leash won't make it a dog either."
"Fuck you." I said the words with exasperation, with a sadness, not with fury. I looked up at her, sitting in her chair, staring down at me through the bars of the cage, waiting for me to put the collar on so she could control me. I squeezed my thighs together as my emotions battled with my needs. "You're literally trying to train me like a dog. You've got whistles and collars and I have to submit just to go to the bathroom." I shouldn't have said it out loud. The tears were coming now. "Fuck you, Gwen. You don't know shit about werewolves."
"What I know is that being in a pack isn't much different. Packleaders don't go easy on the new ones. I’ve got whistles and collars to even the playing field. Other wolves have teeth and claws. What's different here is that you don't need to scavenge and fight for food. You’ve got a warm roof over your head. The collar won't do anything if you don't try to hurt me. But I'm the Packleader here. You want to challenge me? I'm not going to just back down. Maybe there'll be a time when I don't need all this. It's definitely not tonight though."
I sneered at her little speech. "You're describing a pet. An Alpha lets you have some dignity." My objection was only half-hearted. Alpha didn't allow me a shred of dignity, she knocked me around, she kicked me, she shamed me, she threw me outside...
Bitterly, I snapped the collar around my neck, feeling an awful shiver go through me.
"There."
When I got out of this, I'd take her. She'd be my pet. She knew too much about wolves to be loose. Wiping the tears from my eyes, I made this promise to myself - I'd repay her for every humiliation. I kept my eyes down, not wanting to see her, not wanting to look at that face - if she looked smug, I’d lose it. If she said good girl to me again, I’d lose it.
The void waited for me on either side. One side despair, the other side fury, with me walking on the thinnest of cables. Angry tears fought for freedom, some few escaping just to show Gwen she was winning, my body betraying me. The smallest of breezes would push me over, send me tumbling into the chasm.
"So, here's how this is going to work." I looked up to Gwen, who had stepped away and now held an old, worn cane with a silver tip. "That door leads to a storage area. The bathroom is through it. Haven't had the cash to renovate the storage room to make it nicer. Bathroom is upgraded at least." She pulled on a leather cord around her neck, showing a medallion of some kind - I couldn’t see the design clearly. "You get within five feet of me and you're not going to like what it does. I'm giving it a ten second delay to walk over, unlock the cage, and give you space to crawl out. Any questions?"
My heart sank when I realized that the bathroom wasn't upstairs. I thought I was buying an attempt to escape by selling my dignity - Alpha would have been able to break the collar and the bracelets and she’d take this human bitch down and carry her off.
But it wasn't going to happen that way, not with me... at least, not easily.
Five feet was a pretty big bubble... but I was going to wait until after my shower to make a break for the stairs. I was faster than she was, and I could break down a door in my human form. But now I had to hedge that bet - if I was wrong, if she was more prepared than I thought, I'd end up back in the cage.
So the shower came first.
"No."
Sullenly, I waited while she unlocked the cage. With a heart contorted by helpless rage, I crawled out of it, hating my weakness, hating that it took me time to shift. Alpha had told me a million times that my struggle with shifting, how slow I was at it, would cost me. If I could shift like she did, the collar and bracelets wouldn't matter.
“Alright, let’s go.” She gestured at the door on the far side of the room from the stairs.
Does this make you feel powerful, human?
I was seething as I walked into the storage room - it was her own little stockpile. Canned foods, dry goods, bins of clothing - a typical human basement storage.
So she can look at her captive while she gets her next box of cereal?
The door beyond opened easily, though I tested the doorknob with the back of my wrist before trusting it. The burn ointment had helped a little, it had numbed the pain in my palm - I didn't want to think about how much it would hurt if I got another silver burn in that same spot.
The small bathroom was clean with a surprisingly modern aesthetic given how rough the storage room was. Black and white, gleaming tile on the floor, stainless steel tiling on the wall, and a huge, frosted glass shower. The smell of chemicals assaulted me, cleaning agents, harsh things.
"Is the collar going to shock the shit out of me when it gets wet?"
“No,” she called from the storage room. There were no exits here, just a fan in the ceiling for ventilation. No windows, no clocks, nothing to use as a weapon unless I wanted to rip the toilet off the ground and throw it at her. “It’s waterproof. You can clean around it, you can move it and turn it - it’s sensitive enough to tell the difference between that and the wearer trying to break it.”
"You do realize how fucked up this all is, right? The fact that you have a cage in your basement and shock collars and shit?" I didn't wait for a reply before stepping into the shower and turning on the water.
It had been so long since I had a hot shower. Since the change, my body preferred cold showers, cold water - but I wanted to feel the heat. It was going to take me ages to get clean - the water ran brown off of my body.
I just decided to piss right there in the shower, it was fine. I didn't mind a lot of things that would have bothered me before the change. The hot water felt good, though I saved washing around the collar for last. Her shampoo smelled mostly of cucumbers - it was nice. It was really, really nice. Nice enough that I ignored the smell of chemicals underneath it.
To enjoy human comforts again. I could have wept if it wasn't so humiliating.
I thought of the last time I had a real shower, not just one at a truck stop or some public shower at a campground. I thought about living in a house, going to work, watching TV and playing games on my phone. Being normal. Not running through the wilds, not avoiding people and getting slapped around by my packmates. Not being a wolf.
And I cried.
She couldn’t see me here, she wouldn’t see me crack, not as long as I kept quiet. Crying quietly was a skill I had honed to perfection in my childhood. Sliding down the wall, I let the silent sobs shake me. The humiliation of the night, the weight of the collar, the resentment at my pack, and more than anything, the fury at myself. My chest shook from the weight of the emotions as the hot water cascaded over me.
It wasn’t fair. It had never been fair, and I didn’t want to be human. The fantasy of a house, a job, a normal life was ash on the wind. The humans would never let me have that. Humans at whatever job I got would shun me without knowing why, neighbors would hate me. Every moment around humans was a fight.
It was hard to remember sometimes that was what Alpha had saved me from when she killed my parents that night at the campground. And as hard as she was on me, she was right. If I could shift quicker, I could have escaped. If I had gone to get Alpha instead of trying to get the bag myself. If I had just swallowed my pride and took my lumps. One thing that was becoming clearer from all of this… Alpha was right about a lot.
Eventually, the tears stopped, the water was finally running clear, my hair was clean for the first time in ages - and I mean really clean, not just rinsed in lake water or rainwater - I felt more human than I had in years.
So I decided to shave my legs, to shave my pits. When it was done, when I could run my hand over my leg and feel that silky smoothness... I was elated. I was floating on clouds... until I stepped out of the shower and saw myself in the mirror.
There was Tori Tanner. Fresh faced and young, smiling back at me.
With a big fucking steel collar around her neck.
And the happiness was gone. Soured. Evaporated in an instant, blasted by the scorching heat of my hatred. Only the unexpected blonde highlights in my hair cracked my scowl into a small smile again. A near perfect tan, only the smallest difference where a t-shirt would be. Not the bikini lines I would have preferred, there was something magical about that, but the sun-kissed look was good on me. I looked like... a girl. Not a bum, not a werewolf, I looked like I could fit in society again with the right clothes. My tummy was taut, my arms were wiry and defined, my collarbones stood out above my small breasts.
I looked like an athlete, like the track star I thought I could have been in high school but failed at attaining.
I called sourly to my captor, doing what I could to dry my hair before I wrapped the towel body. "I'm done."
She was already in the doorway when I turned around.