Tori
She had cried. She cried for me.
Gwen was a hard bitch who lived on her own in the middle of fucking nowhere. She wasn’t crying because she didn’t like the sight of blood, the rugged asshole knew how to sew up a wound using fishing line for crying out loud.
She had driven that needle into my flesh again and again and again while I complained.
And she had cried for me. It couldn’t have felt good with her face all bruised up the way it was. I had blacked one of her eyes and her nose was swollen. It looked painful.
It was messing me up. It was making it harder to hate her. And she was right, even if I killed her right now, what was I going to do? I could survive on eating her body for a few days, but then what? What if I didn’t heal in time? What if Alpha couldn’t find me, was I going to starve to death in her basement?
If I got out right now, I couldn’t run away.
That was the reason I wasn’t attacking. Not because she cried for me. Not because I could smell her rose and mint again, and certainly not because that smell made me feel happier now.
“So… how about we relax and watch some movies?”
I sighed. It was better than nothing. And in this form, I could really only give her my mood, which was sour.
I nudged the door with my head, giving a small whine.
She echoed my sigh, gazing at me with a look of difficult thought in her eyes. I tensed painfully as she walked toward the cabinet she kept the spear in. The spear didn’t appear, thankfully. Instead, she held a metal can of some sort with a round pin hanging out of it like a grenade.
“Tori.” She held up the cylinder “I’ve made a lot of things I’m not terribly proud of. Ways to defend myself and others in case of werewolf attacks. This,” she turned the circle-pin toward me, “is a smoke bomb. The smoke is relatively harmless to humans but it’s got a mix of things that, to put it lightly, don’t agree with werewolves.” She sighed again. “I made it for outside use, to chase a wolf away. In here, the smoke won’t be able to go anywhere. If this goes off, if you breathe the smoke, your lungs will burn the way your hand did. You… “ She was struggling with her words, with her emotions. “I can’t leave myself unprotected. If you attack me this time, you might get hurt very, very badly. Bark once if you understand.”
It made sense. I could agree to that. I just wanted to be able to move around - the threat of the smoke bomb was fine, even if I was absolutely sure I could get the kill, I wouldn’t right now. It was probably starvation for me if I did.
Her feeling safer with the smoke bomb was more reasonable than say, a leash and a muzzle. I wouldn’t be able to shift out of them now, I’d actually be restrained by those, and the humiliation would be far too much. I’d rather stay in the cage.
And I wasn’t going to bark for her. I nodded again instead.
"I'm gonna let that go this time because I don't want to push you into an even worse mood." Gwen gave a weak smile. There was still a sadness in her. "I need you to wait a second though, I'm getting everything set up first so you can be comfortable."
I watched from the cage as she did just that, standing the air mattress up against the wall, getting blankets and pillows set up next to her recliner - which she had righted after the fight. A bowl of water. Of course, what else was I going to drink from? I rolled my eyes, though I had no idea what that actually looked like in this form.
In front of the blanket-bed she had made for me, she laid out an assortment of DVD boxes.
“Let’s just try to relax today, alright?” She opened the cage and took a step back, giving me room to hobble out. Gently, gingerly, I limped out of the cage on three legs, never really letting my right hind bend.
Of course, I played up my limp, dragging the leg a bit for effect. The way she winced, I actually felt a little guilty for the choice. But this was her fault.
Alpha wouldn’t be sad if she had hurt you in a fight.
The thought came from nowhere, but it was true. She’d broken my arm once in a scuffle, one of the times I tried to stand up to her. She didn’t take care of me, she didn’t take care of the wound, and she certainly didn’t shed a tear over it.
Standing on the bed in front of them, I looked at what she had.
She was honestly giving me more choice now that I was injured than she had before. Ironic. Gwen apparently liked to watch cartoons? It wasn't a thing I was very familiar with - I had been taught as a child that animation was a form of lying to the audience, making it so you could see the villains clearly. In real life, the villains looked like everyone else. It painted the world in bright colors where things were clear and good and bad were clearly separated. Nobody real was all good, and most humans weren't good at all.
I gave a small chuckle, fairly sure Gwen wouldn’t be able to tell what the sound was. She had a lot of movies about wolves, most of them cartoons. Some were even about werewolves. The woman was obsessed - but had the obsession started before or after she met her first real werewolf? How much of the fiction did she believe was true?
Then again, I hadn't believed the silver thing was true. Alpha didn't believe in focusing on weaknesses - it didn't matter what weapon your enemy had, if you got hit you had already fucked up.
The way she had the boxes arrayed said that she wanted me to pick the movie, which was more than I had gotten before. I tapped a paw on one of the werewolf-looking movies, curious what lies she had to share there.
Wishing I could pace a bit more and fluff it before settling in, I pawed at the blanket as best I could before laying down very, very carefully.
"The oddest kind of werewolf I've ever seen." Gwen leaned over the arm of her chair, grinning at me. "Your soul ever leave your body like that?"
She had drawn more than one laugh from me during the course of the movie. It had been relaxing in a way I hadn’t expected, and while she was obviously enjoying the film, it didn’t stop her from popping off with sarcastic remarks during. She had also passed me a piece of jerky now and again, my own movie snacks. It was kind of nice, really.
The animation had been less disingenuous than I expected, though the colors did show good and bad - from the human perspective, of course. And it was their own glorified imagining of what wolves were like.
And Gwen had a sense of humor. Of course, I already knew that she did - it was why she was a bitch. How she managed to find exactly what was going to piss me off at any given point. She was sharp, she reacted quickly, and she was good with words.
She’d make good company if she wasn’t such a raging jerk.
...but now I needed something. I needed to communicate to her that I needed the bathroom - and by that, I meant I needed to go outside. I stood, shakily, and limped over to the staircase, looking at her and then looking up.
"You're putting me in a hard spot, Tori." Gwen sighed when she figured out what I was saying. "I'm gonna give you two choices. You can just go piss in the shower and I'll clean it out later. Stand in front of the storage room for that one. Or, I'll take you outside. But I want you to wait in the cage while I go get ready. It's a show of good faith and doesn't put me at risk of you listening to the advice of a shoulder devil."
I was doing it as a favor to her, not to me. I huffed, hot air from my nostrils in response to her choice. She wanted to clean it up? Fine. But she couldn't say I didn't try to warn her. I'd rather not go shit in the cold anyway. I could still move faster on three legs than I could one human leg.
I headed for the storage room, letting Gwen open the doors for me, and limped on into the shower with one final glance back at my captor... before she disappeared back into the other room.
Gently, I stepped up into the shower... and did my business.
And headed back out to the prison. It was probably a good thing I didn't have readable expressions this way, I would have been smirking. Limping back out, I headed for the array of movies.
I settled back in, laughing softly as she went into the bathroom… and came back out with an uncomfortable look on her face a few minutes later.
"Well. I guess we're both learning a lot about each other." It drew another laugh from me, a series of soft, muted barks. "We'll need to figure that out eventually. But I obviously just can't let you walk upstairs and go outside like this. But that's future Gwen and Tori's problem." She sat back down, cracking a soda for her and a fresh bag of jerky for me. "The current problem is choosing another movie to watch."
Movies and relaxing was vastly preferable to her degrading me through the bars of the cage. My ears went back on their own, and it took a moment for me to figure out why. I was still mad at her. She had said I was a slave to my wolf, to the instincts. That the wolf wanted to be petted and ordered around, that the wolf wanted to obey.
Well, I was the wolf now, and I disliked her just as much as ever.
On the one hand, I had picked the first movie and it was only fair if she got to pick the second... on the other hand, that was the human talking. Wolves share with those who are weak and need it, and those who are strong and take it.
Already laying next to her chair, I flopped a paw down on a movie about aliens in Hawaii, by the looks - it would also be human propaganda, about how the other and the unknown was inherently evil and humanity was inherently good... but we'd talk about that later.
When I could change again.
During this movie, she let her hand drape over the arm of her chair. I had noticed it, but hadn’t thought anything of it. Until she was stroking my left ear. Her touch sent a flash of anger through me at first… but I really did enjoy the scent of her perfume and the gentleness of her touch.
I decided to pretend I couldn't feel it at all and remained focused on the movie.
The cartoon was... oddly appropriate. The alien, a creature of destruction - who was colored in bright blue and cute, like a protagonist - pretended, poorly, to be a dog. The other main character, frequently in reds but similarly bright, was as inept as Gwen in handling the alien.
I liked the alien. He didn't choose to be what he was, he was born that way... but predictably, in the end, he integrated with humans because of course the human way of life is the correct one. The villains were clear in greens and browns and ugly. It started good and ended up like so much human garbage.
The alien was an idiot.
"I always liked that one." Gwen stretched, subtly pulling her hand away at the end. "I can't speak for werewolves of course, but the message seems to be a good one. Families are important, but you get to decide what makes it up. I guess that's kind of what packs are like? Maybe it's a bit of a simplistic take."
She looked down at me like she thought I might answer suddenly. If I could talk, I would. The musculature just wasn’t the same, it wasn’t easy to form sounds that made sense to a human.
"Well... I'm not sure what to do now. You hungry for lunch yet?" She took a moment to glance at her phone. Humans and their damned phones. They all stared at them so much. "Maybe taking a nap would be good for the healing process."
My answer to her was limping back over to the cage and slipping inside. Getting in and out was so much easier in wolf form.
A nap sounded nice, and I wasn't hungry, though I probably needed the food to heal faster. I didn't want a human meal though, I wanted a kill - to gorge myself on a fresh carcass and just rest for a few days.
But I was in no condition to hunt.
I kept my back to the cage opening as my subtle indication that while I went willingly, I wasn't happy about it.
“Get some rest, Tori.” Gwen refilled the water bowl and set it inside the cage before she tore the jerky bag wide and gave it as well. “I’m going to go try to get some things done around the house. I’ll check back in like… two hours? I’ll bring lunch with me.”
She hesitated, looking down at me, but she decided to lock me in.
And she was gone. I was back in the cage. Still unable to pace, now because my leg was hurt. Which, of course, she blamed on me.
The only thing I could do was think.
I thought about where I had failed in my attempt. I thought about how damned dangerous silver weapons were. I thought about the cage, the cinder block, and how she had subdued me again and again.
I could use stuffing from the cushion to plug my ears.... I was wishing I had thought about that sooner, it was so obvious in retrospect. I tried not to think about the things she had said before, but my thoughts ended up wandering to how her hand felt in my fur...
And how she might be right. The wolf responded to her. It was like I couldn't control it. Her touch felt good and I wanted more of it, her scent was wonderful and I wanted more of that, too.
I needed to get out of the wolf form. I couldn't trust it. I needed to talk to Alpha about it... but I was terrified that she'd kick me out of the pack if I did, that she'd say I should go be a pet. I needed to get back to human form and I needed to rely on the brute to kill Gwen. I needed to do it before Alpha found me.
...but for now I had to rest.