FIC: Walk Tall Beneath These Trees (Chapter I)
Rating: PG-13 for swearing and some sexual content
Spoilers: No particular spoilers in this chapter; while this is an AU, assume that the entirety of S1 (and, later, S2) is fair game to be used or twisted at some point.
Warnings: None for this chapter
Word Count: ~10,000
Summary: Ohio Territory isn't a friendly place for werewolves. Especially in a world like this, nobody makes it alone.
Chapter I: Ohio Territory Is For Lovers
Quinn never asked for any of this. Puck and Santana wouldn't give it up for anything. Finn is just trying to understand.
Author's Notes: So, I succumbed to the lure of the werewolf AU. Some credit completely owed to crown_of_weeds , aka the other half of the extensive meta discussion that gave birth to this fic in my head. Story title from Wolf Song, by Patrick Wolf, off his album Lycanthropy; chapter title is, of course, bastardized from Ohio Is For Lovers by Hawthorne Heights.
Ohio Territory isn't a good place for wolves.
They're around if you go looking for them, out into the dense patches of the Great Eastern Forest where the good asphalt roads don't quite reach. There are usually one or two scratching out a half-tamed living on the edges of any good-sized town, and Chief Sue Sylvester's troop of trained hunters walk right through the streets of Lima, collars flashing like talismans. Collars or no, even they know better than to bother anyone unless it's on her orders.
Ohio Territory is that kind of place. Oh, it's still more woods than farmland, but they're friendly and well-traveled woods, good for hunting, and logging, and quiet strolls with your lover. There are the inevitable few witches willing to get all the proper certifications who're working at making an honest living, a few other, not-quite-human things tucked away in back corners and out of sight, because there always are, really, even right in Nassau County if you look hard enough. But it's not like the badlands out in Sonora Territory, or those places up in Acadia where the Great Eastern Forest gets to the mountains and half the territory just runs wild.
Mostly, Ohio Territory is for people. It has more good-sized villages and towns than anywhere west of New York itself. Lima's nearly large enough to count as a small city if you judge it against the standards of one of the smaller provinces instead of by Nassau. The rivers all have dams and water wheels. Electric generators are easy to come by and fuel isn't too hard. It's a good, civilized sort of place.
There are reports, once or twice every six months or so: maulings out in the deep parts of the woods during a full moon, livestock disappearing, some poor unfortunate getting bitten. Chief Sylvester's wolves go out then, streaks of gray and brown and the sound of distant howls as they tear through the woods to drag the culprit in by the throat. It's always a messy business.
But what can you expect? An animal's an animal. It's not the werewolf's fault it can't help but kill.
~~~~
This is the first time Quinn's neck has been bare since her fourteenth birthday. Breathing feels funny, the throb of her throat against the empty place where her collar used to sit. That has to be the reason why breathing feels funny right now.
Sue's being generous, she's giving Quinn half an hour to pack and letting her keep most of the clothes and trinkets she's accumulated over ten years of being one of Sue's wolves. Not the weapons, of course, that would be totally illegal and irresponsible; not the Team Leader's pair of gleaming silver-coated knives and the sheath harness that always stayed with her no matter what shape she was in. Not the collar that always made every shopkeeper in Lima stand up and take notice, even the ones with NO DOGS signs right in their front windows. But her hairbrush. The little inlaid box that she uses for the silver cross necklace her mother gave her years ago that she can't touch bare-handed any more. The little fluttery dresses she wears when she's not in uniform, that make her feel almost human again.
There's not enough room in her heavy canvas duffel bag, but there's not enough time to sort through and pick and choose, and maybe she shouldn't be bringing anything along anyway. The full moon's in three days. Quinn will make better time on four feet than two. God knows she can't stay in Lima any more.
Better to pack it, though, better to try and run with it now and get rid of it later when she has time to think, when she can breathe again past the band of cold air wrapping around her throat where Sue used to make her safe. At least if she abandons the whole bag somewhere in the woods the other girls in the kennel won't be able to rip through her belongings, squabbling and fighting over who gets what. Santana's getting the knives, Quinn's sure. Let her enjoy them.
In the end her bag is only half full. She spends too long staring at the bed, wondering if she should try to bring the quilt or one of the pillows, wondering how feral werewolves sleep on nights with no moon. In all these years of hunting them down in their dens, she's never really thought about it.
In the end she has the boots on her feet, the clothes on her back, a few dresses and a few dollars cash. She doesn't own any pants that aren't part of her uniform. She'd never spent enough time out of it to think about that before, either. She hopes she doesn't have to run too soon. This skirt isn't made for the woods.
The Chief is waiting at the front gates of the kennel, Becky sitting at her side, growling low. Becky spends more time in wolf form than out, but she watches everything, even if only Chief Sylvester can tell what she thinks about it. Santana's there too, of course. The only real surprise is that half the troop isn't out front to watch her fall. Then again, they were all there when Sue took her collar off in the mess hall this afternoon. That has to be enough drama for anybody's day.
"Sorry to see it end this way, Q," Chief says, sounding almost regretful. "You had some skills. Shame to see you blow it like this."
"I never wanted this to happen," Quinn says, a little too desperately for what little pride she has left. "I'm sorry. I didn't--"
"Should've thought of that before you started sniffing around Hudson in the first place," says the Chief. "I can't have my wolves mingling with people like that. Sets a bad example. Next thing you know you've got half-breeds running around all over the place and there's rioting in the streets."
And it's so unfair, because Quinn knows that Sue knows Brittany and Santana don't bother to limit their conquests to their own species, that not all of Puck's bitches have worn collars. Sue doesn't always care unless the wrong mood strikes her, though, so long as everyone involved remembers to stick to meaningless animalistic fucking. It's the feelings that aren't allowed.
"You know the rules, Q. Get the hell out of here and don't let me see you again. I don't like it when I know my rugs' names, puts me off my morning protein shake." Everyone always says that Sue Sylvester is frozen through. Quinn supposes she always knew it, but even so, it's a trickle of iceberg down her spine.
"Later, Quinn," Santana promises, far too sweetly for the threat it implies. "I'll be sure to keep Puckerman warm for you." Like Quinn had wanted him, like she'd ever wanted him, like she'd ever wanted any of the filth and the fur and the drool and and the nastiness of being a werewolf at all.
"You two just make sure you don't catch any more fleas," Quinn says, just as sweetly. Then she shoulders her bag and turns down the road towards the sun, head held just as high as she's ever carried it despite the glare in her eyes, damp spring breeze kissing her throat like a welcome.
This is all, completely, 100% Finn Hudson's fault.
~~~
Finn Hudson's life story is pretty easy to summarize. Finn's a pretty nice guy. That's about it.
The town of McKinley where he grew up had about five or six hundred inhabitants, all but one of them people, and that one was about as tame as Finn figured a werewolf could be. There were some farms, some fields, a sawmill up at the north end run by Henri St. Pierre, a leather tannery just out of town to the east where the wind mostly blew the smell away.
Finn wasn't actually a farmboy, because his mom had to sell the farm when he was six when his father didn't make it back from the eastern front in Havannah. By the time he was seventeen he could handle a horse without hurting himself and a truck without hurting anyone else, fix an engine, field-dress a deer, and hit what he aimed at with a shotgun at least half of the time. He couldn't really sew, or cook, or tell which of the mushrooms out in the forest were the ones he was supposed to bring home for his mom to make dinner and which were the ones he was to bring to Mr. Hendershott, who bought the old farm, to dry down and use for rat poison, but that was okay. Mom and Mr. Hendershott were pretty good at telling the difference by then.
There was space for him in McKinley if he'd wanted to stay, if he hadn't been his father's son. Finn hasn't seen his dad in twenty years, but he remembers: Christopher Hudson dressed in his traveling uniform crouching down in the dust of the yard outside their front door, one hand on each of Finn's shoulders, eyes he can't quite picture but his mother says looked so much like his own.
"Promise me you'll look after your mom," he said, and Finn said, "I promise."
"And the farm," he continued. "All the dogs, and Sugar and Lancey, and the new kittens, and the goat." And Finn was only a little bit more than four and pretty sure the goat had tried to eat him last week, but he said, "I promise."
"You're the man around here now," said Christopher. "That means you have to take care of anyone who's smaller or weaker than you are. Do you understand?"
"I understand," said Finn, who was only a little bit more than four, and only barely understood that his father wasn't going to be back next week just like when he went up to Cinncinatti for the market.
"Do you promise?" prodded Christopher.
"I promise," said Finn, who really was only just a little bit more than four, but already knew the value of a promise like that. You had to keep it until the person you'd promised to said you were done, no matter what.
Of course nowadays, everybody was smaller than Finn. His dad had probably expected to get back before he got quite so tall.
He eventually figured out that his dad probably hadn't meant he had to look after everyone in the whole world, but he could at least help take care of Ohio Territory. Chris Hudson went off to war and died to protect the Empire. And even Finn could see it would pretty much destroy his mother if he did the same thing, but he could at least go all the way to the headquarters of the Territory Sheriff in Lima.
Finn is a good deputy. He's usually fair, and he always listens to what the victim has to say after a crime, and he can throw a pretty good punch when he has to. He's been promoted three times in the last five years, because he's one of the only deputies who's not scared to work with Chief Sylvester's werewolves and somebody's got to be the departmental liaison. Werewolves that threaten the peace in Ohio Territory are automatically Chief Sylvester's to deal with, but sometimes they scrape along kind of close to human law. Finn took an oath to serve and protect. He's pretty sure it's not supposed to matter what he's protecting people from.
None of this really explains why he, his shotgun, and a bag more full of bullets than anything else are loaded into the front seat of his pickup truck, roaring down the main road east out of town, not a badge in sight.
~~~
Santana stays poised behind Chief Sylvester and to the left for as long as Quinn stays in sight, every muscle held in the perfect relaxed tension of ready stillness. Becky stares and growls a soft, continuous threat without urgency.
Santana's never met a person besides Chief Sylvester who didn't underestimate Becky. People see her walking along at the Chief's side like a dog so often they start to think she's dumb like one. Becky's got about as much patience for human ways of doing things as she has for her human body. Santana doesn't really blame her.
"You and Brittany tried to seduce that deputy six months ago, didn't you?" the Chief asks without taking her eyes off the road.
"He wasn't interested," Santana says carelessly. "He was freaked out before we even got a chance to offer. Seemed like a waste of our time."
"And you didn't happen to notice that he wasn't interested because he was already tail-to-testicles with your own Team Leader?" Chief continues.
"They weren't sleeping together then," Santana says with absolute certainty. Yeah, the whole 'secret romance' thing kind of crept up on her, but there is no way she and Brittany would have missed that.
"Hmm," says Chief Sylvester. Quinn crests the last ridge out of town. She doesn't pause for a moment to be dramatically silhouetted against the sky or anything, even though the sun's totally at the right angle for it, just takes two or three more steps as even as all the ones that have come before and disappears from view.
"If I were you, I'd keep all my little paws crossed about that Team Leader spot," Chief says. "If you're lucky, the whole rest of the troop will spend the next few weeks being even more disappointing than usual and I won't be able to give it to somebody competent enough that they might actually notice a secret affair going on right in front of their noses."
"Yes, Chief," Santana says obediently, and waits for the signal to move.
"Go on, get out of my sight," Chief says. "I've had enough of dealing with cocky bitches and their delusions of specialness to last me until the next full moon."
Santana's through the gate and halfway to her dorm on the other side of the kennel before Chief Sylvester's even finished the sentence.
~~~
Puck met the Chief kind of late, for a troop wolf. She has most of her werewolves in training at the Lima kennel well before they hit sixteen. Puck was almost eighteen, when he finally came by. His mother calls him a late bloomer.
If asked, Puck would say it was his natural charm and obvious talent that persuaded Chief Sylvester to take him anyway. If she were asked, Sue would say that she wanted him under her thumb for as long as possible so that when he inevitably goes rogue, her wolves will know him well enough to be able to tear him to shreds without even needing to breathe hard.
Being one of Sue's wolves is kind of all perk, except for the boring working parts. He'd known about the sweet paycheck and the social currency that would let him actually spend it, but none of the stray wolf bitches he'd run into back when he was still roaming the backwoods of Akron Valley had ever been this willing to give it up. Sure, maybe some of that had to do with him being fifteen and still kinda spindly, but Puck prefers to believe that he's always been a stud, it's just that now he has the status to make people notice it.
And then there's the collar. It's all metal with no clasp, but it lays flat over his fur and snug against his skin no matter how he twists or moves his neck. Everyone says Chief Sylvester makes them herself. Puck's pretty sure the Chief's got more important things to do than weave hundreds of tiny metal links into fine mesh, but hey, who knows? She's definitely the one who put the magic on them--spells for extra strength, quicker healing, to let them always find each other. Enough magic to keep that much silver from killing anybody who wears it. And not that he's ever seen it happen or anything, but Puck's pretty sure the Chief knows exactly how to take all the spells off some wolf's collar and watch the silver poisoning eat them from the inside out.
Nobody knows that much about Chief Sue. She's a witch, everyone's pretty much got that, but she's one of the most respected figures in the Ohio Territory anyway. Everybody Puck's ever met, wolves, people, everybody is at least a little scared of her.
The really confusing thing is, she talks like a werewolf sometimes. Her smell is impossible to figure out even if he jabbed a nose right into her hand, the white part of lightning and the tangy part of silver, the round sort of edges of sweat from someone who isn't afraid, something smooth and hard and chemical, and as many different melodies of wolfmusk as the kennel itself. It makes no sense in words that fit on a human tongue, but the thing is, if Puck said any of that, the Chief would understand. She'd want to know why the hell he felt the need to describe her own scent to her, but she'd understand how he was saying it. And Puck's never met another not-wolf who could do that.
She might be a werewolf. Like, it's not outside the realm of possibility. Puck's never seen her on a full moon night. Everyone whose team isn't on duty gets an out-of-town pass to run a little wild on full moon nights, and everyone whose team is on duty spends their watch running through drills until they break off into wrestling and fucking on the practice ground. Sure, apparently some of the humans have seen her out and around town, but it's not like you have to change at the moon. Especially not if you're a witch like Sue. Puck doesn't know why anyone ever wouldn't want to, not when the moonlight is coming down and filling you up with more life than any human body can hold. But if Sue had a reason, she could definitely pull it off.
Even those poor domesticated bastards who actually lock themselves in cages change on full moon nights. Puck almost--almost--understands the cages for the ones who've been bitten, especially if they were old and used to being human all the time already. But the ones who've been wolves all their life? Who've spent minimum thirteen nights a year smelling colors and tasting sound since before their human mouths could talk? No fucking excuse. Pussies. Might as well be cats.
If Puck misses anything about life before coming to Lima, besides his mom and his sister, and getting to sleep in whenever he wanted, and having his mom make him waffles every morning-after-full-moon-night plus a bunch of other times every month just because...well. No. He doesn't miss anything besides that about life before coming to Lima. The other things that are definitely out there to miss didn't really happen in the Akron Valley, not if you didn't want to give Sue's wolves a reason to come after you. He can't miss not being afraid of Sue. Puck was born with claws on his hands and the moon wired to his spine. He's been afraid of Sue Sylvester his whole life.
He maybe misses being able to pretend not to care as much. And going out running for three days on end without telling anyone. And not having to wonder, way far back in the human part of his brain how much the uncollared bitches he sometimes meets on an out-of-town pass see the Chief's mark around his neck and think they have to.
But that was why he gave himself almost eighteen years out there, to make sure willingly putting a chain made of iron and silver around his neck wasn't as crazy as it sounded. That and the fact that it took his mom eighteen years to get tired of lying about where he was on full moon nights and throw him out to hunt, scrape, or get dragged before Sue on his own. But mostly the first thing.
~~~
The Ohio Territory troop is not a pack. That's important to remember. Wild animals have packs. Soldiers have troops.
Monkeys have troops as well, but that's almost fitting. A troop is a gathering of hairy animals that, if you squint in bad light, almost look human. Quinn doesn't think Sue made a mistake there.
It's not a pack. They patrol the forty mile radius around Lima every night, they don't roam across it. The only dominance hierarchy is the one Sue lays down, and hers is the only word anyone needs. It's not a family. They don't form mating bonds. They don't raise pups. They only hunt other wolves.
It's a job. It's a job that legitimized Quinn's existence near real people for long enough that she almost forgot she wasn't one. She blames Finn for that.
Finn Hudson came up to Lima out of nowhere seven months and eight full moons before Quinn was first promoted to Team Leader. He congratulated her. She remembers that.
Finn was bumbling. After being surrounded all day by inhuman grace and the occasional awkward steps of someone too used to their joints moving altogether differently, it was somehow sweet just to watch a piece of honest human clumsiness. Finn was sweet. Finn was honest. Finn was human.
Finn got so utterly befuddled by directions one night when they were out walking and he got turned around in the dark that Quinn nearly died laughing. He didn't mind being laughed at, even though she never told him he was the first thing to make her laugh in longer than she could remember. She'd forgotten he couldn't see in the dark. Nearly everybody who looked at her eyes instead of her neck while they were talking to her could see in the dark just fine.
There aren't very many wolf packs left in the Ohio Territory any more, but Quinn knows they exist. It's her business to know how wild wolves live. The ones from Ohio have mostly picked up and moved west, to Sonora and Sierra Territories, where they say packs sometimes run a hundred strong. Acadia's thick with them, torn with territorial disputes because there are nearly too many wolves just to fit on the land. It's hard to imagine.
There are werewolves out there that stick as close as family, no matter what--closer, then, than Quinn's human family. They run down deer and elk side-by-side and mate for life and raise pups in the dirt to become more grown-up werewolves who will never leave their pack, who will live their whole lives in raw meat and dog slobber, just like their parents, and their parents, and their parents before them. And something like that might be the closest to love that Quinn's ever going to have, now, because Finn Hudson is too human and too clean for her to ever be allowed to touch.
She was a human little girl, once. She used to fall asleep in her daddy's lap, clutching his shirt tight with her opposable thumbs. She had dreams about a husband, about a yellow house with shining wood floors and fluttering white curtains in every window. She used to play with baby dolls. She'd put them in little dresses and rock them in their cradles and think about what she wanted to name her children when she grew up, back when she'd thought they'd be human, too.
Finn reminded her of all of it. He rented a room in a boarding house six blocks west of the main Sheriff's station, the kind with a plump landlady who sets out breakfast every morning because Finn eats like a horse and can't cook anything that isn't over an open campfire to save his life. The landlady hung curtains in the drab little window, cream-colored lace that fluttered in the breeze while Quinn lay on her back in Finn's bed, face-to-face, like people do. She'd bury her nose in his neck while he shuddered and tried to last, smelling the healthy sour tang of a young man at the peak of exertion, and he would move in her, and she would let herself forget.
~~~
Brittany is doing a backbend on the very tips of her fingers and toes. The stretch is strange in her muscles, strange in her joints, but good-strange, tingling like the opposite of early moonlight.
Everything Brittany's body does makes sense. Her paws are for running and her tail is for balancing and her jaws are for lunging and snapping and biting. She doesn't think about it any more than Santana says people think about their human bodies, although Brittany finds that so hard to believe. There are so many joints that bend in so many ways. When Brittany's human she can be as upside-down as she is inside-out.
Her body can latch onto a rhythm and sail across it for a while, scratch at her side a quick staccato, lope across an empty yard an even brum-brum-brum. Her human body can latch onto a rhythm and dance.
Santana misses being human sometimes. It's not something she says on purpose, not in the droop of her tail or the way she holds her head or even in words, but Brittany knows. She's not sure why--human things are confusing, too many sentences and not enough making sense, too many rules that don't even apply to Brittany, too many special rules that do. She follows them when she can, except for one time, but Santana promised that was okay too. Santana still understands people even though her body talks like Brittany's now. She takes Brittany out into town and introduces her around, and they meet people who remind Brittany how humans can talk with their skin and their muscles and their cries too, once a werewolf gets rid of all the clothes and starts another kind of dance.
Santana is coming down the corridor, so Brittany pushes up with her legs and rolls forward onto two feet. Santana's happy-not happy today, Brittany can feel it hanging in the air even before she comes in the door.
Brittany frowns. Sometimes she forgets how many face muscles she sometimes has, especially right after a moon, but she's been mostly human for the past couple of weeks. "What's wrong?" she asks. "Did Quinn leave?"
"Yeah," says Santana. She drops backwards onto the nest of pillows Brittany uses as a bed whenever she doesn't feel like dealing with blankets. "I've really got to step up my game, though. Chief is pissed we didn't figure it out about Quinn and Hudson earlier."
"We didn't figure it out at all," Brittany says, and Santana glares.
"Yeah, and Chief never finds out about that, all right? Anyway, if I can just keep it together and show her what I've got for the next couple of weeks, that Team Leader slot is mine."
"You'll get it, Santana," Brittany assures her. "You'd be really good at it, and Chief totally knows how much you want it."
"Yeah, and that's why she thinks she can just leave me hanging like this. Ugh!" Santana's head flops back in frustration.
"Are you going to miss Quinn?" Brittany asks. There's space on her pile of pillows next to Santana, so she sits down, close. Snuggling isn't quite the same when there's no fur involved, but sometimes it's better.
"No," Santana scoffs. "Listen, Brittany, that bitch betrayed us. She was walking around trying to pretend like she was better than everyone here, all right, trying to pretend like she was human. Probably trying to convince herself that someday she and Hudson were going to go back to his hometown and raise ugly bastard half-breed babies together."
"Puck's a half-breed," Brittany points out. Santana snorts.
"Yeah, and Puck's an ugly bastard," she says, but her shoulders have relaxed and she doesn't sound like she means it anymore. "So," says Santana, putting an arm around Brittany's shoulders. "What do you want to do for the full moon?"
~~~
Finn had never actually had a best friend before Puck. It was surprisingly awesome.
The whole 'departmental liaison'-ing thing sounded pretty cool in theory or when he wrote to his mom about it, but mostly it just means a whole lot of paperwork. Usually when the werewolf troop goes out, it's to put down a pack that's started killing people or a tame wolf who's gone feral. There's not a lot for the sheriff's department to do with that kind of thing. It's not even technically against the law, since Ohio doesn't really have any laws that apply to werewolves. That's what they have Sue Sylvester for.
Finn gets called in when there's some kind of theft and there's property to be returned, or some humans have gotten involved and made things an even bigger mess than they would've been otherwise. There was a guy down in Cuyahoga who was raising three pups in his basement and training them to kill his neighbors' livestock at the full moon. Then one of the pups bit one of the neighbors, and it turned into a whole thing about endangerment charges and liability. The other two pups got out past the territory borders somewhere, Finn's pretty sure. He's kind of gladder than he should be. They were cute.
Anyway, Finn figures his real job in the sheriff's office is to be the guy who doesn't just go 'shoot all wolves that don't have collars on sight'. Puck's job is to be the dog who sniffs around by himself and figures out which wolf they're supposed to shoot.
Puck's been on a bunch of different teams within the wolf troop while Finn's known him, but it never seems to stick--he works best, he told Finn, leaning in conspiratorially, as a free agent. It totally makes sense: Puck just sort of roams around getting women to fall all over him with his dangerous-charming-barely-leashed-animal mystery aura thing, and then they give him information, and then Finn gets to go back to the office and take credit for figuring out who's been harboring the stray that comes around every few months and tears up Mr. and Mrs. Potter's chickens.
Most of the other werewolves are cool and all, but they're not really good at being around people. Even Quinn gets really intense sometimes. And he liked it, liked her, even when she was kind of scary, but the point is, Puck's not like that. Puck's just cool.
Finn's still not really sure why Puck picked him to hang out with. It just sort of happened, and then a few weeks, seventeen rounds of tequila shots, and half a dozen hangovers later, they were buddies.
He tried asking once. "So, don't most werewolves, like, usually like to hang out with other wolves? You know, when there's werewolves around, not, like, the ones out in the middle of nowhere who don't know anybody else and never go out at night and everything." He sort of trailed off at the end there because Puck was giving him that look that made him think maybe he'd put his foot in his mouth again, but then Puck threw an arm around his shoulder and pushed open the door to the Pour House down on Sawyer street--they'd gotten kicked out of McStaggers the week before for generally rowdy behavior--with the other hand.
"I," Puck said, "am a stud in every body, my friend, and it is only right to share my studliness with the human population as well as my werewolf brothers and sisters. Also, there's a two drink limit on werewolves, so, you're buying."
They'd gotten along, though. They kinda understood each other. Puck's dad hadn't been around while he was growing up, either. Of course, that's because Puck's dad was off being a totally wild werewolf that Finn was secretly k still ind of worried was gonna get dragged in before Chief Sylvester one of these days even though he was probably half way to Queen-of-Angels by now, and not because he died a national hero or anything, but still. He'd never been there to teach Puck to ride a bike either.
He'd even let Finn tag along on some of his adventures, when they were close enough to some village that Finn could justify it to his boss, and he'd totally saved Finn's life that one time the truck broke down just north of Allegheny and they ran into that bear. Puck was awesome. He had, like, eight million good ideas, and he was always letting Finn take the credit for stuff just 'cause it was easier that way. They got drunk together and talked about girls. Wasn't that what best friends are like?
~~~
Puck hangs around the kennel until after dinner--there's an ongoing prank war between Strando's team and Cooper's team, and some of the bitches have set up a betting pool that he'd totally be getting in on if he had more time. Then he strips off his uniform and steps out into the moonlight.
Partial moon nights never have the same rush. There's totally enough of it--it's a clear night and the moon's only a few days before full--but for Puck it's just creeping up on the edge of being work to pull his fur on over himself instead of just letting it explode at will. Anybody who's endured Sue Sylvester's style of training had better be ready to shift into paws and claws no matter when or where it is, but how far a werewolf can easily stretch whatever moonlight they manage to soak up mostly depends on the wolf. He's seen Becky take wolf-shape at the new moon in the middle of the day. Puck, he's too comfortable with the too many human things, the game of how much charm or slyness he can put into his voice at once, to go easy stripping away his vocal cords too often. But just this much is a piece of steak.
She's only about eight miles out of town, which means she has to have stopped at least once or twice. Crappy winding human road and rough terrain or not, the Quinn he knows is faster than this. She's also a hell of a lot smarter.
You don't get killed, in Ohio Territory, just for being a wolf. You get killed for being a dangerous wolf, which means causing damage to anyone or anything human, conspiratorial plotting against the state, or running around free on the full moon where the troop can see you. Sylvester didn't have Quinn executed right out, but that's not going to stop anyone from dragging her back if they run into her less than forty miles from Lima on Tuesday.
She doesn't stop walking even when he bounds out of the undergrowth in front of her and shakes the fur off his back. She's dull-eyed, exhausted.
"Are you here to kill me, or do I have at few more hours to stagger my way out into the wilderness?" Quinn asks with flat sarcasm.
"Hey, I'm trying to help," Puck protests. Every fucking time, she always gets his back up, the second she opens her mouth.
"Well, don't," Quinn snaps, shrugging off the hand he'd automatically reached out to grab her shoulder. "Jesus, Puck, put some clothes on. Where's your uniform?"
"Left it," he says. "I'm coming with you."
That stops her. She actually turns to look at him, and Quinn's usually too good to meet anyone's eyes if they're too yellow. She stares at him incredulous, reading casual sincerity in every inch of his open, slouching posture. Puck waits to see if she's going to burst into tears or kick him in the balls first.
"You can't be serious," Quinn says.
"Why not?" he asks. "Because I can't love you? I mean sure, no offense, you kinda put the 'witch' in 'bitch', but I'm still here."
"We had sex one time," she says. "One time, and it was the day after the full moon. We aren't anything. We were never anything, and we were never going to be anything, all right?"
"Why, because of Finn?" Puck snorts sarcastically. "Finn was never going to be the one who could keep up with you and you know it."
"Why, because he's a human?" Quinn snaps.
"Yeah, and he's an idiot," Puck says, with no real judgment. Finn's still probably his best friend, he is. They even have the same taste in girls. The only difference is, Puck knows what she needs in ways Finn never, ever will. "I mean, I love the guy, but he was never going to get it. He was never going to get you. He is never gonna know what you and I both do, because he's never gonna be like us."
"Maybe I don't want to fuck an animal," Quinn says, but she's shaking a little. She lets him put his hand on her shoulder this time.
"Doesn't matter whether or not he's an animal, Finn's nice," says Puck. "Us, we're killers. If Finn were a werewolf he'd be so tame he'd play fetch."
"We're tame," Quinn says. "We're not wild animals."
"No," says Puck. "You were never meant to be a domesticated little lapdog that curls up in a cage every full moon and never learns to run. Admit it. You already miss those knives, and secretly you're terrified that if you don't get far enough away you're going to tear right through some village on the full moon and you won't even care."
"I'll care, Puck," Quinn snaps, drawing back half a pace. "Because that's what people do, they care about things like that."
"But we're not people, Quinn, we're werewolves, remember?" he says. "You can't tell me you haven't ripped out at least as many throats as most of the wolves we've dragged in here. The only difference is, you do it when Sue tells you to, and they just do it."
"I should've known you'd admire them," she scoffs, turning away. "Is that why you told Sue about me and Finn?"
"Hey, that was Santana," Puck defends.
"And who told Santana?" Quinn asks, sweet as little crystals of poison.
"That was an accident." Maybe not as much of an accident as it should have been, for something that sort of threw his best friend and the girl he's in love with under the bus, but they're going to be better off without each other anyway.
Puck doesn't let himself think about how much he's going to miss Finn. He's kind of nice and he's kind of dumb and he's human from the top of his sky-scraping head right on down. Maybe he and Puck could have been friends their whole lives, in some other lives, but Puck's not a pet and when it comes down to it, with Finn that's all he could ever really be.
"Everything you screw up is an accident, Puck." Quinn turns away from him and continues on down the road. Puck stands and stares, though it's way too dark for any human to see, watching the tiny little skirt on her dress brushing around her thighs.
"Are you coming or not?" she adds over her shoulder. "Sue will kill you even faster than me once she realizes you quit without waiting to get thrown out first."
He has to jog a few paces to catch up.
~~~
Santana's about 90% certain that Sue Sylvester knows how she became a werewolf. She pretends to believe the official story, the one Santana gave her with the biggest eyes she could muster when she was fifteen years old, but Santana's just waiting for the day she pulls out the real one because it suits her. And Santana won't--can't--let that happen.
So she stays on Chief Sylvester's good side, and she makes sure Brittany does, too. It's a constant challenge, since Chief Sylvester's moods seem to change shape even more often than her werewolves do, but it's worth it.
Santana doesn't know what Quinn was always moaning about. They have it good in the wolf troop. People notice them, and it's not to throw sticks or run for their shotguns. People get out of their way on the sidewalk. They always get super-fast service when they go to a bar or a restaurant, and human guys are scared enough that they'll do pretty much anything she or Brittany tell them to. They have the wind and the moon and the smell of dust after rain, and Santana knows Quinn loves the hunt just as much as anybody. But Quinn would prance along at the head of the team like the most perfect little wolf who ever lived, and then get back to the kennel and just sit there and whine about how she wanted something different. Santana seriously does not see what the big deal about not being people is. People suck.
So what if Quinn used to braid Brittany's hair or give Santana advice on clothing when she remembered she had to own some, in between boning that excruciatingly dull stick of man-meat. So what if Puck was, like, obsessed with her. Santana wasn't jealous, and she's not guilty. She did her job. Chief is happy, Brittany's safe, and Santana's one step closer to getting made Team Leader. Everything's good here.
It's not about right and wrong. Right and wrong don't apply, not really, not for werewolves and the rules that get thrown their way.
After all, the way the rules see it, the worst thing Brittany's ever done in her life isn't any of the other werewolves she's killed, or even those people who got in their way when they were taking down that werewolf fight club gambling ring, the one Puck seemed to know way too well. They both got scratches behind the ears for that, and shiny bonuses the next day while they were still picking human skin out of their teeth. No, according to Sue's rules, the worst thing Britt's ever done Santana had to outright beg her for, and she only agreed because Santana promised they'd never, ever get caught.
Santana'd get somebody to rip out her own throat before she ever went back to being a human, seriously, she means it. Like hell she wouldn't tear out Quinn's if it kept her and Brittany at the top of the troop heap. Not when Quinn didn't even want to be here. Santana fixed that little problem for her.
She seriously does not get what Puck sees in her. Puck's like Santana, born for this life, even if it took her a decade and a half to get to it. Puck's way more perceptive than he should be. He gets the way some things are more like pack than Sue Sylvester ever wanted, how Santana would've been willing to kill for Brittany even in the days where that would've been murder. He gets the language of tongue on tongue and skin on skin and even fur on fur. Santana tries to picture Perfect Miss Quinn ever getting down and doin' the dirty in wolf-body, and can't begin to imagine it.
Puck will link arms with Santana sometimes when they both have a night off and the moon hangs a sliver in the sky, and walk through the streets of Lima just to watch the humans awkwardly refuse to meet their eyes. It's fucking hilarious. Puck agrees, Puck gets that, Puck's scored them more free dinners with a rumbling growl from the back of his throat at just the right time than this town has waiters. Sometimes it feels like Puck's the only one who gets it. She loves Brittany, but she's so wolf Santana's not even sure she pays attention to the human assholes all around them. Puck understands how to play.
So yeah, he told her about his little affair with Blondie McPrissypants, and he told her about the whole, tragic mess between her and that human drink ticket he somehow calls a friend. And Santana did him a favor, because friends do shit like that for each other, and told Hudson and the Chief all about it. So now Puck's out two problems.
They were supposed to be on call tonight, but Chief pulled them until she could name another Team Leader. So now Santana gets to lounge against a rock in the rec yard and watch Brittany do perfect backbends, one after another, bathed in moonlight.
~~~
And the thing is.
Look, the thing is, Finn's not really the smartest guy in the world. Maybe he's a little too naive. Maybe he's a little too trusting. In McKinley everyone really was genuinely good-hearted and always trying to look out for their neighbors (the alternative, that maybe they actually weren't and he just never, ever noticed occurs to him suddenly, and he has to push down extra hard on the accelerator to outrun it). And in Lima, he always had Puck around for that.
A smarter, less naive kind of guy might have figured that Puck was going to end up being the one betraying him, but that's just not the kind of guy Finn is. Maybe it makes him a chump, and it definitely made him kick over a chair at the boarding house when he finally figured out just how well he got played, but Finn believes in friendship and stuff.
Friends don't sleep with each other's girls. Friends especially don't sleep with each other's girls and then lie about it, and then tell everybody else they know so they can laugh at the stupid human jerk who thought he was good enough to fall in love with someone like Quinn.
And girlfriends don't sleep with their boyfriends' best friends. If they were girlfriend and boyfriend. The problem with Quinn has always been that she's just impossible to figure out sometimes. Finn just wishes he didn't love her for it so much.
They've known each other for five years and they didn't do anything more than talk for the first three. Finn was still just a gangly teenager fresh in from the countryside when he met her. She was more beautiful than any girl he'd ever seen.
There are things he knows about Quinn: how to make her laugh, when to shut up and do what she tells him, how to brush her hair back and kiss her just right to make her smile after a bad day she would never give him the details of. He knows that she wears vanilla perfume when she has a day off, but when she comes to see him sometimes she smells kind of like blood, until she washes up in his bathroom and puts on one of his shirts and comes back just smelling like him. He knows she likes some kind of foreign food he can't even pronounce from that Scythian place on Rose Street. He knows that when she curls up close to him, she feels soft and almost tiny, like he could just fold in around her and protect her from everything in the world.
Finn doesn't know when she started sleeping with Puck--Santana didn't tell him, and he didn't think to ask in the middle of the shouting argument he and Quinn finally had, right in the middle of Pepper Street, just down the block and around the corner from the kennel. He doesn't know why he wasn't enough for her. He doesn't know much of anything, really.
He knows Sylvester threw her out because his own boss made a point of saying so, but he doesn't know where she is now. Then again, Finn doesn't exactly know where he is right now, either. He knows the roads around Lima well enough not to be quite lost, entirely, but it's a dark night and trees aren't exactly signposts for him like they are for other people. Or not-people, in this case.
He's pretty sure he's going south-west, at this point; he started off east and then circled around back once he got farther than she'd ever manage going along the road on foot. Quinn might be heading off through the trees like a wolf, but Finn doesn't think so. She likes her stuff too much to leave it all behind.
The shotgun rattles against the floorboards as Finn hits a dip in the road. He's scanning the tree line way too hard to keep an eye out for potholes. He'll probably have to check the suspension, later.
The headlights catch on a pair of tall shadows and a glint of metal on the far side of the road. Finn's teeth involuntarily clench; if he were a werewolf, he'd growl. Of course he'd be with her.
He swings the truck over left, completely blocking the empty oncoming lane, and slams the breaks on right in front of the place where the shadows had ducked between trees. The click of the door opening is louder than he remembers.
Finn really wishes he wasn't just now realizing that he has no idea how this is supposed to go.
~~~
It's the second time tonight a guy who thinks he's in love with her has surged up out of the darkness, most likely to kill her, and Quinn is too tired to be surprised at anything anymore. The headlights are too bright and if Finn shoots her now at least it'll all be over. She won't have to decide what to do next.
"Hey, uh..." Finn steps out of the truck, uncertain and night-blind, holding a shotgun in one hand. Quinn is still frozen between staying to watch and melting away into the woods forever when he spots them, across the hood of the truck, just past the edge of the beam of the headlights.
"Come on, Quinn," Puck says from behind her, not bothering to lower his voice. "Let's get out of here."
"You're never going to get far enough away before the full moon on foot," Finn says, and he's right. They've got two more days of walking at human speed with no food and no water, and even if they abandon everything now Quinn doesn't know where they'd go to ever get any of it back again.
"Then we'll ditch the stuff and run. Come on, Quinn," says Puck.
"We don't exactly have a lot of options," Quinn says, very carefully.
"Get in the truck," says Finn. Their aura of astonishment must be obvious even to human perceptions, because he sighs and adds, "I'm not going to let them hunt you down and kill you just because I'm pissed you lied to me. Either of you."
"Why the hell should we trust you?" Puck says, taking one step forward, now looming over Quinn's shoulder almost close enough to touch.
"Because that's what friends do," says Finn. "Even when they're angry. They quit their jobs and destroy their whole lives and go find their other friends in the middle of the woods with nothing but a bunch of spare bullets and a couple of pairs of socks."
Quinn laughs, because it's either that or cry, and says, "You're better than Puck, at least. Neither of you are borrowing my tooth brush," more strain in her voice than she'd like to show.
"We don't need you, Hudson," Puck says, but low and cautious, and not at all like he's saying no.
"Yeah, what are you going to do, just keep walking and hope wherever you end up they won't run you out of town just for being there?" Finn asks. "I know some people who can help."
"You?" Quinn asks, incredulous, because if there's a poster for 'secret underground werewolf conspirator'--well, maybe it would be the guy with wolves for a girlfriend and a best friend, but still, it wouldn't be Finn Hudson. He's too honest to conspire over anything.
"My stepbrother's a wolf, back in McKinley. Our old teacher--there's places. Places you're not going to get to on foot," he adds, with a way-too-earnest look for both of them.
"Fine," says Quinn. So maybe she's making the decision for all of them, but she never asked Finn or Puck to ruin their lives over her. Her back hurts and her arms hurt and her feet hurt, and is it so wrong to just want to sit down and let somebody else drive for a while?
"Fine," Puck agrees, stepping up to the truck. "Hey, give me your knife. It's steel, right?"
"Why?" Finn asks, clearly suspicious. Quinn would be wary too, even though Puck doesn't need a weapon to kill someone even in his human form.
"If we're going off to find, like, domesticated werewolf utopia or whatever, I'm not wearing this thing the whole way," he says, jerking his chin at his collar. "So give me your knife so I can cut it off."
"Wait, that collar's magic," Quinn objects, even though Finn's already handing his belt knife over the hood of the car. "You can't just--"
"It's still just made out of metal," Puck says, easing the tip of the knife between the links of chain and his skin. "It's not even a metal that's good for anything, just some dumb soft gold and silver alloy."
"Electrum," says Quinn quietly. This whole thing seems incredibly dangerous--for one thing, Quinn's pretty sure nobody in their right minds would trust Puck with something that sharp that close to his own throat, even if it is only steel--and so equally stupid and brave that she doesn't dare say any more. "Naturally-occurring alloy with excellent conductive properties for both electricity and magic. Almost as dangerous to werewolves as pure silver."
"Dude, are you sure you know what you're doing?" Finn asks, but there's a sound like something popping, and the sides of the collar starting to pull free.
"Yeah, this might just take a little while," says Puck. "And you're seriously gonna want to sharpen your knife after this."
"Finn," Quinn says, to change the subject more than anything, "did you bring any spare clothes with you? Because I've been dealing with him naked for four hours and if I have to sit next to him on a car ride like that for too long..."
"Um...I think I've got a horse blanket in back," Finn offers. Puck groans.
"Seriously, dude? That is so not cool."
"You're the one who ran off without bringing any clothes with you," Quinn points out.
"Um, because I was trying to catch up to you before anybody else did?"
"And you're kinda ruining my knife," Finn adds.
"Hey, it's a symbolic gesture of Sue Sylvester can kiss my ass and can't use this thing to track us with her creepy magic powers," Puck grumbles. "What is this, pick on Puck night?"
"You do make it kind of easy," Finn says, and Quinn is startled to realize that she's smiling.
There's a light *plink* from Puck's direction, then a sigh. "Done. Gimmie the damn horse blanket and let's get this show on the road already."
It's a tight squeeze along the bench seat of the cab; Quinn's slim but not tiny, and Finn and Puck are both fairly large. It's almost cozy. It's almost safe. It isn't really either.
The long night road stretches on and on beyond the headlights.
~~~
Brittany trots into the Chief's office on light, quick paws. The morning after the full moon is bury-your-face-under-your-tail-and-sleep time, but by the afternoon she's always starving, and after that she's awake. It usually takes a day or two before she feels like spending her free time in her human body again, too. It's good to be able to wag her tail and bristle her fur with her moods, to yip and growl and bound places on all four feet when she feels like it. After a couple of days she starts to miss having hands.
Santana's already there, and human, standing across from the Chief, who gives Brittany the hand motion to stand up. It feels like a new suit of clothing settling over the top of her, stretching up into human-ness. It's comfortable and it fits and all, but it's not the same as just being naked.
Probably that's just because of the uniform coming back from wherever Chief Sylvester's made it magically go away when she changes. Brittany's not really sure how she feels about the whole idea of metaphors. Things probably ought to just get called what they are all the time, but human language doesn't work that way.
"Well I see you've managed to last a whole four days without a team leader to rescue you from your own incompetence," says the Chief. "Tell me, do you know what this is?" she adds, and holds a familiar leather harness up by one finger.
"That's the team leader's knives," Santana says quickly. If she were a wolf she'd be straining forward with only her feet keeping her in place, Brittany thinks, but in a human body she just sounds like she really wants Chief to be happy with her.
"Very good. Now, can either of you tell me what this is?" she continues, picking up something slithery and metal from the desk.
"It's a collar," Brittany answers obediently, since Santana's still looking at it and she took her turn last time.
"That's Puckerman's," Santana says, making Brittany look closer. It smells sort of like Puck, but also like woods and dirt and everyone on Traci's team, but the patterns look sort of right. Santana's always been better at recognizing things like that.
"Wait, how would Puck's collar get broken?" Brittany asks. It can't be Chief Sylvester, because Puck doesn't sleep with any humans more than once and she'd take his collar off in front of everybody like Quinn's if she kicked him out. Santana looks really worried all of the sudden.
"Well, that's what you two are going to find out, Brittany," says Chief Sylvester, in the happy voice that comes with the very angry body language. "I'm sure you'll find that this is nothing more than an accident and an unfortunate coincidence, and our misplaced little cub is even now no doubt sleeping off some unauthorized full moon bender that left him too staggeringly incapacitated to notice his collar mysteriously falling off, and we can all just stop worrying. Of course if it is somehow related to your tramp of a former team leader and that grotesquely oversized man-child the Ohio Sheriff's Department calls a deputy...I expect you'll act accordingly."
The thing about the Chief is that she uses a lot of words, especially if she's angry, but you don't need to follow all of them to know what she means. Puck leaving is about Quinn, and the Chief never gets this kind of angry unless she wants somebody dead.
"What's accordingly?" asks Santana, who has to have worked out the same thing as Brittany, and wants the Chief to take it back. Brittany doesn't want to kill Quinn. Or Puck. She just wants to say no to the Chief a lot less.
Chief Sylvester sits back in her chair and fixes them both with the look that means she's going to start telling one of her stories. "You know, when I was temporarily assigned with the Macedonian Foreign Legion, and my regiment got stranded thirty miles from the Arctic Circle with nothing but three mules and half a day's worth of supplies, most people would have seen the desertion of almost the entire regiment and the threat of an oncoming blizzard as a problem, but one, extremely talented, young officer saw it as an opportunity. And do you know that officer's name?"
"Sue Sylvester?" Brittany guesses. It's always Sue Sylvester.
Chief nods and leans forward across her desk, and says, with great intensity, "Sue Sylvester."
Then she leans back again and says, "And that's how the Empire came to conquer the province of Greenland."
"Wait, I thought that was Admiral Peary, like, a hundred years ago," Santana says, confused.
"No, that was me," says the Chief. "This is an opportunity. I want to know where they're headed. Not even Don Juan Fido is stupid enough to go off without some kind of plan. You're going to follow them, and you're going to find them, and then when you do, you're going to join them."
"Wait, I thought you wanted us to kill--" Santana starts, but then cuts off as the Chief raises a finger.
"If I wanted you to kill, I'd say 'kill'," the Chief says pleasantly. "I just want you to watch. I want you to watch, I want you to send word back to me about whatever cozy little wild forested yonder werewolf hideaway they find, and if they step out of line, I want you to send for a team and crush the living daylights out of them." She smiles broadly. "If you do it right, I'll make you Team Leader!"
"What if they figure out we're spying on them first?" Santana asks, and Brittany looks over with her eyes without moving her head because Santana sounds way nervous. Brittany wants to see Quinn and Puck again, but she really hopes they won't do anything wrong, because wanting to see them isn't the same as wanting to kill them, no matter what Chief Sylvester orders.
"Well then, either I'll get rid of two troublesome deserters, or I'm out a pair of she-wolves who can't even carry out a simple set of orders," Chief says happily. "I'd say that's pretty good for me either way, wouldn't you?"
"All right," says Santana, and Brittany nods. She knows the Team Leader position isn't really being offered to her, but it's Santana, and somebody needs to be there to back her up. Wolves on their own are just sad. Santana's always been the other half of Brittany's pack, even when she was human. Neither of them's any good alone.
"Good," says the Chief, getting up from her desk. "Now. One last thing." Brittany and Santana exchange glances. "We're going to have to get those collars off of you. Can't have you looking like you're still loyal, right?"
The thing about humans is, sometimes a smile is the scariest expression they can have.