FIC: Walk Tall Beneath These Trees (Chapter II)
Rating: PG-13
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: Does 'generalized dystopia' require a warning? Some references to child abuse; otherwise, none for this chapter
Word Count: ~8,000
Summary: Ohio Territory isn't a friendly place for werewolves. Especially in a world like this, nobody makes it alone.
Chapter II: Music Of The Night
Werewolf night school is the place you go when you've got nowhere else to be.
Author's Notes: Chapter two! And things start to take shape. As far as pace goes, I'm not the world's fastest writer, so I'm expecting about 1-2 weeks between chapters until this is done, probably for the rest of the summer; I'm also expecting chapters to stay around 8-12k, though no promises on that. I'm going out of town tomorrow morning and will be gone for about a week, so advance apologies for being very late getting back about comment replies; I will have pen and paper though, so I'm hoping Chapter III will still appear on schedule.
Once again, story title from Wolf Song, by Patrick Wolf, which by the way can be found here; chapter title from Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which can be found here. (The song Rachel sings is here). All place names taken from real towns and counties in Ohio, although any actual resemblance is coincidental.
Again, thanks to crown_of_weeds for being a most wonderful cheerleader and sounding board on all fronts.
Will Schuester's great-Aunt Lillian died when he was 20 years old. He had to hitchhike home from school in Lima to get to the funeral--he nearly missed it, too, when the driver taking him from Salem to Bluffton got stuck in the mud by the river. He wouldn't have made a dent in the crowd. Half the district came out to see her buried; well, she'd taught almost all of them, at one point or another.
Will was the one she left her house to, though. After that he had to come back and teach in the Auglaize district. He'd grown up in Bluffton and McKinley. The love of his very young life was selling bolts of cloth and ladies' hats in a shop in Elida. The moment when he stepped off the farm cart bringing him into Bluffton for the last time, once again spattered in mud--this time from helping when a mail truck sprang a flat thirty miles out from Delphos--the whole promising world seemed to settle into place around him.
Great-Aunt Lillian's house was eleven miles down the road from Elida, the first eight of those dirt, and even farther from anywhere else. It had been left empty for over a year while Will finished his degree and negotiated his way into the rotation of teachers through the one-room school houses of Auglaize. There was an old, creaky water wheel and an old pump that badly needed repairing, half a dozen broken windows, and a forest bent on creeping in to all the cleared area that had long been denied it. Will fixed almost every rusty pipe and rotted floorboard himself before Terri would agree to move in there with him.
It's always been a teacher's house, and not only because Will can't afford anything closer into town on what they pay him. It's just about the same amount of inconveniently far from everything; it might be more than ten miles to go to teach reading and writing in the Elida schoolhouse on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but it's also only thirteen miles instead of twenty-five to do the same in Delphos on Monday and Thursday. Terri could have her sewing room and they'd still have plenty of room to, someday, fill the house with children.
Neither of them had really been expecting what kind of children he'd end up bringing home with him, but it wasn't like Will could just throw them back out into the night after Rachel Berry's fathers had invited them in. Deep down, he still can't completely blame Terri for leaving him over it.
~~~
Someday, Rachel Berry is going to live in a place with better-than-substandard lighting. She suspects that once she finally gets to New York City, that problem might take care of itself--of course she'll move into an actual constructed house and not a cave at all, although this cave has been good to her in her time here. Caves, after all, come cheaply and pre-built, often with their own supply of water, may have many different entrances and exits, are terribly difficult to navigate if you're unfamiliar with them or can't see in the dark, and are next to impossible to burn. Also, and much more importantly, they have great acoustics.
Acoustics are important. How else could she put on impromptu welcome concerts every time another lone wolf or small family pack passes through the area? Nobody new has arrived in the district since last fall, but Kurt and Mercedes come by all the time, and anyway there's always her fathers. Familiarity is hardly a reason to get complacent, after all. She has to practice so she'll sound her very best at Mr. Schue's this week. She and Tina are teaching some of the young ones about pitch and tone.
"Flowers fade, the fruits of summer fade, they have their seasons, so do we," Rachel sings, and her voice reverberates pleasingly off the high stone roof of the sitting room. "But just promise me that sometimes, you will think of me!" She holds the last note for just a few beats before cutting it off cleanly rather than letting it taper away into silence, an artistic decision she feels lends more weight to the power of the song. She doesn't bother to dash away the delicate trickle of tears; it lends more weight and drama too, after all. She doesn't even have to try to make herself cry for a performance any more. In the moment of silence-just-before-the-applause that every true performer lives for, she can hear a pocket of crumbling sand dislodge itself from the ceiling and patter softly against the cheesecloth canopy tacked up over the ceiling.
Her fathers clap enthusiastically. Kurt and Mercedes join in--and she can tell the difference in exuberance, Kurt Hummel--a moment later.
"Bravo, honey, bravo," says Daddy H. "Couldn't be sung better on Broad Avenue."
"I've got no critiques, honey," Mercedes says frankly. "You knocked that one dead."
"Kurt?" Rachel prompts a moment later. He rests one elbow on his other hand and tilts his head at her, considering.
"You rushed the tempo a little coming out of the bridge," he says.
"I was trying to signify the growing intensity of the song!" she protests, because really Kurt, there's helpful and then there's just jealously nitpicky, but he just nods.
"Yes, well, it came off as rushed. Don't tell me the Rachel Berry can't show intensity without speeding up," he says. Then he smiles. "Other than that, it was brilliant. No critiques."
"Oh! Well, yes, thank you," says Rachel. Sometimes just being around Kurt can be a bit much, but he's still her harshest--some days, her only useful critic, and his praise can leave her a little flustered.
"Well, this has been lovely," Kurt says, standing and carefully brushing off his trousers even though the fur-covered cushions they're using in place of a couch are perfectly clean, thank you very much, "but if Mercedes and I want to make it through the woods before any eager farmers start taking predawn potshots at shadows, we should get going. Rachel, we'll see you at Schue's this weekend?"
"Be careful out there," says Daddy L. "Moon on Tuesday."
Rachel shudders dramatically. Moon on Tuesday means guns on Monday and fire on Wednesday. Really, she doesn't know how they've survived here for this long.
"We'll be fine," Mercedes promises, slipping out of the dress she always leaves at Rachel's for nights like this. Kurt's already halfway out of the cave and behind a wall of stalagmites--he hates to be human naked in front of anyone, even them. She'll find his clothes neatly folded on a small, dry pedestal of rock after they go.
Rachel walks out to the mouth of the cave just to see them safely off, two lithe, low shadows springing out into the night.
~~~
Kurt can sing the entire score to every operetta his mother ever knew by heart, but it doesn't sound right without the harmony.
His mother could never hear music like he can. She'd put the record player on and sit in her purple armchair and set her sewing basket carefully to the side so she could hold him on her lap. She closed her eyes while she sang along, stroking his hair like she would a pet dog or her actual human son. She only heard notes, though, sung or played one at a time, and Kurt knows because she told him to close his eyes and listen for them, too. The first time he heard music as a wolf, he almost lost his mind.
The thing about notes is that there's never just one. The thing about sound is that it ripples out from its center in so many more dimensions than just 'high' or 'low'. The few beats of an operetta played on his mother's scratchy old record player expand into whole overwhelming clouds of sound, too much to piece through, enough to drown in if you tried. And then because it's music, it just keeps coming, throwing out harmonies so intricate and full of depth that humans couldn't ever stand to hear them or they'd stop making music ever again.
The first time Kurt heard music as a wolf was two days after the full moon that fell on his seventh birthday, when his mother let him practice changing indoors and away from the cage in the attic, just this once. She let him down on the floor of the sitting room, cautiously, with his father guarding the door to the foyer, to sniff and nose his way around such a little space he already knew so well when he could see it right. Then the full orchestral might of the overture to Christina and the Ghost shattered through his senses and destroyed any sense of where he was, what he was doing, anything but the impossible maze of sound.
His mother pulled her hand away fast enough that he didn't actually snap it off when she reached out to try and comfort him. Burt Hummel didn't need two werewolves in his life.
Kurt thought to regret it a year and a half later. Wolves don't slip and fall patching slick roofs after rain while their husbands are in another city learning about new engine innovations in tractors and grain threshers. If they do, they walk away from the three-story drop with nothing but a few rapidly-healing bones. It's just that there's not much use in trying to save a body once it's already begun to cool.
She started to sing to him from her sturdy wooden rocking chair on the other side of the attic on full moon nights after Christina and the Ghost. It was just one voice, infinitely rich in complexities, a single rope of sound winding its way through modulation after modulation. It wasn't so different than listening to talking this way, with a voice Kurt already knew right into his bones in any form. It got more difficult when she brought him back down to the sitting room to add in the piano, his father standing by tensely to ward off any disaster.
He loves it now, of course. Wolves who know what they're doing in being wolves don't lose themselves over music any more than humans collapse in a riot of color vision and the ten thousand things there are to see around them all the time, even when they're not moving. The trick is in learning to choose what to ignore.
~~~
Tina hates the five and a half mile stretch of land between the farmland just outside Delphos and the outskirts of Spencerville more than just about any patch of Ohio Territory she's ever been to. And she's been to the ruins of the iron city of Cleveland.
At a flat-out run, the distance from Artie's house to her father's takes about eleven minutes through clear, uninterrupted farmland. She's pretty sure she clocked in at under nine once, that morning when half a dozen farmhands were out in the fields with dogs and shotguns, milling around and making concerned noises behind every hedge. They were worried about a fox, or a new nest of rabbits, or some kind of crop blight, but that had never stopped a farmer sending his hounds after a wolf if he happened to run into one. Tina'd lost her favorite uncle that way, to the wrong end of a deer hunt.
She wouldn't mind it so much at night, but somehow, nine times out of ten, they find themselves together at Artie's house instead of her dad's, and nine times out of ten she's still there by dawn. If she could ever remember to leave a pair of shoes here, she'd just walk home, in the sun, like a normal person, maybe even wave to the farmers as she walked by.
But she always forgets to bring extra clothing over here because she and Artie usually spend barely any of their time alone together human, and most of that naked. And she'd attract enough attention being the barefoot girl with the yellow eyes even if all Spencerville and half of Auglaize District didn't know her as Daniel Cohen's werewolf daughter. And the road is two miles longer than the straight shot, and made of gravel, and limping eight miles until her feet hurt to walk on could be even more stupid than it would be painful.
Artie raises his head from his paws, cocks it, invites her to stay. Tina finishes straightening up--somebody with hands ought to--and leans down to ruffle behind his ears.
"Not today," she says.
They've known each other since they were twelve years old, and they're wolves together, anyway, so she doesn't say all the other things. They don't really do words between them. Words are for Kurt and Rachel and Mr. Schue, Mercedes and all the younger pups in Werewolf School. Tina and Artie have never had that much to say to each other that couldn't be said in the flick of a tail and the tilt of a head.
If Tina doesn't get going now, she's going to have trouble keeping wolf all the way home. She hasn't practiced pushing it as long as Artie, and she's fine sitting with him all night, but it's already past sun-up and it's been a long time since the last full moon.
"See you at Schue's later," Tina says, and lets herself out.
~~~
Mercedes Jones is the reason Will Schuester's secret werewolf school conspiracy ever really got started. Sure, it was little miss Rachel Berry and her overwhelming ambition that got Mr. Schue to take her in and start tutoring her in the evenings, but it was Mercedes and the Jones pack that turned it from one girl with a slate chalkboard to a closely-guarded secret shared quietly across half of Ohio Territory. The others, Kurt and Rachel and Artie and Tina, they sort of forget that sometimes.
Werewolves know. Go winter in Auglaize District for a few months, the packs say, 'cause there's a man there who'll sneak your puppies into his own home at night and teach them just like real children. Don't stay too long, though, don't you dare cause any trouble, 'cause the pack that gets Will Schuester caught or ruins it for the rest of us? They're gonna answer to every parent in Ohio Territory.
Mercedes knows three different languages, after so many winters with nothing else to do besides borrow books out of Mr. Schuester's library, listen to Kurt and Rachel bicker, or practice skinning beavers for the fur traders. Half the pack-born wolves Mercedes has ever met can't even read or write. The ones that can mostly got taught by bit wolves who lived human long enough to go right through school, and then somehow managed to make it out to the woods before they got shot or went crazy, afterwards. It's different for the wolves born to human parents, accidental throwbacks like Kurt or little Gracie, but not by all that much. Gracie was ten by the time Kurt's dad and Rachel managed to talk her parents into letting her go up to Shuester's place for school, and she didn't even know her A-B-C's.
Mr. Schue's important. He gives them a place to go with actual furniture in it, someplace other than Rachel and her dads' cave or the tiny scratched-out den Mercedes has been living in since the rest of the Jones pack moved on without her. He teaches them all the things the people who run the world have to know, like maybe it'll help, and who knows, maybe someday it will. Sometimes, when it's late at night and he starts to forget, he sort of starts treating them like they're human.
It's funny, knowing a guy so well who half the werewolf grapevine in Ohio whispers about like some kind of hero. Mercedes first met Mr. Schue when she was eleven years old, dropped on his doorstep next to Rachel one night without even a warning. It kinda seems like half her life's been spent traveling to and from Auglaize District, and the other half living right here, even though she was already seventeen the first time she talked her parents into leaving without her. Mr. Schue's been right there in her life for all of that, more years than half the puppies at night school have even been alive.
You kinda get to know a guy when you've been around him for that long, even if you've been calling him by his last name since before he started teaching you fractions. You remember that he's made of more things than just the ones everybody remembers him doing, that he's only human. And it's funny, but sometimes Mercedes has to wonder if he even knows what it means, what they say about him in Allegheny and Springfield and Laurentide. If it matters to him the same way at all.
~~~
Rachel is always early to Mr. Schuester's house on school nights. Promptness is a cornerstone of a civil society, and living in a cave without clocks is no excuse for neglecting it.
They're really much too old for school any more, herself and Kurt and Mercedes and Artie and Tina, but age is no true barrier to learning. When they finally find a way to gather themselves up and move to New York, they'll need all the knowledge and practice they can get.
They aren't Mr. Schue's only students any more, of course. As the founder and first member of werewolf night school, Rachel always feels a certain sense of proprietary pride in the pups that come through to learn here. She has every confidence that sooner or later, Auglaize District's secret reputation for werewolf-friendliness will bring her dream boyfriend out of the woods and into her life once and for all. Possibly he'll be accompanying his much younger sibling, a move that speaks wonderfully for his sense of generosity, caring, and devotion to the ones he loves. It might even be his very young son or daughter, born to a mate who was shot tragically dead by a cruel band of traveling fur trappers, freezing his heart to a lump of ice only softened by the love he bears for their small child. Rachel, obviously, will be the one to melt his heart and bring him back to the land of the truly living. Stepmotherhood isn't exactly in her plans at the moment, but she could be flexible for the sake of a truly epic romance. She's not getting any younger.
Mr. Schuester very wisely never unlocks his back door until the first wolf shows up on a school night, so Rachel changes back to human and raps sharply on the glass pane of it. Mr. Schuester appears a minute later to unlock it, carefully averting his eyes to her nakedness, as always.
Rachel spent a very long year at the age of seventeen being utterly, crushingly disappointed by that. Now that they're older and he hasn't really taught them in a few years so much as let them sit around in his living room and talk, Mercedes thinks Rachel could probably have him if she tried. Rachel thinks she's probably right, but that's not the first time she wants for herself any more. She wants flowers, romance, and sunlight, deep, longing gazes, and a dog-wolf who will pine away for at least a few weeks over her in recognition of all this long time she's spent pining away for him. All other criteria aside, Mr. Schuester's simply not a wolf, and much as Rachel could never be with someone who doesn't recognize her truly superior talent in singing and performance, she could never settle for a man who can't truly appreciate her beauty in both her forms.
"Thank you, Mr. Schuester," Rachel says politely, and circles past him on her way to the spare room where they all keep their school clothes. It isn't at all impossible to make it up here on foot--Rachel herself does so regularly on low moon nights, simply for the sake of the exercise--but it is much faster and easier taken at a run.
"Coffee's on the stove when you're done," he says. "I've got some exciting things for us to work on tonight!"
She smelled the coffee brewing as soon as she got onto the property, of course, but it would be rude to mention. The house always smells like it, coffee and a faint hint of wolf, dusty books, and an almost-full bottle of aftershave Mr. Schuester dropped years ago that still hangs in the air. It's a little bit spicy, expensive, foreign-smelling, the kind of thing people must wear in New York City. It's the most exciting thing in the whole house.
~~
There's one chair in Mr. Schuester's living room, over in the shadowy corner a little bit behind the fire, that nobody ever bothers to try to sit in but Artie. Tina sits next to him sometimes, on the floor with her legs curled up under her, when she's not surrounded by wolf pups wanting help with their math and spelling. Tina's going to be a good mother someday, when she stops hanging this backwoods piece of farm country and gets on with her life.
Artie would get down on one knee if he could, but his human legs aren't really in any kind of shape for kneeling. Werewolves don't do that, anyway, getting married. Weddings are all about churches they're not allowed into and documents they don't have the legal standing to sign. Artie tries not to let it bother him. Watching Tina bend down and show the pups how to solve an algebra problem, though, sometimes it kind of irks him anyway.
There are thirteen of them here tonight, counting Mr. Schue. It was Mercedes' turn to pick up Gracie; she's twelve and shows up with bruises on her arms almost every time. Rob comes in with the Drexel pups because their pack has been denning up over the falls near Beaverdam. When they get up and move out in the next couple of months he's going to go right back to getting lost in the woods again half the time he's meant to show up here, because he's got parents who love him enough to assume any wolf can cross half a district at night at nine years old with no problem. Emily, Theo, and Lilah are practically illiterate even though Lilah's almost fifteen, and Renee can do geometry without blinking but tonight she's refusing to talk to anyone again, even her adopted packmates. Drake is 16 and still walks twelve miles here and back twice every week because he only got bitten three months ago and hasn't figured out how to work all his legs and all his senses at the same time.
Rachel is teaching the younger ones some ridiculous catchy song she totally wrote herself with the names of all the territories and provinces in the order they joined the Empire, that the rest of them are all going to have stuck in their heads for days. Mr. Shue is standing back against the wall and watching her with a level of pride and also non-interaction with his students that makes Artie sort of uncomfortable. Kurt sits in his own corner, offering occasional commentary to the goings-on in between sketching another commission he'll sew in his basement for his stepmother to sell. Mercedes is reading a book on the couch next to him, making use of the chance for indoor lighting for once and glancing up every thirty seconds to make sure nothing's changed. Tina's on the floor next to Renee, just sitting, the two quietest things in the whole room. Sometimes one of them makes a mark on the slate between them, but mostly they're just there. Renee probably doesn't need as much instruction as everybody else here, anyway. She got to go to school as a human until last year, when she stopped having friends or a family or a home and had to start learning to catch rabbits with her teeth if she wanted to eat.
Artie remembers what human school was like. It wasn't that long ago, even if it is only getting longer. He's officially been a wolf longer than he used to be a boy, now. He's pretty sure secret werewolf night school is less boring.
Drake is standing awkwardly next to Artie's chair. Artie would offer to move somewhere a little more convenient, but this isn't his most mobile form, and shifting into wolf just to walk across the room a little more easily is both pathetic and really hard on the clothes.
"You used to be human," Drake says finally, quietly enough that the rest of the group doesn't have to hear, although except for Mr. Schuester they all can. He keeps looking awkwardly over Artie's head, instead of directly at his face, but Artie doesn't mind. He's pretty used to it by now.
"Yep," says Artie. He's the only other one in this room besides Renee and Tina, and the younger ones don't need to know about Tina. He's been expecting this conversation for two months.
"How did you...I mean," Drake says. "What did you do?"
Artie twists a little in his chair, trying to stretch and relieve some of the pressure on slightly mangled limbs. If he weren't a werewolf, he'd probably be paralyzed right now. Of course, if he hadn't been attacked and mauled by a werewolf he wouldn't have been injured in the first place, and it turns out there's only so much accelerated healing can do against this kind of damage.
"I spend a lot of time as the wolf," Artie says honestly. "It matters less, then." He pauses, considering. "Also, sometimes Mr. Schue lets us sing really angry songs if we persuade him we're just using them to 'practice our music'."
~~~
They spend more time in this room singing than learning from books. It's what Rachel and Kurt say is going to get them out of this damn district and into being somebody, though, so nobody argues it.
Mercedes met Kurt Hummel right in this very room. He was eleven years old, all pale skin and fancy clothes wilted by the long hike up the road, standing half behind his tall, brown-eyed and floppy-haired new stepbrother, Mr. Schuester's favorite student from the human classrooms in McKinley that he still never really talks to any of them about. She's heard plenty about Finn Hudson over the years, though. Kurt would follow that boy to the ends of the earth if their parents didn't flat-out forbid him to.
Mercedes can't really imagine being like that about either of her brothers; she was born having them and neither of them are human, but maybe that's sort of the point. Finn showed up out of nowhere and still beat up that other kid when they were thirteen for saying shit about wolves. Mercedes isn't going to forget that fight any time soon. She heard about it once a week for years.
It's funny how wolf Kurt can be sometimes, though, in between all the fussy human stuff he tries to do, his clothes and his cooking and his and Rachel's musical dreams. Mercedes wouldn't do loyalty like that for her brothers any more, not since she let the pack move on without her, but she would for Kurt.
They've been working on this plan for ten years now, since they realized Kurt's voice wasn't ever going to drop a whole lot and Rachel let her own plans expand to fit the two of them. "Someday," Rachel said, voice quivering with emotion, "we're going to live here." Her finger pressed down on the little gray square of Nassau County, right over the star for New York City, crinkling the map into the dirt of the cave floor.
"Someday," Kurt agreed. "We'll have to work on our act if we want to make it there, though. If we're going to sing in front of that many people, we'll need to be absolutely perfect."
"Of course we will, Kurt," Rachel scolded. "Please. With your countertenor, Mercedes' vocal power and my unmatched star quality, we'll take New York City by storm."
"Right! Can't wait," Mercedes hastened to agree. "Big city, here we come."
It's going to be amazing, once they finally make it. Just the three of them, or maybe they'll bring Artie and Tina, too, Mercedes isn't real sure how Rachel thinks that part of the plan's going to go. Off on their own making good for themselves in the big city. Kurt and Rachel, Rachel and Kurt, and Mercedes right there in the middle of it. It's going to be amazing. It has to be.
Because if there's one thing Mercedes Jones has learned in nearly fourteen years of being their friend, it's that Rachel Berry always gets what she wants eventually, and Kurt Hummel usually has his way even sooner. It won't be like the time when they were seventeen when they made it halfway across Ohio on foot before that thunderstorm hit, they got pummeled by hail, and they lost half their stuff because Kurt's lived in his dad's basement his whole life and Rachel hasn't moved with a pack since she was ten. It won't be like the time two years later when Rachel got them a gig singing at a bar in Putnam and a couple of drunk hicks threw beer bottles at them, or the time after that when Kurt got them a gig in Sugar Creek and then almost got shot for growling at some guy who tried to feel Rachel up and wouldn't take no for an answer. It won't be like that time they got all the way east to Plymouth and got turned back at the border because it's illegal to even be a werewolf in the province of Plymouth without the proper registration or permits.
Rachel's going to keep trying, and Kurt's going to keep trying, and so New York is going to happen for them, one way or another, someday. For the three of them.
~~~
"If you're very masochistic," Will's Aunt Lillian once told him, "become a farmer. They don't have to travel as much as teachers do and they worry almost as much." She'd been proud of him, though, would be proud of him if she could see her house now. It just didn't make her wrong about the worrying part, even if he's pretty sure that no teacher's ever had quite the same kind of worries he does.
He, Will Schuester, is basically constantly responsible for anywhere from six to fifteen werewolves and all the things they learn and talk about when they get together. If he does his job, he truly believes they might grow up like Rachel or Tina, educated, driven, and smart enough to find ways of using their skills positively, for the good of everyone in this society. If he doesn't do his job well enough...
Will has to believe Emma when she says she thinks he can make enough of a difference in these kids' lives to be worth the risk. Emma's got that special insight into what it's like to be one of them, with her...condition, and all.
She's the only person Will's really told about the school--well, besides Holly, who sort of found out on her own, and Terri, of course. Emma's the only one he can really talk to about it, anyway. They have lunch together on the days Will teaches in Delphos, in the sense that they sit together in her spotlessly tidy garret room in the windowless attic of the schoolhouse, and he eats his lunch while she watches. Emma loves hearing about the wolf kids.
She even has pretty good advice sometimes. She's the one who pointed out that the Newsomes might listen to a guy like Burt Hummel about their daughter before they listened to him. And she's the one who gave him the great idea to let the older kids teach some of the newer ones as much as possible, to keep them busy and out of trouble. Not that Will really thinks that the likes of, say, Artie Abrams or Tina Cohen-Chang would ever intentionally be a troublemaker, but it has to be good for them to keep some stable good influences in their lives.
Emma's the only one Will can unload on about his worries for any of them. He doesn't know if Drake is going to snap any day now and kill his own parents, or if Lilah is going to leave the district in a few months and forget everything he's spent all this time and effort trying to teach her. He doesn't know if they're ever going to persuade Artie to spend more than a few hours in their company looking human, no matter how distracting he's worried the scarring might be. He doesn't know if Rob is going to grow up to take everything Will's giving him and run off into the woods to live off the work of farmers and villagers across Ohio by theft, or even go sign up to work for Sue Sylvester and her despicable private army and turn them all in. It's a lot of pressure on Will's part to get it right.
~~~
Kurt slips down the tunnel leading to his basement about half an hour before sunrise. It's an excellent tunnel, as half-mile-long underground excavations go. Kurt dug it himself as soon as his father finished building the house for Carole. It's better for everyone if the neighbors don't notice him slipping off after dark, in either form. If being able to leave the house directly from his basement means that Carole and his father don't realize exactly how many nights Kurt spends away from home, well. That's probably better for them too.
The basement was his father's consolation bribe for replacing his first wife and son with Carole and Finn, who, not being dead nor in any way werewolves, could finally give him the family he'd always deserved. Kurt didn't blame him for it, of course. He couldn't. Finn and Carole were both wonderful, and anyway, Kurt knew what it felt like to wish for more of your own kind. His father deserved to be happy. He hugged Kurt without any visible or olfactory signs of fear, and Kurt got his own basement.
The basement suite is sleek in white and gray and, aside from the scratches gouged deep into the paint of the alcove set behind the metal bars on the north side of the room, pristine. Most of the claw marks are set much too close together to fit Kurt's paws now, but that's another thing Carole and his father are better off never looking too closely at. He's used it a few times in the past couple of years, when the others were busy or too far away on a full moon night to run safely together. It's good to have. Just...in case.
One of the good things about being a wolf, few as they are, is Kurt's complete ability to flop down onto his gratuitously overstuffed mattress and fall instantly asleep no matter the time of day or night. He stops to change into his pyjamas and run through his facial cleansing cycle. This face is as human as he'll ever get to look. Kurt intends to take care of it.
He rarely dreams much, unless it's close to the full moon, and then it's all mixed-up fragments of sensation that seem nothing at all like the linear surrealism Dad or Carole describe when they talk about their odd dreams at breakfast. These are more violent than usual, a slice of growling menace underlying the smell of red silk, a dank cave, the taste of smoke.
He wakes up at noon to the sound of a truck pulling up outside. It isn't his dad's; this one has a slightly different pitch to its engine, and the break pads are about to go. Both of his parents ought to be at church and brunch in town until three or four, just like every Sunday. That makes this his responsibility.
Kurt takes the time to pull together a quick outfit and run a brush through his hair anyway. Nobody respects a werewolf in pyjamas.
Halfway up the basement steps he sniffs the air and quickens his pace, because somebody's brought a pair of wolves to his front door, and unless he's forgotten the scent of him in the past two years 'somebody' means Finn. His brother is not exactly the most careful of men at the best of times. Kurt wonders if it would be hypocritical of him to grab his father's shotgun from its rack on his way out the front door. Then he does it anyway.
The doorbell rings--of course, Finn can't be expected to keep his keys for an entire month, let alone the two years since he last visited home--and Kurt pauses a moment to check his hair in the hall mirror before he opens it. Good first impressions are, after all, key.
"Hey," Finn says, breaking into a wide, tired smile that, much like Finn himself, manages to be breathtaking in its simple sincerity. Kurt can see the wolves over his shoulder, a small blonde bitch carrying a bag, a brawny dog without any clothes on lounging against the hood of Finn's rusty blue pickup. "So...I kinda quit my job," he says. The wolves both have tan lines around their throats. What in the name of hell has Finn brought down on them? "And my friends kind of need someplace to stay for a while. Can we come in?"
~~~
Finn's childhood home is bigger than she expected, for a little town like McKinley, and kept almost as neatly as her mother's house. Quinn guesses, without having much to go on besides an immediate gut impression, that far less of that is down to Finn's own mother than to the incredibly fussy stepbrother she'd never known he had. Kurt would probably be hilarious, if she weren't so sick and exhausted right now. Domestic wolves always pick up the weirdest neuroses.
Or maybe she'd be grateful, as he hands her a stack of fluffy white towels and steers her into a room with a huge clawfoot bathtub, water already running and steaming hot. She'd be thankful that he's even giving her the time of day, let alone this much space and privacy to get herself clean while the three of them go off to talk like the men only one of them could ever hope to be. She'd be lowering her eyes in submission instead of finding herself staring blankly past everyone she's talking to in a way that can only partially be explained by a night without sleep.
This is her life now, Quinn reminds herself as she slips into the bathtub. This is her life now, as she runs the soft, soapy washcloth over the skin of her throat. This is her life now, and she hasn't come this far to lay down just a little lower and drown herself in Finn Hudson's mother's bathtub.
If she narrows her thoughts down just to this room, to this bath, she can breathe again, if you don't count nearly choking on the steam. The towels smell like lavender and the soap like vanilla, the room itself like the lingering, washing-day scent of bleach. She's not crying. She's not. There's no one to see her at it, anyway.
Quinn didn't let herself cry in the woods, not more than a couple of gasps leaning back against a tree to collect her composure, but she's got nowhere to be now and nothing but time. At first it's just a trickle dripping from the corner of her eyes, nothing she can't blame on the bathwater, but then she heaves a breath, too harshly, and then another, and another, and then she's crying like she's never going to stop. She has the presence of mind to yank the stopper out of the drain and turn the tap back on to cover the sound of it from the hall. Then Quinn wraps her arms around her knees and sobs.
It's not fair. It's not fair that she's had her whole life ripped away from her twice. It's not fair that all she wanted was just one little taste of something human. Her life is over, and Quinn is only twenty-four, and she doesn't want to die.
~~~
Even when Finn was a teenager he was a giant, but Kurt said it was probably better not to push his dad's good graces by borrowing his clothes and Finn grimaced and nodded, so Puck's swimming in denim and flannel. He didn't even bother asking about Kurt's clothing; pup's skinnier than a bitch on a diet, and whatever you call what he's wearing, it looks like it belongs on a west-town prostitute.
Seriously, having to work out clothes wherever he is every single time he changes back to being human? Totally going to be the worst thing about leaving Sue Sylvester. Not that Puck's got any problem with a little casual nakedness between friends, it's just that it tends to make the human-type ladies more nervous than they already are.
Anyway clothes are probably the least of Puck's problems, because this may legitimately be the most awkward dinner he's had to sit through since that time his Ma brought over the only rabbi in the district without telling him, and he came in naked halfway through with two black eyes from a scuffle with some lone dogs passing through the other end of the valley.
"Would anybody like more potatoes?" Finn's ma offers a little too brightly. Kurt slaps his father's hand away from the serving spoon without even looking, and on Puck's other side, Quinn flinches like somebody's about to get hit.
"Oh, come on," Mr. Hummel protests, and Kurt rolls his eyes.
"You've already had two helpings, and don't think I don't know exactly how much salt and butter is in those."
"You're the one that made them," Mr. Hummel points out, and Kurt nods.
"For our guests, who can have as much more as they like. I can only imagine what you've been eating," and suddenly his sharp-eyed judgment is swinging around to point right at Puck and Quinn, and jeeze, doesn't this pup know Puck could snap him in half if he wanted? "the dietary habits of most wolves left to their own devices are usually atrocious when it comes to getting enough vegetables, and don't think I don't know what you're likely to have been living on, Finn Hudson."
Finn guiltily lets the last slice of roast beef slide off the serving fork and back onto the platter. "It's a busy job, I had a lot on my plate. I ate what the landlady gave me."
"Pity the poor woman trying to keep up with you," Kurt sniffs, and yeah, okay, if this is what Finn grew up around, no wonder the troop's wolf bitches didn't scare him.
"They served a lot of vegetables in the troop, actually," Quinn says out of nowhere, sounding weirdly flat, like she doesn't even care enough to be pissed off. "Chief Sylvester is very invested in proper nutrition."
"Well," says Kurt, "I'm glad she gets something right."
"How long are you all planning on staying, anyway?" Mr. Hummel asks, cutting Puck off before he can think of a better response than a growl. Yeah, maybe she threw Quinn out and would probably kill both of them if she had the chance, but like hell if Sue Sylvester isn't a bigger badass on her laziest day off than this dog has ever been in his whole life. "I know you've got that full moon day after tomorrow, and I don't know if Kurt's cage is big enough for all three of you..."
"I'm not setting foot in any cage," Quinn says instantly, the same moment that Puck says,
"Like hell I'm spending full moon in a cage. I haven't used one of those since I was eight." Okay, maybe he was more like fourteen before he and his Ma gave up the charade for good, but he'd been sneaking out of it for a good six years before that. Nobody but nobody is getting Puckzilla back behind bars without a loaded rifle and shitload of luck.
"Guys, they don't really use cages in the troop, I think Puck and Quinn will be just fine on their--"
"Now hold on a minute, Finn. You ask me to take a couple of strange werewolves into my home on nothing but your word, that's one thing, but all of the sudden you want us to be responsible for what happens if they go running around out there on a full moon and kill somebody?" Mr. Hummel asks. "Right here, where everybody in McKinley's going to go looking at Kurt first thing when they need someone to blame for it? Not gonna happen, buddy," he says firmly.
"Dad, Rachel and Mercedes don't even have cages, they go out on full moons all the time," Kurt says, a little too desperately, and Puck sneaks a glance over at Quinn to see if she's noticed it too. Somebody's not as good a boy as he wants people to believe. Finn, of course, is totally oblivious.
"Mr. Hummel, I think when you consider the amount of time and training Puck and I have both had even to be considered for Sue Sylvester's wolf troop in the first place," Quinn says.
"Dude, whatever, if this is the welcome we're gonna get, I'll go right out and den up myself, I don't care," says Puck.
"Well," says Finn's mom. "If everybody's finished with their dinners, who wants pie?"
~~~
Tina's good about practicing her scales. It keeps her busy when her father's not home and she can't handle spending a whole day at Artie's. It's not like the house is overflowing with things for her to do otherwise.
Her dad works. There's not really a lot of friendliness in Spencerville for Daniel Cohen, with his come-and-go werewolf mistress and his crazy live-in daughter, but you're not supposed to like your accountants. You're just supposed to trust that it would be easy to round up a torch-wielding mob if they ever breathed a word of your secrets to your wife. He makes enough money to have indulged all of Tina's most out-there fashion experiments before she started just letting Kurt make her clothes. It's really a gift to both of them; they all need something to keep themselves busy during the day.
Tina reads. There's a bookseller in downtown Spencerville that she walks to once a week, rain or moon, to buy and trade. It's sort of the only time she sees humans, besides her dad and Mr. Schue; wandering around town as Daniel Cohen's crazy dramatic half-werewolf daughter got a lot less fun around the time she finally talked her mother into letting her drop the 'half'. The bookseller stocks all kinds of things Mr. Schue doesn't have in his library, slim paperback essays by social theorists in New York and Roanoke, picture books that she sometimes buys to bring to the puppies. Tina likes the really dreary gothic novels, when she can sneak them past her father--the ones where it's all passionate tragic romance, and everybody dies at the end, and sometimes there's vampires.
(Artie says that Miss Pillsbury over at the school in Delphos is a vampire, but Tina's pretty sure she doesn't believe him. Any vampire she's ever read about would have way better taste than to live--or unlive--in Auglaize District, Ohio.)
Sometimes there are werewolves, too, although usually they only show up to tear somebody's love interest apart or provide an appropriate air of menace to a scene. Mostly it's just dark windows and lots of consumption and billowing nightgowns. Tina can dig that.
Today she's practicing her scales, because the full moon is tomorrow and she can't sit still long enough to read. She's never going to hit the High F that Rachel and Kurt keep bickering over, but she can stay in tune for backup when Rachel tries to expose the pups to culture by hauling Kurt up to help her sing the entire libretto to Pygmalion from end to end. Somebody's got to do the "mmm mmm mmm" bits. Tina's good at those.
There's a gray spring drizzle in the air, dampening everything down, making noses twitch and sounds carry farther. There's no storm on any horizon, just the lingering wet of steady drops. She keeps the windows closed and the curtains drawn against it.
That's why she doesn't hear the truck pull up until the heavy *thud* of boots sounds against the front porch. Then the doorbell rings.
It's weird enough to be scary, because anybody in the whole district who might want to see her dad knows where his office is and that he's there all day, and the only ones who ever want to see her show up naked and come in through the back. Anyway, every wolf knows, full moon means guns the day before and fires the day after. People get too nervous to leave their homes on the night, so first they set up and prepare and then they go out for vengeance after. Today's not a good day to be anywhere on four legs.
The nervous, paranoid feeling doesn't go away when she opens the door to see Kurt there by himself, fully dressed, not even when she notices the unfamiliar truck behind him. She knew Kurt knows how to drive, but he doesn't, why would he, when anywhere that he ought to go is better on paws and at night when nobody will see.
"We have a problem," Kurt says simply.
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: Does 'generalized dystopia' require a warning? Some references to child abuse; otherwise, none for this chapter
Word Count: ~8,000
Summary: Ohio Territory isn't a friendly place for werewolves. Especially in a world like this, nobody makes it alone.
Chapter II: Music Of The Night
Werewolf night school is the place you go when you've got nowhere else to be.
Author's Notes: Chapter two! And things start to take shape. As far as pace goes, I'm not the world's fastest writer, so I'm expecting about 1-2 weeks between chapters until this is done, probably for the rest of the summer; I'm also expecting chapters to stay around 8-12k, though no promises on that. I'm going out of town tomorrow morning and will be gone for about a week, so advance apologies for being very late getting back about comment replies; I will have pen and paper though, so I'm hoping Chapter III will still appear on schedule.
Once again, story title from Wolf Song, by Patrick Wolf, which by the way can be found here; chapter title from Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which can be found here. (The song Rachel sings is here). All place names taken from real towns and counties in Ohio, although any actual resemblance is coincidental.
Again, thanks to crown_of_weeds for being a most wonderful cheerleader and sounding board on all fronts.
Will Schuester's great-Aunt Lillian died when he was 20 years old. He had to hitchhike home from school in Lima to get to the funeral--he nearly missed it, too, when the driver taking him from Salem to Bluffton got stuck in the mud by the river. He wouldn't have made a dent in the crowd. Half the district came out to see her buried; well, she'd taught almost all of them, at one point or another.
Will was the one she left her house to, though. After that he had to come back and teach in the Auglaize district. He'd grown up in Bluffton and McKinley. The love of his very young life was selling bolts of cloth and ladies' hats in a shop in Elida. The moment when he stepped off the farm cart bringing him into Bluffton for the last time, once again spattered in mud--this time from helping when a mail truck sprang a flat thirty miles out from Delphos--the whole promising world seemed to settle into place around him.
Great-Aunt Lillian's house was eleven miles down the road from Elida, the first eight of those dirt, and even farther from anywhere else. It had been left empty for over a year while Will finished his degree and negotiated his way into the rotation of teachers through the one-room school houses of Auglaize. There was an old, creaky water wheel and an old pump that badly needed repairing, half a dozen broken windows, and a forest bent on creeping in to all the cleared area that had long been denied it. Will fixed almost every rusty pipe and rotted floorboard himself before Terri would agree to move in there with him.
It's always been a teacher's house, and not only because Will can't afford anything closer into town on what they pay him. It's just about the same amount of inconveniently far from everything; it might be more than ten miles to go to teach reading and writing in the Elida schoolhouse on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but it's also only thirteen miles instead of twenty-five to do the same in Delphos on Monday and Thursday. Terri could have her sewing room and they'd still have plenty of room to, someday, fill the house with children.
Neither of them had really been expecting what kind of children he'd end up bringing home with him, but it wasn't like Will could just throw them back out into the night after Rachel Berry's fathers had invited them in. Deep down, he still can't completely blame Terri for leaving him over it.
~~~
Someday, Rachel Berry is going to live in a place with better-than-substandard lighting. She suspects that once she finally gets to New York City, that problem might take care of itself--of course she'll move into an actual constructed house and not a cave at all, although this cave has been good to her in her time here. Caves, after all, come cheaply and pre-built, often with their own supply of water, may have many different entrances and exits, are terribly difficult to navigate if you're unfamiliar with them or can't see in the dark, and are next to impossible to burn. Also, and much more importantly, they have great acoustics.
Acoustics are important. How else could she put on impromptu welcome concerts every time another lone wolf or small family pack passes through the area? Nobody new has arrived in the district since last fall, but Kurt and Mercedes come by all the time, and anyway there's always her fathers. Familiarity is hardly a reason to get complacent, after all. She has to practice so she'll sound her very best at Mr. Schue's this week. She and Tina are teaching some of the young ones about pitch and tone.
"Flowers fade, the fruits of summer fade, they have their seasons, so do we," Rachel sings, and her voice reverberates pleasingly off the high stone roof of the sitting room. "But just promise me that sometimes, you will think of me!" She holds the last note for just a few beats before cutting it off cleanly rather than letting it taper away into silence, an artistic decision she feels lends more weight to the power of the song. She doesn't bother to dash away the delicate trickle of tears; it lends more weight and drama too, after all. She doesn't even have to try to make herself cry for a performance any more. In the moment of silence-just-before-the-applause that every true performer lives for, she can hear a pocket of crumbling sand dislodge itself from the ceiling and patter softly against the cheesecloth canopy tacked up over the ceiling.
Her fathers clap enthusiastically. Kurt and Mercedes join in--and she can tell the difference in exuberance, Kurt Hummel--a moment later.
"Bravo, honey, bravo," says Daddy H. "Couldn't be sung better on Broad Avenue."
"I've got no critiques, honey," Mercedes says frankly. "You knocked that one dead."
"Kurt?" Rachel prompts a moment later. He rests one elbow on his other hand and tilts his head at her, considering.
"You rushed the tempo a little coming out of the bridge," he says.
"I was trying to signify the growing intensity of the song!" she protests, because really Kurt, there's helpful and then there's just jealously nitpicky, but he just nods.
"Yes, well, it came off as rushed. Don't tell me the Rachel Berry can't show intensity without speeding up," he says. Then he smiles. "Other than that, it was brilliant. No critiques."
"Oh! Well, yes, thank you," says Rachel. Sometimes just being around Kurt can be a bit much, but he's still her harshest--some days, her only useful critic, and his praise can leave her a little flustered.
"Well, this has been lovely," Kurt says, standing and carefully brushing off his trousers even though the fur-covered cushions they're using in place of a couch are perfectly clean, thank you very much, "but if Mercedes and I want to make it through the woods before any eager farmers start taking predawn potshots at shadows, we should get going. Rachel, we'll see you at Schue's this weekend?"
"Be careful out there," says Daddy L. "Moon on Tuesday."
Rachel shudders dramatically. Moon on Tuesday means guns on Monday and fire on Wednesday. Really, she doesn't know how they've survived here for this long.
"We'll be fine," Mercedes promises, slipping out of the dress she always leaves at Rachel's for nights like this. Kurt's already halfway out of the cave and behind a wall of stalagmites--he hates to be human naked in front of anyone, even them. She'll find his clothes neatly folded on a small, dry pedestal of rock after they go.
Rachel walks out to the mouth of the cave just to see them safely off, two lithe, low shadows springing out into the night.
~~~
Kurt can sing the entire score to every operetta his mother ever knew by heart, but it doesn't sound right without the harmony.
His mother could never hear music like he can. She'd put the record player on and sit in her purple armchair and set her sewing basket carefully to the side so she could hold him on her lap. She closed her eyes while she sang along, stroking his hair like she would a pet dog or her actual human son. She only heard notes, though, sung or played one at a time, and Kurt knows because she told him to close his eyes and listen for them, too. The first time he heard music as a wolf, he almost lost his mind.
The thing about notes is that there's never just one. The thing about sound is that it ripples out from its center in so many more dimensions than just 'high' or 'low'. The few beats of an operetta played on his mother's scratchy old record player expand into whole overwhelming clouds of sound, too much to piece through, enough to drown in if you tried. And then because it's music, it just keeps coming, throwing out harmonies so intricate and full of depth that humans couldn't ever stand to hear them or they'd stop making music ever again.
The first time Kurt heard music as a wolf was two days after the full moon that fell on his seventh birthday, when his mother let him practice changing indoors and away from the cage in the attic, just this once. She let him down on the floor of the sitting room, cautiously, with his father guarding the door to the foyer, to sniff and nose his way around such a little space he already knew so well when he could see it right. Then the full orchestral might of the overture to Christina and the Ghost shattered through his senses and destroyed any sense of where he was, what he was doing, anything but the impossible maze of sound.
His mother pulled her hand away fast enough that he didn't actually snap it off when she reached out to try and comfort him. Burt Hummel didn't need two werewolves in his life.
Kurt thought to regret it a year and a half later. Wolves don't slip and fall patching slick roofs after rain while their husbands are in another city learning about new engine innovations in tractors and grain threshers. If they do, they walk away from the three-story drop with nothing but a few rapidly-healing bones. It's just that there's not much use in trying to save a body once it's already begun to cool.
She started to sing to him from her sturdy wooden rocking chair on the other side of the attic on full moon nights after Christina and the Ghost. It was just one voice, infinitely rich in complexities, a single rope of sound winding its way through modulation after modulation. It wasn't so different than listening to talking this way, with a voice Kurt already knew right into his bones in any form. It got more difficult when she brought him back down to the sitting room to add in the piano, his father standing by tensely to ward off any disaster.
He loves it now, of course. Wolves who know what they're doing in being wolves don't lose themselves over music any more than humans collapse in a riot of color vision and the ten thousand things there are to see around them all the time, even when they're not moving. The trick is in learning to choose what to ignore.
~~~
Tina hates the five and a half mile stretch of land between the farmland just outside Delphos and the outskirts of Spencerville more than just about any patch of Ohio Territory she's ever been to. And she's been to the ruins of the iron city of Cleveland.
At a flat-out run, the distance from Artie's house to her father's takes about eleven minutes through clear, uninterrupted farmland. She's pretty sure she clocked in at under nine once, that morning when half a dozen farmhands were out in the fields with dogs and shotguns, milling around and making concerned noises behind every hedge. They were worried about a fox, or a new nest of rabbits, or some kind of crop blight, but that had never stopped a farmer sending his hounds after a wolf if he happened to run into one. Tina'd lost her favorite uncle that way, to the wrong end of a deer hunt.
She wouldn't mind it so much at night, but somehow, nine times out of ten, they find themselves together at Artie's house instead of her dad's, and nine times out of ten she's still there by dawn. If she could ever remember to leave a pair of shoes here, she'd just walk home, in the sun, like a normal person, maybe even wave to the farmers as she walked by.
But she always forgets to bring extra clothing over here because she and Artie usually spend barely any of their time alone together human, and most of that naked. And she'd attract enough attention being the barefoot girl with the yellow eyes even if all Spencerville and half of Auglaize District didn't know her as Daniel Cohen's werewolf daughter. And the road is two miles longer than the straight shot, and made of gravel, and limping eight miles until her feet hurt to walk on could be even more stupid than it would be painful.
Artie raises his head from his paws, cocks it, invites her to stay. Tina finishes straightening up--somebody with hands ought to--and leans down to ruffle behind his ears.
"Not today," she says.
They've known each other since they were twelve years old, and they're wolves together, anyway, so she doesn't say all the other things. They don't really do words between them. Words are for Kurt and Rachel and Mr. Schue, Mercedes and all the younger pups in Werewolf School. Tina and Artie have never had that much to say to each other that couldn't be said in the flick of a tail and the tilt of a head.
If Tina doesn't get going now, she's going to have trouble keeping wolf all the way home. She hasn't practiced pushing it as long as Artie, and she's fine sitting with him all night, but it's already past sun-up and it's been a long time since the last full moon.
"See you at Schue's later," Tina says, and lets herself out.
~~~
Mercedes Jones is the reason Will Schuester's secret werewolf school conspiracy ever really got started. Sure, it was little miss Rachel Berry and her overwhelming ambition that got Mr. Schue to take her in and start tutoring her in the evenings, but it was Mercedes and the Jones pack that turned it from one girl with a slate chalkboard to a closely-guarded secret shared quietly across half of Ohio Territory. The others, Kurt and Rachel and Artie and Tina, they sort of forget that sometimes.
Werewolves know. Go winter in Auglaize District for a few months, the packs say, 'cause there's a man there who'll sneak your puppies into his own home at night and teach them just like real children. Don't stay too long, though, don't you dare cause any trouble, 'cause the pack that gets Will Schuester caught or ruins it for the rest of us? They're gonna answer to every parent in Ohio Territory.
Mercedes knows three different languages, after so many winters with nothing else to do besides borrow books out of Mr. Schuester's library, listen to Kurt and Rachel bicker, or practice skinning beavers for the fur traders. Half the pack-born wolves Mercedes has ever met can't even read or write. The ones that can mostly got taught by bit wolves who lived human long enough to go right through school, and then somehow managed to make it out to the woods before they got shot or went crazy, afterwards. It's different for the wolves born to human parents, accidental throwbacks like Kurt or little Gracie, but not by all that much. Gracie was ten by the time Kurt's dad and Rachel managed to talk her parents into letting her go up to Shuester's place for school, and she didn't even know her A-B-C's.
Mr. Schue's important. He gives them a place to go with actual furniture in it, someplace other than Rachel and her dads' cave or the tiny scratched-out den Mercedes has been living in since the rest of the Jones pack moved on without her. He teaches them all the things the people who run the world have to know, like maybe it'll help, and who knows, maybe someday it will. Sometimes, when it's late at night and he starts to forget, he sort of starts treating them like they're human.
It's funny, knowing a guy so well who half the werewolf grapevine in Ohio whispers about like some kind of hero. Mercedes first met Mr. Schue when she was eleven years old, dropped on his doorstep next to Rachel one night without even a warning. It kinda seems like half her life's been spent traveling to and from Auglaize District, and the other half living right here, even though she was already seventeen the first time she talked her parents into leaving without her. Mr. Schue's been right there in her life for all of that, more years than half the puppies at night school have even been alive.
You kinda get to know a guy when you've been around him for that long, even if you've been calling him by his last name since before he started teaching you fractions. You remember that he's made of more things than just the ones everybody remembers him doing, that he's only human. And it's funny, but sometimes Mercedes has to wonder if he even knows what it means, what they say about him in Allegheny and Springfield and Laurentide. If it matters to him the same way at all.
~~~
Rachel is always early to Mr. Schuester's house on school nights. Promptness is a cornerstone of a civil society, and living in a cave without clocks is no excuse for neglecting it.
They're really much too old for school any more, herself and Kurt and Mercedes and Artie and Tina, but age is no true barrier to learning. When they finally find a way to gather themselves up and move to New York, they'll need all the knowledge and practice they can get.
They aren't Mr. Schue's only students any more, of course. As the founder and first member of werewolf night school, Rachel always feels a certain sense of proprietary pride in the pups that come through to learn here. She has every confidence that sooner or later, Auglaize District's secret reputation for werewolf-friendliness will bring her dream boyfriend out of the woods and into her life once and for all. Possibly he'll be accompanying his much younger sibling, a move that speaks wonderfully for his sense of generosity, caring, and devotion to the ones he loves. It might even be his very young son or daughter, born to a mate who was shot tragically dead by a cruel band of traveling fur trappers, freezing his heart to a lump of ice only softened by the love he bears for their small child. Rachel, obviously, will be the one to melt his heart and bring him back to the land of the truly living. Stepmotherhood isn't exactly in her plans at the moment, but she could be flexible for the sake of a truly epic romance. She's not getting any younger.
Mr. Schuester very wisely never unlocks his back door until the first wolf shows up on a school night, so Rachel changes back to human and raps sharply on the glass pane of it. Mr. Schuester appears a minute later to unlock it, carefully averting his eyes to her nakedness, as always.
Rachel spent a very long year at the age of seventeen being utterly, crushingly disappointed by that. Now that they're older and he hasn't really taught them in a few years so much as let them sit around in his living room and talk, Mercedes thinks Rachel could probably have him if she tried. Rachel thinks she's probably right, but that's not the first time she wants for herself any more. She wants flowers, romance, and sunlight, deep, longing gazes, and a dog-wolf who will pine away for at least a few weeks over her in recognition of all this long time she's spent pining away for him. All other criteria aside, Mr. Schuester's simply not a wolf, and much as Rachel could never be with someone who doesn't recognize her truly superior talent in singing and performance, she could never settle for a man who can't truly appreciate her beauty in both her forms.
"Thank you, Mr. Schuester," Rachel says politely, and circles past him on her way to the spare room where they all keep their school clothes. It isn't at all impossible to make it up here on foot--Rachel herself does so regularly on low moon nights, simply for the sake of the exercise--but it is much faster and easier taken at a run.
"Coffee's on the stove when you're done," he says. "I've got some exciting things for us to work on tonight!"
She smelled the coffee brewing as soon as she got onto the property, of course, but it would be rude to mention. The house always smells like it, coffee and a faint hint of wolf, dusty books, and an almost-full bottle of aftershave Mr. Schuester dropped years ago that still hangs in the air. It's a little bit spicy, expensive, foreign-smelling, the kind of thing people must wear in New York City. It's the most exciting thing in the whole house.
~~
There's one chair in Mr. Schuester's living room, over in the shadowy corner a little bit behind the fire, that nobody ever bothers to try to sit in but Artie. Tina sits next to him sometimes, on the floor with her legs curled up under her, when she's not surrounded by wolf pups wanting help with their math and spelling. Tina's going to be a good mother someday, when she stops hanging this backwoods piece of farm country and gets on with her life.
Artie would get down on one knee if he could, but his human legs aren't really in any kind of shape for kneeling. Werewolves don't do that, anyway, getting married. Weddings are all about churches they're not allowed into and documents they don't have the legal standing to sign. Artie tries not to let it bother him. Watching Tina bend down and show the pups how to solve an algebra problem, though, sometimes it kind of irks him anyway.
There are thirteen of them here tonight, counting Mr. Schue. It was Mercedes' turn to pick up Gracie; she's twelve and shows up with bruises on her arms almost every time. Rob comes in with the Drexel pups because their pack has been denning up over the falls near Beaverdam. When they get up and move out in the next couple of months he's going to go right back to getting lost in the woods again half the time he's meant to show up here, because he's got parents who love him enough to assume any wolf can cross half a district at night at nine years old with no problem. Emily, Theo, and Lilah are practically illiterate even though Lilah's almost fifteen, and Renee can do geometry without blinking but tonight she's refusing to talk to anyone again, even her adopted packmates. Drake is 16 and still walks twelve miles here and back twice every week because he only got bitten three months ago and hasn't figured out how to work all his legs and all his senses at the same time.
Rachel is teaching the younger ones some ridiculous catchy song she totally wrote herself with the names of all the territories and provinces in the order they joined the Empire, that the rest of them are all going to have stuck in their heads for days. Mr. Shue is standing back against the wall and watching her with a level of pride and also non-interaction with his students that makes Artie sort of uncomfortable. Kurt sits in his own corner, offering occasional commentary to the goings-on in between sketching another commission he'll sew in his basement for his stepmother to sell. Mercedes is reading a book on the couch next to him, making use of the chance for indoor lighting for once and glancing up every thirty seconds to make sure nothing's changed. Tina's on the floor next to Renee, just sitting, the two quietest things in the whole room. Sometimes one of them makes a mark on the slate between them, but mostly they're just there. Renee probably doesn't need as much instruction as everybody else here, anyway. She got to go to school as a human until last year, when she stopped having friends or a family or a home and had to start learning to catch rabbits with her teeth if she wanted to eat.
Artie remembers what human school was like. It wasn't that long ago, even if it is only getting longer. He's officially been a wolf longer than he used to be a boy, now. He's pretty sure secret werewolf night school is less boring.
Drake is standing awkwardly next to Artie's chair. Artie would offer to move somewhere a little more convenient, but this isn't his most mobile form, and shifting into wolf just to walk across the room a little more easily is both pathetic and really hard on the clothes.
"You used to be human," Drake says finally, quietly enough that the rest of the group doesn't have to hear, although except for Mr. Schuester they all can. He keeps looking awkwardly over Artie's head, instead of directly at his face, but Artie doesn't mind. He's pretty used to it by now.
"Yep," says Artie. He's the only other one in this room besides Renee and Tina, and the younger ones don't need to know about Tina. He's been expecting this conversation for two months.
"How did you...I mean," Drake says. "What did you do?"
Artie twists a little in his chair, trying to stretch and relieve some of the pressure on slightly mangled limbs. If he weren't a werewolf, he'd probably be paralyzed right now. Of course, if he hadn't been attacked and mauled by a werewolf he wouldn't have been injured in the first place, and it turns out there's only so much accelerated healing can do against this kind of damage.
"I spend a lot of time as the wolf," Artie says honestly. "It matters less, then." He pauses, considering. "Also, sometimes Mr. Schue lets us sing really angry songs if we persuade him we're just using them to 'practice our music'."
~~~
They spend more time in this room singing than learning from books. It's what Rachel and Kurt say is going to get them out of this damn district and into being somebody, though, so nobody argues it.
Mercedes met Kurt Hummel right in this very room. He was eleven years old, all pale skin and fancy clothes wilted by the long hike up the road, standing half behind his tall, brown-eyed and floppy-haired new stepbrother, Mr. Schuester's favorite student from the human classrooms in McKinley that he still never really talks to any of them about. She's heard plenty about Finn Hudson over the years, though. Kurt would follow that boy to the ends of the earth if their parents didn't flat-out forbid him to.
Mercedes can't really imagine being like that about either of her brothers; she was born having them and neither of them are human, but maybe that's sort of the point. Finn showed up out of nowhere and still beat up that other kid when they were thirteen for saying shit about wolves. Mercedes isn't going to forget that fight any time soon. She heard about it once a week for years.
It's funny how wolf Kurt can be sometimes, though, in between all the fussy human stuff he tries to do, his clothes and his cooking and his and Rachel's musical dreams. Mercedes wouldn't do loyalty like that for her brothers any more, not since she let the pack move on without her, but she would for Kurt.
They've been working on this plan for ten years now, since they realized Kurt's voice wasn't ever going to drop a whole lot and Rachel let her own plans expand to fit the two of them. "Someday," Rachel said, voice quivering with emotion, "we're going to live here." Her finger pressed down on the little gray square of Nassau County, right over the star for New York City, crinkling the map into the dirt of the cave floor.
"Someday," Kurt agreed. "We'll have to work on our act if we want to make it there, though. If we're going to sing in front of that many people, we'll need to be absolutely perfect."
"Of course we will, Kurt," Rachel scolded. "Please. With your countertenor, Mercedes' vocal power and my unmatched star quality, we'll take New York City by storm."
"Right! Can't wait," Mercedes hastened to agree. "Big city, here we come."
It's going to be amazing, once they finally make it. Just the three of them, or maybe they'll bring Artie and Tina, too, Mercedes isn't real sure how Rachel thinks that part of the plan's going to go. Off on their own making good for themselves in the big city. Kurt and Rachel, Rachel and Kurt, and Mercedes right there in the middle of it. It's going to be amazing. It has to be.
Because if there's one thing Mercedes Jones has learned in nearly fourteen years of being their friend, it's that Rachel Berry always gets what she wants eventually, and Kurt Hummel usually has his way even sooner. It won't be like the time when they were seventeen when they made it halfway across Ohio on foot before that thunderstorm hit, they got pummeled by hail, and they lost half their stuff because Kurt's lived in his dad's basement his whole life and Rachel hasn't moved with a pack since she was ten. It won't be like the time two years later when Rachel got them a gig singing at a bar in Putnam and a couple of drunk hicks threw beer bottles at them, or the time after that when Kurt got them a gig in Sugar Creek and then almost got shot for growling at some guy who tried to feel Rachel up and wouldn't take no for an answer. It won't be like that time they got all the way east to Plymouth and got turned back at the border because it's illegal to even be a werewolf in the province of Plymouth without the proper registration or permits.
Rachel's going to keep trying, and Kurt's going to keep trying, and so New York is going to happen for them, one way or another, someday. For the three of them.
~~~
"If you're very masochistic," Will's Aunt Lillian once told him, "become a farmer. They don't have to travel as much as teachers do and they worry almost as much." She'd been proud of him, though, would be proud of him if she could see her house now. It just didn't make her wrong about the worrying part, even if he's pretty sure that no teacher's ever had quite the same kind of worries he does.
He, Will Schuester, is basically constantly responsible for anywhere from six to fifteen werewolves and all the things they learn and talk about when they get together. If he does his job, he truly believes they might grow up like Rachel or Tina, educated, driven, and smart enough to find ways of using their skills positively, for the good of everyone in this society. If he doesn't do his job well enough...
Will has to believe Emma when she says she thinks he can make enough of a difference in these kids' lives to be worth the risk. Emma's got that special insight into what it's like to be one of them, with her...condition, and all.
She's the only person Will's really told about the school--well, besides Holly, who sort of found out on her own, and Terri, of course. Emma's the only one he can really talk to about it, anyway. They have lunch together on the days Will teaches in Delphos, in the sense that they sit together in her spotlessly tidy garret room in the windowless attic of the schoolhouse, and he eats his lunch while she watches. Emma loves hearing about the wolf kids.
She even has pretty good advice sometimes. She's the one who pointed out that the Newsomes might listen to a guy like Burt Hummel about their daughter before they listened to him. And she's the one who gave him the great idea to let the older kids teach some of the newer ones as much as possible, to keep them busy and out of trouble. Not that Will really thinks that the likes of, say, Artie Abrams or Tina Cohen-Chang would ever intentionally be a troublemaker, but it has to be good for them to keep some stable good influences in their lives.
Emma's the only one Will can unload on about his worries for any of them. He doesn't know if Drake is going to snap any day now and kill his own parents, or if Lilah is going to leave the district in a few months and forget everything he's spent all this time and effort trying to teach her. He doesn't know if they're ever going to persuade Artie to spend more than a few hours in their company looking human, no matter how distracting he's worried the scarring might be. He doesn't know if Rob is going to grow up to take everything Will's giving him and run off into the woods to live off the work of farmers and villagers across Ohio by theft, or even go sign up to work for Sue Sylvester and her despicable private army and turn them all in. It's a lot of pressure on Will's part to get it right.
~~~
Kurt slips down the tunnel leading to his basement about half an hour before sunrise. It's an excellent tunnel, as half-mile-long underground excavations go. Kurt dug it himself as soon as his father finished building the house for Carole. It's better for everyone if the neighbors don't notice him slipping off after dark, in either form. If being able to leave the house directly from his basement means that Carole and his father don't realize exactly how many nights Kurt spends away from home, well. That's probably better for them too.
The basement was his father's consolation bribe for replacing his first wife and son with Carole and Finn, who, not being dead nor in any way werewolves, could finally give him the family he'd always deserved. Kurt didn't blame him for it, of course. He couldn't. Finn and Carole were both wonderful, and anyway, Kurt knew what it felt like to wish for more of your own kind. His father deserved to be happy. He hugged Kurt without any visible or olfactory signs of fear, and Kurt got his own basement.
The basement suite is sleek in white and gray and, aside from the scratches gouged deep into the paint of the alcove set behind the metal bars on the north side of the room, pristine. Most of the claw marks are set much too close together to fit Kurt's paws now, but that's another thing Carole and his father are better off never looking too closely at. He's used it a few times in the past couple of years, when the others were busy or too far away on a full moon night to run safely together. It's good to have. Just...in case.
One of the good things about being a wolf, few as they are, is Kurt's complete ability to flop down onto his gratuitously overstuffed mattress and fall instantly asleep no matter the time of day or night. He stops to change into his pyjamas and run through his facial cleansing cycle. This face is as human as he'll ever get to look. Kurt intends to take care of it.
He rarely dreams much, unless it's close to the full moon, and then it's all mixed-up fragments of sensation that seem nothing at all like the linear surrealism Dad or Carole describe when they talk about their odd dreams at breakfast. These are more violent than usual, a slice of growling menace underlying the smell of red silk, a dank cave, the taste of smoke.
He wakes up at noon to the sound of a truck pulling up outside. It isn't his dad's; this one has a slightly different pitch to its engine, and the break pads are about to go. Both of his parents ought to be at church and brunch in town until three or four, just like every Sunday. That makes this his responsibility.
Kurt takes the time to pull together a quick outfit and run a brush through his hair anyway. Nobody respects a werewolf in pyjamas.
Halfway up the basement steps he sniffs the air and quickens his pace, because somebody's brought a pair of wolves to his front door, and unless he's forgotten the scent of him in the past two years 'somebody' means Finn. His brother is not exactly the most careful of men at the best of times. Kurt wonders if it would be hypocritical of him to grab his father's shotgun from its rack on his way out the front door. Then he does it anyway.
The doorbell rings--of course, Finn can't be expected to keep his keys for an entire month, let alone the two years since he last visited home--and Kurt pauses a moment to check his hair in the hall mirror before he opens it. Good first impressions are, after all, key.
"Hey," Finn says, breaking into a wide, tired smile that, much like Finn himself, manages to be breathtaking in its simple sincerity. Kurt can see the wolves over his shoulder, a small blonde bitch carrying a bag, a brawny dog without any clothes on lounging against the hood of Finn's rusty blue pickup. "So...I kinda quit my job," he says. The wolves both have tan lines around their throats. What in the name of hell has Finn brought down on them? "And my friends kind of need someplace to stay for a while. Can we come in?"
~~~
Finn's childhood home is bigger than she expected, for a little town like McKinley, and kept almost as neatly as her mother's house. Quinn guesses, without having much to go on besides an immediate gut impression, that far less of that is down to Finn's own mother than to the incredibly fussy stepbrother she'd never known he had. Kurt would probably be hilarious, if she weren't so sick and exhausted right now. Domestic wolves always pick up the weirdest neuroses.
Or maybe she'd be grateful, as he hands her a stack of fluffy white towels and steers her into a room with a huge clawfoot bathtub, water already running and steaming hot. She'd be thankful that he's even giving her the time of day, let alone this much space and privacy to get herself clean while the three of them go off to talk like the men only one of them could ever hope to be. She'd be lowering her eyes in submission instead of finding herself staring blankly past everyone she's talking to in a way that can only partially be explained by a night without sleep.
This is her life now, Quinn reminds herself as she slips into the bathtub. This is her life now, as she runs the soft, soapy washcloth over the skin of her throat. This is her life now, and she hasn't come this far to lay down just a little lower and drown herself in Finn Hudson's mother's bathtub.
If she narrows her thoughts down just to this room, to this bath, she can breathe again, if you don't count nearly choking on the steam. The towels smell like lavender and the soap like vanilla, the room itself like the lingering, washing-day scent of bleach. She's not crying. She's not. There's no one to see her at it, anyway.
Quinn didn't let herself cry in the woods, not more than a couple of gasps leaning back against a tree to collect her composure, but she's got nowhere to be now and nothing but time. At first it's just a trickle dripping from the corner of her eyes, nothing she can't blame on the bathwater, but then she heaves a breath, too harshly, and then another, and another, and then she's crying like she's never going to stop. She has the presence of mind to yank the stopper out of the drain and turn the tap back on to cover the sound of it from the hall. Then Quinn wraps her arms around her knees and sobs.
It's not fair. It's not fair that she's had her whole life ripped away from her twice. It's not fair that all she wanted was just one little taste of something human. Her life is over, and Quinn is only twenty-four, and she doesn't want to die.
~~~
Even when Finn was a teenager he was a giant, but Kurt said it was probably better not to push his dad's good graces by borrowing his clothes and Finn grimaced and nodded, so Puck's swimming in denim and flannel. He didn't even bother asking about Kurt's clothing; pup's skinnier than a bitch on a diet, and whatever you call what he's wearing, it looks like it belongs on a west-town prostitute.
Seriously, having to work out clothes wherever he is every single time he changes back to being human? Totally going to be the worst thing about leaving Sue Sylvester. Not that Puck's got any problem with a little casual nakedness between friends, it's just that it tends to make the human-type ladies more nervous than they already are.
Anyway clothes are probably the least of Puck's problems, because this may legitimately be the most awkward dinner he's had to sit through since that time his Ma brought over the only rabbi in the district without telling him, and he came in naked halfway through with two black eyes from a scuffle with some lone dogs passing through the other end of the valley.
"Would anybody like more potatoes?" Finn's ma offers a little too brightly. Kurt slaps his father's hand away from the serving spoon without even looking, and on Puck's other side, Quinn flinches like somebody's about to get hit.
"Oh, come on," Mr. Hummel protests, and Kurt rolls his eyes.
"You've already had two helpings, and don't think I don't know exactly how much salt and butter is in those."
"You're the one that made them," Mr. Hummel points out, and Kurt nods.
"For our guests, who can have as much more as they like. I can only imagine what you've been eating," and suddenly his sharp-eyed judgment is swinging around to point right at Puck and Quinn, and jeeze, doesn't this pup know Puck could snap him in half if he wanted? "the dietary habits of most wolves left to their own devices are usually atrocious when it comes to getting enough vegetables, and don't think I don't know what you're likely to have been living on, Finn Hudson."
Finn guiltily lets the last slice of roast beef slide off the serving fork and back onto the platter. "It's a busy job, I had a lot on my plate. I ate what the landlady gave me."
"Pity the poor woman trying to keep up with you," Kurt sniffs, and yeah, okay, if this is what Finn grew up around, no wonder the troop's wolf bitches didn't scare him.
"They served a lot of vegetables in the troop, actually," Quinn says out of nowhere, sounding weirdly flat, like she doesn't even care enough to be pissed off. "Chief Sylvester is very invested in proper nutrition."
"Well," says Kurt, "I'm glad she gets something right."
"How long are you all planning on staying, anyway?" Mr. Hummel asks, cutting Puck off before he can think of a better response than a growl. Yeah, maybe she threw Quinn out and would probably kill both of them if she had the chance, but like hell if Sue Sylvester isn't a bigger badass on her laziest day off than this dog has ever been in his whole life. "I know you've got that full moon day after tomorrow, and I don't know if Kurt's cage is big enough for all three of you..."
"I'm not setting foot in any cage," Quinn says instantly, the same moment that Puck says,
"Like hell I'm spending full moon in a cage. I haven't used one of those since I was eight." Okay, maybe he was more like fourteen before he and his Ma gave up the charade for good, but he'd been sneaking out of it for a good six years before that. Nobody but nobody is getting Puckzilla back behind bars without a loaded rifle and shitload of luck.
"Guys, they don't really use cages in the troop, I think Puck and Quinn will be just fine on their--"
"Now hold on a minute, Finn. You ask me to take a couple of strange werewolves into my home on nothing but your word, that's one thing, but all of the sudden you want us to be responsible for what happens if they go running around out there on a full moon and kill somebody?" Mr. Hummel asks. "Right here, where everybody in McKinley's going to go looking at Kurt first thing when they need someone to blame for it? Not gonna happen, buddy," he says firmly.
"Dad, Rachel and Mercedes don't even have cages, they go out on full moons all the time," Kurt says, a little too desperately, and Puck sneaks a glance over at Quinn to see if she's noticed it too. Somebody's not as good a boy as he wants people to believe. Finn, of course, is totally oblivious.
"Mr. Hummel, I think when you consider the amount of time and training Puck and I have both had even to be considered for Sue Sylvester's wolf troop in the first place," Quinn says.
"Dude, whatever, if this is the welcome we're gonna get, I'll go right out and den up myself, I don't care," says Puck.
"Well," says Finn's mom. "If everybody's finished with their dinners, who wants pie?"
~~~
Tina's good about practicing her scales. It keeps her busy when her father's not home and she can't handle spending a whole day at Artie's. It's not like the house is overflowing with things for her to do otherwise.
Her dad works. There's not really a lot of friendliness in Spencerville for Daniel Cohen, with his come-and-go werewolf mistress and his crazy live-in daughter, but you're not supposed to like your accountants. You're just supposed to trust that it would be easy to round up a torch-wielding mob if they ever breathed a word of your secrets to your wife. He makes enough money to have indulged all of Tina's most out-there fashion experiments before she started just letting Kurt make her clothes. It's really a gift to both of them; they all need something to keep themselves busy during the day.
Tina reads. There's a bookseller in downtown Spencerville that she walks to once a week, rain or moon, to buy and trade. It's sort of the only time she sees humans, besides her dad and Mr. Schue; wandering around town as Daniel Cohen's crazy dramatic half-werewolf daughter got a lot less fun around the time she finally talked her mother into letting her drop the 'half'. The bookseller stocks all kinds of things Mr. Schue doesn't have in his library, slim paperback essays by social theorists in New York and Roanoke, picture books that she sometimes buys to bring to the puppies. Tina likes the really dreary gothic novels, when she can sneak them past her father--the ones where it's all passionate tragic romance, and everybody dies at the end, and sometimes there's vampires.
(Artie says that Miss Pillsbury over at the school in Delphos is a vampire, but Tina's pretty sure she doesn't believe him. Any vampire she's ever read about would have way better taste than to live--or unlive--in Auglaize District, Ohio.)
Sometimes there are werewolves, too, although usually they only show up to tear somebody's love interest apart or provide an appropriate air of menace to a scene. Mostly it's just dark windows and lots of consumption and billowing nightgowns. Tina can dig that.
Today she's practicing her scales, because the full moon is tomorrow and she can't sit still long enough to read. She's never going to hit the High F that Rachel and Kurt keep bickering over, but she can stay in tune for backup when Rachel tries to expose the pups to culture by hauling Kurt up to help her sing the entire libretto to Pygmalion from end to end. Somebody's got to do the "mmm mmm mmm" bits. Tina's good at those.
There's a gray spring drizzle in the air, dampening everything down, making noses twitch and sounds carry farther. There's no storm on any horizon, just the lingering wet of steady drops. She keeps the windows closed and the curtains drawn against it.
That's why she doesn't hear the truck pull up until the heavy *thud* of boots sounds against the front porch. Then the doorbell rings.
It's weird enough to be scary, because anybody in the whole district who might want to see her dad knows where his office is and that he's there all day, and the only ones who ever want to see her show up naked and come in through the back. Anyway, every wolf knows, full moon means guns the day before and fires the day after. People get too nervous to leave their homes on the night, so first they set up and prepare and then they go out for vengeance after. Today's not a good day to be anywhere on four legs.
The nervous, paranoid feeling doesn't go away when she opens the door to see Kurt there by himself, fully dressed, not even when she notices the unfamiliar truck behind him. She knew Kurt knows how to drive, but he doesn't, why would he, when anywhere that he ought to go is better on paws and at night when nobody will see.
"We have a problem," Kurt says simply.