Archive of Our Own

They’re fast girls, wild girls, beast girls. Long before the moon gave them her gift Jade had been able to feel it inside her, something in her marrow that had been always waiting to burst into existence, something that was only given form when she met Kit and recognised the same untamed desire in her.

Their world doesn’t seem to want them untamed though, so as the walls of their lives begin to close in with restrictions made by other people and futures that promise only to shackle them, they take each other by the hand and board a Greyhound out of town.

Jade has always thought that running away was the coward's way out. Kit has always said that there is nothing cowardly about choosing to live. With Kit asleep on her shoulder as their fifth hour of travel blurs into the sixth, Jade rests her cheek on the the top of Kit’s head, breathes in the scent of her with every inhale, and starts to re-write her own definition of bravery.

Jade will never know if Kit awoke the wild wolf in her or if she awoke it in Kit, or if it was simply a matter of two souls who couldn't deny the truth once they'd collided. Kit will never know if it was her teeth biting into Jade’s arm that changed them, or if it was Jade’s teeth sinking into the back of her neck. But they share their blood on their first night of freedom, beneath a desert sky and under the full wolf moon, and since then, for three nights a month, they leave their human bodies behind.

Every month the change is different. The snow moon in February turns them into long limbed racers, and they chase each other through the streets of their new town, their temporary town, hundreds of miles from their first home. They are creatures of short yips and long leaps and even longer howls. Jade has tall dark limbs and a majestic mane and hot breath that ghosts from her body. Kit has the coldest nose she’s ever had in her life. She buries it in her tail, in Jade’s furry neck. Jade opens her jaw wide and takes Kit’s whole muzzle in her mouth. Kit’s never felt so held. Human arms can’t engulf her the way Jade’s wolf mouth can.

By the second night, the crisp snow turns to icy gray sludge on the side of the roads. By the third, all wolfish tracks they left behind have vanished.

Kit becomes a terror, more beast than girl, more monster than beast. She’s a bulking horror from an old movie shot in black and white, enormous knots of muscle and snarling teeth and eerily human blue eyes. Too much skin, too little fur to cover it. Two days too early she changes, and Jade stares at her own human hands in horror and wonders what it is in Kit’s blood that the worm moon calls to with such potency, when it does not call the same monstrosity from Jade’s.

It wrecks Kit, once it’s over. Pale and wan, she needs to lean on Jade just to move. Kit doesn’t talk about it, but long after the moon has shifted away from its alluring fullness Jade can see the unspeakable things Kit witnessed still haunting her lover’s eyes. Jade wonders if this whole thing has been a terrible mistake.

The next moon swells despite Jade’s fear, and Spring brings out the youthfulness in them both. Awkward and gangly, half grown, their energy is boundless and their appetites insatiable. Jade chases Kit tumbling down a grassy hill and together they splash through a river, snapping at fish. Kit can’t hold herself back from mounting Jade, hips thrusting as she chases a different kind of hunger.

After moonset they lie together in tangled human limbs in their small apartment, the ground floor window wide open to let in the cool morning air. Outside everything smells of petricore and ozone, wet asphalt and soft earth. Outside, delicate green things are pushing through the weight of the world, softened as it has been by the rain.

Kit sleeps deeply in Jade’s arms, snuffling softly where her mouth is pressed between the thin cotton pillow and Jade’s skin. Jade has always felt older than her age, but worn out by three nights of play makes her think a little differently. She is still young, Kit - for all she’s been through as well - is still young. All of the things in Jade’s life that have aged her still reside in her bones, but tonight all she can feel is a warm, exhausted joy.

They are monsters and they are children and they are always growing, changing, becoming whatever the next phase in their life calls them to be.

Even fast girls, wild girls, beast girls need a break from being girls at all sometimes. Kit wakes in a meadow of wildflowers, self seeded and untamed. Her body has transformed from wolf back to Kit, but there's a squareness to her jaw and a flatness to her chest and a different kind of impregnable strength in her now. In her? In him? Kit isn't sure what Kit is yet, but there's no falseness coming from this body; it is Kit's, just as the wolf body is Kit's. That's all that really matters.

Over the third quarter and the waning crescent, through the dark moonless mid-month and into the waxing of the new moon, Jade lets her beard bloom red and curly, lets the grasslands of her arm hair grow, lets the deeper warmth of her crackling laugh warm her soul. They don't know if this will last, but whether it does or it doesn't, they still end each day wrapped up in each other. Love comes to them in every shape they can imagine.

Everything grows ripe in the heat. Bright fruit swells too fat and juicy to be hidden by leaves, the ewes that dot the green hillsides are heavy with lamb. Jade's lips and hands are stained from picking berries, and a slow spring of blood flows from between her legs. They lie naked beside the fire, Kit's fingers knuckle deep in the red warmth of Jade, stroking her from the inside as they wait for the moon to rise. Jade has already come twice, but Kit is enjoying painting their bodies in dark blood and glimmering come.

“Such a mess,” Jade croons on the comedown from her third orgasm. It isn't a criticism.

Kit grins, and writes a K across Jade's left breast. “I'll clean you up good,” she promises, and flicks her tongue out over her suddenly wolfish teeth.

Kit loses the grapple and Jade pins her to the ground with her hulking lupine body. Heart leaping and lungs racing to catch up, Kit pushes her own urge to transform back. She reaches up to bury her fingers in Jade’s fur, to feel the low vibration of a rumbling growl through her palms. Some ancient human part of Kit fears Jade like this, fears Jade’s teeth and the cleverness of a hunter in her amber eyes. Her body has never forgotten it is part of a food chain and her breath catches and her stomach lights up and sharp shooting stars of adrenaline spike through her body as Jade lowers her head.

But it’s Jade, whatever body she’s wearing at the moment, it’s Jade, and because it’s Jade the fear slicks into arousal between Kit’s legs. Jade’s tongue drags across Kit’s chest and her nipples ache beneath it, her low moan an answer to the gnarr in Jade's throat. Jade’s cold, wet nose huffs against the heat of Kit’s cunt as Jade buries her snout in Kit like Kit’s seen her bury it the meat of a fresh kill. Kit hips buck as she whines like she’s dying and when Jade lifts her head Kit can see her own slick shining on Jade’s muzzle in the moonlight.

Fear and fire and the full moon have Kit’s body squirming to change, but she fights to stay like this for a little longer, so Jade can explore her like this, because she wants to love Jade in all ways it is possible to love Jade and she wants to be loved by Jade in all the ways it is possible for Jade to love her. And want her. And want to fuck her.

And Jade does want to fuck her like this. Wants her carnally and animalistically and fully. Kit can hear it in the hungry growl and Kit can feel it on her hot, panting breath, and Kit can see it in the heavy cock that the buck moon has bestowed as a gift upon them both. She’s going to take it. She’s going to feel herself open for Jade, filled by Jade, she’s going to grip fistfuls of thick fur in her hands and howl as she comes, ravaged tender by every inch of Jade’s perfect self.

The sultry heat of summer draws them out to the lake, where reflected moonlight stretches over the endless depths between them and the distant shore. They hike all day from the carpark where the road ends, nipping at each other's heels and haunches and speaking a language of tails and ears and naked gums.

Exhausted, they nap on the vantage point of a wide, flat rock that still remembers the sun long after it has set. No one knows where they are. From here, even the city lights can’t reach them. The world seems ancient and wild. They leave nothing but footprints and co-mingled scent. They take nothing but each other, vigorously, on the lakeshore.

Sunlight turns their fur to gold, turns the drying long grasses of the foothills to gold. The moon is a tissue paper disk in the ruddy blue sky, in the orchard the trees are laden with apples. Between the rows, Kit takes down a hare. Out beyond the cornfields, Jade brings home a fattened gopher. Everything in the world seems to be saying eat, eat, eat while you can for soon you’ll have to -

- Run.

What does home mean, when you’re a werewolf? Home is each other, but home is also the rented apartment they finally make it back to, and tumble inside, and bar the door. Home is a place where their pursuers can’t find them, so this place can’t be home any longer. They slip out the back door just as a window shatters in the front.

The moon rises and they run, and they run, and they run. No one can run as fast as they can, but neither of them wants to be the first to slow. For miles, they splash downstream through a wide, flat river in the hope that the water will hide their scent. As shadow grey ghosts at the edge of night, they slip over a border before they lose the moon entirely.

There are species that crumble ecosystems with their loss, Kit knew this about wolves before she was one. She had a poster in her room about it, in wilderness is the preservation of the world it said, on paper faded by years of sunlight. When she’d watched the video about wolves being reintroduced to Yellowstone, she’d cried. She longed to be part of something like that, to be a creature that could bind a damaged world back together.

Then there are species that destroy, that infect and infest. Like humans do - but their hunters do not smell human. Neither of their noses recognised the scent of the pack of beings that chased them down.

But their noses know their enemies' scent now, and tonight the beaver moon gives them faster legs and lungs, sharper teeth and eyes. The beaver is a keystone species as well, and recognises her wolf sisters’ desire to bring balance back to the world.

They smell one approaching, whipsharp and leatherheavy. This full moon, Kit and Jade hunt the monsters right back.

It’s a hard month. Kit learns to run on three legs, her wounded paw healing slowly. She licks the blood from Jade’s fur till they’re both pale as moonlight, till they can blend into the snow completely.

It’s a month of firsts. The first goosedown-soft falling of snow. The first of their battles for a better world won.

It’s a cold month, but only their coal-dark noses feel it. They find shelter from the biting wind in a cave once used by a long-departed bear, and curl into a fluffy white pile, toasty warm in their thick, heavy coats. The world is going to keep changing, new enemies will find them, new challenges, new fears, but they both know they are going to keep changing too, new strengths, new skills, new ways to be together to face down anything they might have to face.

So long as they have each other, and the arcane light of the moon, there will be no stopping them.