WHERE THE WOLVES RUN, teen wolf

𝟏𝟑 - target practice

          THOUGH ONE MIGHT think that going to a party and ensuring that one's friend isn't a blood-thirsty werewolf during their first full moon, while also making sure that said werewolf's prospective girlfriend isn't being eaten alive or tortured in some dungeon somewhere by another stronger werewolf, would tire someone out — Luna could not sleep.

Blearily, she sat on the large oak branch perched by her bedroom window, her entire body fitting snugly onto the wooden makeshift seat, as she added new information to her journal, working under the moonlight and her desk side lamp which she positioned to shine out towards her. Though Stiles had dropped her off an hour ago, impressing her parents by walking her to the door and shaking their hands (and completely ignoring the fact that she was so unreasonably embarrassed that she wanted the ground to open up beneath her), she still awaited a response about Scott. At best, he was most likely somewhere in the woods, eating a squirrel or something like that, and Stiles would force the poor boy to retell the encounter in all its gruesome details. Then, he would make her listen to it as well. She rolled her eyes, imagining it in her brain, before writing down notes about Scott.

He remained unnamed in her journal, only labeled as Version #2 to keep it short, but most of her observations now came from him. He was different than the wolf she had seen back in Sedona, the one with Beckett. That one looked like a wolf, an actual real wolf, but slightly off, a wolf but out of a grim fairytale. Black fur too dark, eyes crimson red, and claws too long — as if it were a wolf born out of a mutation. A science lab's attempt at making the dangerous even more deadly. Scott, however, was nothing like that.

She was not a good artist, but she tried to draw what she could from recollection. He still appeared human when he had turned, weirdly enough. Not human in the same way she was, but humanoid, and from the back, at first glance, he looked somewhat normal. But then, she began to focus on his face. Her pencil scratched against the paper as she drew his snout, crinkled as layers of tough skin formed by the gap between the bridge of his nose and his forehead, eyebrows now in an altered furrow, hunched over his yellow eyes. Or were they orange? She couldn't exactly tell due to the fact that she wasn't enough of an idiot to move closer upon inspection.

The wind blew harshly, some leaves rustling near the ground, and Luna looked up instinctively for a few seconds to scan her surroundings before glancing back down at the page. She brushed off eraser shavings from around Scott's jutted out cheekbones, shading in the rest of his jaw with rough sideburns and fur sprouted from the hollows of his cheeks, curling around his pointed ears. It was not a realistic drawing by any means, but then again, nothing about this felt realistic.

She wrote several traits about Scott's kind of werewolf, remembering the sound of bones breaking and popping out of place as he jumped from his bedroom window, wincing at the memory and trying hard to not gag. It was horrifying and Luna knew, deep within her, that she'd rather die than have to go through the torture of turning into that. No matter the benefits. She wasn't sure if there was anything that could change her mind about that. She'd heard all sorts of things about werewolves and she had read even more, but to witness it all in front of her face — the transformation, the pain, the anger, the cracking of Scott's voice — was a different story. The wolf back in Arizona was not the same thing she was dealing with here when she had seen Scott, and yet she knew this, inevitably, was only the agonizing beginning. And it terrified her. And, well, she was more than certain it terrified Scott even more, so she couldn't even imagine how it felt to be in his shoes.