Three hours to the full moon you find them in the woods, two angry girls with not a transformation to speak of.
You take them you take them you take them there, the lab in the woods, lab where you work and you take and you dissect their kind.
The greater good, you remind yourself. Less monsters means more humans.
(One of them can’t be over ten, all thought of monster erased as she clings to the older one, bawling.)
Two and a half hours to the full moon, and the guards have gotten them into cells, at last. X-23_4, experiment 10 attempt twenty three ID number four, is wailing. You see Rachel turn away and Rice laugh.
Two hours to the full moon, and X-23’s teeth are longer, that’s the first thing you can see. They’re sharper than any you’ve seen before and poke out of her bottom lip when she closes her mouth.
Her eyes have gone yellow, too, replacing the green you saw when they brought her in (there are two hours to the full moon and you know soon she will be gone, hidden away as her bones break and her joints go backward).
On the left of her, the little one is curled in a ball on the wall separating herself and the other, eyes squeezed shut as tightly as she could make them and rocking back and forth. There’s a window in her cell, not in the other ones, and she sits across from it.
X-23 keeps pacing, around and around again, glaring at the scientists taking notes every time she faces them.
Around and around again.
One hour to the full moon, and X-23_4 has her hands stuffed in her mouth, gasping and rocking harder with a mouth full of teeth much too big for her. X-23 has stopped moving, pressed her entire body to the wall and making noises you aren’t able to decipher, pushing on the glass-steel and keeping her hands where the younger girl’s hands are.
Forty-five minutes to the full moon, and X-23_4’s limbs are curling in, ears are pointier, and eyes open (bright yellow and dotted pupils).
X-23 is getting desperate, it seems, banging on the glass and not even bothering to look at all of you anymore, keeping her eyes on X-23_4.
Thirty minutes to the full moon, and X-23 starts to speak.
“Gabby, Gabby, Gabby, don't you go, I’m right here, I’m right here-“
The little one screams, horrible windowsonthechalkboard noise, pulls her hands out of her mouth bloody and scraped. Rice calls for ropes and three guards grab her, pulling her away from the windowlight and wrapping rope around her wrists, the scientists writing all the time- young lycanthropes transform faster, language inaccessible.
X-23 snarls and hits the glass again, bloodybloodyhands and mouth full of knives, now. You almost cross yourself.
Twenty minutes to the full moon, and the little one has broken the ropes. Twenty minutes to the full moon and X-23 is a horror, half bent limbs and fingers like claws, screaming and banging and snarling.
Ten minutes to the full moon and you check the containment cell’s walls, putting your hand on it and yanking it back when X-23 throws herself at the wall you’re near, barely human anymore.
The moon is up and they’re monsters, they’re monsters, they’re fucking wolves. You didn’t know what you were expecting, here, now, but the girls are gone and in their places are canines with teeth that could probably bite your arm off.
The glass is not going to hold them, you realize. You’re all screwed.
(Your fault.)
(For the greater good.)