With one clawed hand dug into the mortar gaps of the back wall of her parent’s house, Waverly opened her window with a few, practiced motions. She’d prepped the latch years ago, when she’d started going to FightNight, and had to find a way back in without her parents noticing. She supposed she could have just used the front door this time, but old habits died hard, or so she told herself, trying to ignore her guilt about pushing away meeting her parents just a bit longer.
They weren’t even bad people, just… She still hadn’t figured out how to make them happy, even after 19 years of trying super hard. As she pushed her window up, she pushed the thoughts down, and with another practiced motion, dove into her room feet first.
Except it wasn’t her room anymore.
One of the luxuries she’d enjoyed as the oldest daughter was having her own room in the terraced house her parents owned. She was sure that if the rest of her litter had been anything else but brothers of varying degrees of competence and usefulness, she probably would have to share, but as it was, she’d gotten the smallest one of the lot, but it had a window and that was actually pretty okay, all things considered. She’d decorated it the way she liked, and with some money she saved, she’d even extended her bed so it covered the space in front of the window wall to wall. Not that it had been expensive. She didn’t even have to stretch to push her fingertips and toes against opposing walls.
But now the bed she expected to jump into wasn’t there, and she landed in a crumpled roll on the floor with a loud thud. She would have been worried about her new CD player if she hadn’t managed to somehow land on its ‘play’ button, and it was faintly blaring guitar riffs out of the headphones. Her younger Sisters, who apparently had been assigned her room in her absence, perked up as she rubbed the back of her head.
“Owwww,” she groaned, just as the brats jumped up and yelled “WAVERLY!” and completely ruined any chances she had at staying undetected.
She still tried to shush them, though, because she always did, because it was important to at least try something, or else you might miss out on some awesome opportunities, which would totally suck.
In this case, however, she failed. She only had a second to shut off the Cd player before three blankets flew through the air like those flags they used to signal the start of races. The green ones. There totally had to be a term for those, right? Start flags?
Anyway, Waverly opened her arms with a resigned sigh and succumbed to the inevitable. She was immediately bowled over by three young werewolves, each in various degrees of shapeshifting, but all with tails that wagged as fast as they could. She wagged back as she tried to ruffle their heads, which was easier said than done when three pint-sized pups who believed they were killing machines tried to pin you down.
“Hey brats…”
“WHY DID YOU COME THROUGH THE WINDOW WAVERLY?” one of them yelled, but she didn’t know which one. They hadn’t turned on the light yet.
“Because I didn’t want to wake Mom and Dad,” Waverly said.
“Don’t worry about us,” her dad said, even before he opened the door and switched on the light. Waverly suppressed a sigh.
“Instead worry about your Sisters for once. It’s not even 6 in the morning, and look at them. Won’t get them back to sleep any time soon. Might as well wake them all, huh?” Waverly grimaced a little at that, but she managed to make it seem like that was because Wendy was biting her wrist, so she was probably fine.
“Hi Dad,” she said, dutifully forcing her tail to wag a few times as she got up.
“Don’t ‘Hi Dad’ me, Waverly. What were you even thinking?”
“Nothing, Dad,” she said, and he harumphed.
“Obviously. Again. You’re lucky your Sisters recognized you, or we would have to save up for another scroll for you, young miss.”
“Sorry, Dad,” she said, ears drooping.
“We’ll talk about this with your mum. Now get out of those dirty clothes, you’re ruining the floor. Where have you been? Brawling again? Being a disgrace to the pack?”
Waverly didn’t even try to answer that one, because she totally knew where the conversation would go. Her dad probably knew, too, most likely because this was the umpteenth time they had this fight, so he just kinda said nothing and walked out, banging on each door to wake everyone up.
“Waverly’s Back everyone, get up and get your hellos!”
The next few minutes were filled with her siblings emerging from their rooms, some cheering, some muttering and giving her dirty looks, depending on the age, but she dealt with it accordingly, patted the cheerful ones on the head, and held the stares of the grumpy ones until they, too gave in and came to collect their hugs.
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She knew they had probably wanted to sleep in, and that they didn’t appreciate being woken up, but that was how her dad was, and they all knew that, too, so there wasn’t much sense in griping about it.
As she headed downstairs (after putting her shoes in the bathtub to rinse them off later), she had to be careful not to get pushed down by the playful pounces of her younger brothers. She barked a “Watch it!”, and most of them stopped, except the usual troublemakers, who hadn’t really gotten better in her absence. That was kinda sad, and a bit concerning, because she had kinda hoped that one of her older brothers would take over while she was in college, but none of them were in sight. Probably, hopefully, working.
When she arrived in their kitchen, she started to direct the brats around and only had to bark twice before even the most reluctant ones started helping set the table. Waverly’s parents would expect everything to be ready when they came down because they worked two shifts to provide for them, and that was kinda fair, Waverly guessed. It certainly had turned her into a bit of an early bird, but then again she’d never known anything else, so maybe it was just who she was? Anyway, it had been “formative” or something like that, and she enjoyed being up before everyone, so her parent’s way of raising them had certainly worked.
She grimaced a little when she opened the fridge and found it almost empty. It was too early to send a handful of rascals to the store, and besides, they wouldn’t be back in time even if they sprinted. The next Submarket was about half an hour on foot, and usually packed at all times of the day. So she had to make do with what she had.
Eggs in a basket with bacon it was, then. It had been one of her favorite meals at some point, but after having cooked it so damn often, it had lost a bit of its sparkle, she guessed, but that was okay, because she still liked cooking it for her siblings, and even her Mom had said it was pretty good once, which had been nice.
They had a big industrial stove—one of those things that had a huge metal slab that you could heat up— which Dad had gotten from surplus somewhere. One of her older little brothers poked her in the ribs to push her aside, then turned on the stove, even the back right part, and after a short while, the entire slab was nice and hot.
“Ohhhhh, nice!” Waverly said, wagging her tail enthusiastically. “That works now? How come?”
“I fixed it,” said Werner, the kid who’d turned it on.
“Great Job, Werner!” Waverly said, wagging her tail even harder for emphasis. “Way to go! So you want to become an electrician, then?”
Werner shrugged. He was the runt of his litter and had always been kinda smart, but he had that sad touch around his eyes that Waverly wished she could brush away, but no matter how hard she tried, it stayed, like a tomato stain in a tablecloth.
“Dunno,” he said, well, mumbled, really, the cub really needed to learn to get his teeth apart and use his howling voice. “I mean I wanted to work in a Dungeon, perhaps yours, you know? But Dad said I should learn something so I can be useful after you went to College. I’ve been doing vocational school in the evenings, it’s kinda nice.”
Waverly didn’t ask if it was nice because he could stay out of the house. The kid was too damn much like her, sometimes.
“Oh, nice!” she said, hiding the annoyed twitch of her ears behind a wide smile as she threw another pack of bacon onto the stove with practiced ease. The trick was to morph your hands so they had claws, then use them to peel the strips apart.
“Like, you should totally stick with that,” she continued. “Because betting on me running a dungeon is like doing the lottery.” She briefly thought about Victor and his promise but immediately pushed the thoughts away. Kindergarten, Elementary, Middle, and High School, it had always been the same. She’d told herself it would be different, had allowed herself to hope, and every time it had been the same disappointing string of…
Well, College had been different, or so a stupid little voice told her, but that had been Victor, and not College itself, just making friends. She should know better. No amount of good grades and hard work would get her out of the Dregs. Fuck, she didn’t even know if she wanted to leave. In any case, Victor’s offer was nice, but it was better to not think about it too hard because it probably would fall through. There were too many factors. His mom would have to take a chance on him, and then her sight unseen, and she knew that Victor and his mom weren’t even that close, so why would she, really? Bend the rules that much? For a bitch from the dregs? No way.
“What’s that?” Warner asked, reaching for the Discplayer, and Waverly snarled at him before he even finished the last syllable. When she saw his scared face, she immediately felt totally bad.
“Sorry, Werner. It’s a CD player,” she said, putting as much warmth into her voice as she could while flipping one hundred slices of bacon, 50 eggs, and one hundred slices of buttered toast. At least the brats had helped her with that.
“What’s a CD player?” he asked, but Waverly shook her head, interrupting his stream of questions.
“I’ll tell you when you get older, okay? Please don’t, like, touch it because it’s…” How was she going to end that sentence? “…important to me.”
“Is it a gift from a BOY?” asked another little hellspawn and reached for it just to get a rise out of her. Waverly’s tail twitched, and a low growl escaped her throat, and the small terror retreated without her even having to turn around.
They dropped the topic afterward, and with the help of thirty-odd hands (and some paws, because they couldn’t control their [Shapeshifting] yet) she managed to get everything set before her Mom and Dad came down the stairs, barely. She even had a few seconds to stash the Discplayer and Headphones up on the shelf above the overflowing clothing racks, because her Mom and Dad were staunch Arch-Satanists, and if they ever found out she was listening to Metal, she’d best order a ticket to Peter’s gates and try her luck there. Higher chances of survival.
As it was, they all sat down around the long table, with her Mom and Dad at each end, and when they’d all washed and folded their hands, the small ones had shifted into as human a form as they could, and a few glares had gotten everyone to be calm and quiet, Dad led them through the Hail Satan, and they dug in.