@photoaria
A day and a night pass slowly at first, aching growing into outright pain, hot flashes turning into sheeting sweat that soaks through clothes even as she pulls them off, and whether it's basement dust in the light or steam from some sort of heat uncaging itself inside of her, it curls off of her shoulders as agony forces herself into bouts of hunched, whimpering pain that are bookended with alternating cries of hurt and reflexive, baleful begging that turns from sobbing to mind-broken laughter before human sounds are replaced entirely.
For Autumn, the agony is an hour or so of immeasurable discomfort and pain, and then a blissful, dreamless void.
It's not until that human mind begins to wake itself from sleep that it catches glimpses; where the world is not the dim dark place where she must pretend to be human, but a cramped, blue-tinted box lined in painful, glimmering bars that sting at the touch, where the scent and taste of blood smother her senses of taste and smell and the sounds of Aria's camera snapping draws attention.
The wolf seems to lurch briefly, as if something's turned over in it's stomach, and with a sudden sharp whimper it starts, throwing itself against the bars and bouncing off, spinning in its claustrophobic space before it seems to fall haphazardly to a bow, patches of fur seeming to recede, bones snapping this way and that, joints twisting into their human affectations. Wolfen whimpers turn slowly into agonized human grunts, fingers snap and pop, and fangs, huge and sharp and red with the blood of the evening's meals, pull themselves magically and woefully slowly into the meat of human gums, leaving no space behind to betray that they'd ever been there.
As always, by the time it's done, Autumn is left a sweaty, naked, and vaguely fuzzy heap in the middle of the cage shivering with the November chill and the exhaustion of the ordeal, but, as ever, she feels fed, but not sated.
There's a brief moment of complete silence, only breathing, before a customary retch spills out of her, half bile and half whatever dregs of raw meat and blood've stayed sat in her stomach after the return trip to humanity. She hears the door lightly squeal open behind her, and her nose tells her it's Aria. She struggles in those first few moments to fully orient herself amber fading back to blue as she searches through ropes of sweaty hair up into Aria's features with a bleak smile.
