(poly werewolves 141 x female human reader)
The forest had always been a cathedral to you.
Not in the way of stained glass and hymnals, but in the hush of pine needles cushioning each step, in the incense of sap and rain, in the way sunlight filtered through green boughs like blessings painted in gold. It was the only place where your body’s brokenness did not feel like a sentence. With your cane and your limp and the ache that gnawed the marrow of your leg on storm-heavy days, the world outside demanded swiftness, strength, perfection.
But here, in your tucked-away cottage on the edge of a wild expanse where no roads reached, you moved at your own pace. The mountains did not mind if you were slow, and the rivers did not scorn when you paused to breathe.
It had been three years since the army sent you home with medals and hollow apologies. The steel pin in your leg sang a different hymn than the one they spoke at the discharge ceremony. You had learned to live with it; You had learned to love quiet mornings steeped in tea and woodsmoke, evenings dappled with deer crossing through your garden as if you, too, belonged to the woods.
But peace is a delicate thing. It always shatters quietly, without warning.
The first sound was not one of peace; it was thunder dragged low across the undergrowth- crashing, breaking and desperate. You nearly dropped the kettle in your hands when you heard it, a ragged cacophony coming closer and closer. Your first thought was bear. Your second- wolves.
You barely had time to step outside before the shadows stumbled into your clearing.
Four of them. Enormous, their coats glistened dark with blood, not rain, their breaths sawing out in great wet gasps. Wolves, your mind supplied, but wrong somehow- shoulders broader, and you thought they might perhaps be wolf dogs… though you’d never seen so many in a pack like this.
And yet, not one of them snarled. Not one lunged.
The first you noticed was a black-furred beast with scars tangled across his muzzle, and it crashed right against your porch steps. Another, the largest, was pale as bone itself, curled protectively near the others though he trembled like a candleflame on torn paws and legs. A mottled, dark-grey one with its back fur raised along its back like a long mohawk staggered in last and his eyes flashing toward you, unreadable, before he fell on his side. The fourth, leaner, russet-streaked, was bleeding badly from his flank; he whimpered once and then stilled, curling near the mottled dark-grey one.
Your breath should have fled with fear. And yet… something in their stillness unraveled the panic in your chest; they did not come with bared teeth. They came like creatures at the edge of breaking, and you’ve always had a soft heart towards animals- even ones who could genuinely tear you apart without a single chance for you to defend yourself.
They are injured, and they need help. And they looked wary of you- clearly only dropped here by sheer circumstance.
“God,” you whispered, cane rattling against the porch rail as you knelt as best you could. “You poor things.”
Your hands shook as you reached out, half-certain they’d tear into you, but the black one- his eyes fathomless, old as winter- only let out a low, warning rumble. Not threat, but something like acceptance, and something like surrender.
They let you touch them. They let you tend their wounds.
You dragged your old army medical kit out from the cupboard. The motions returned like instinct- press, clean, wrap. Gauze soaked through crimson faster than you could lay it down.
You whispered apologies each time they winced, though they bore the pain with an eerie calm. They were too intelligent for beasts, but you told yourself they must be strays, must be dogs twisted by some cruel hand of war or horrible owners clearly unequipped.
And still, your heart broke with every fever-hot breath against your palms.
Hours passed; the storm outside broke with rain, tapping against the roof as though the forest itself prayed for them. One by one, they sank into uneasy sleep on your floor, their hulking bodies curled together in a heap of fur and scar tissue.
You should have been afraid, truthfully- your cane leaned helplessly against the wall, your fragile body too slow to escape if they turned on you. And yet, you sat among them with your hand resting on one blood-matted ear, watching the rise and fall of their ribs, and felt nothing except gladness that they’d stopped here and not somewhere they would have been shot.
And when dawn crept pale through your windows, the black one was the first to stir, lifting his massive head to watch you. His eyes caught yours, unflinchingly sharp. You felt the weight of command in him, the way you once felt it in the battlefield: the quiet authority of someone who had endured too much, survived too long. He lowered his head again, a gesture not of defeat but of… trust, delicate as it might be.
When the bleeding slowed and your trembling hands had done all they could with bandages and warm cloth, you stood in the middle of your little cottage and looked at them- four hulking shadows sprawled on your floor, breath hitching, blood drying into their coats. Wolves, or wolf-adjacent.
And yet… they were quiet, calm as tides, and watching you with eyes far too clever.
You had no words to give them; so you gave them what you could.
You hobbled to your pantry, leaning hard on your cane, gathering what little stores you could spare: the smoked venison you had meant to ration for the month, a loaf of bread baked just yesterday, a day-old chicken, and several clay bowls of water. You set it all down gently near the hearth, as if you were laying an offering at the altar of some ancient god.
“Here,” you murmured, voice almost breaking in the hush. “Eat. You’ll need the strength.”
Their eyes followed your every motion, gleaming in the firelight. There was no snarling and no snapping. Just… watching as though they understood.
For a heartbeat, the room seemed to hold itself still, as if waiting for you to do more. But exhaustion claimed you then, the ache in your leg cutting sharp, and you turned your back to reach for another roll of gauze. You thought only of finishing the work, of keeping them alive through the night.
When you turned again, the room was empty.
The bread, gone. The meat and chicken, gone. The bowl overturned, licked clean. The pawprints led across the wooden floor and out the open door, fading into the storm-slick earth.
You stood there alone, staring at the space where they had lain, where their breath had rattled heavy and mortal. And the strangest ache welled in your chest, something not relief and not fear, but in between.
The days that followed wore a strange shape.
You told yourself you had imagined it, that no wolves could have survived such wounds. That they had vanished back into the wild, perhaps to die beneath roots and soil. You wanted to believe it- needed to, even. Life had already carved you down to a small, quiet existence; the intrusion of those impossible beasts felt like a dream you could not keep.
But the forest began to change; it started small.
A rabbit, caught neatly in a snare you hadn’t set, left dangling near your garden. A pheasant feather placed cleanly upon your porch, too deliberate to be chance. Pawprints circling your cottage come morning, broad and heavy, pacing like guards at their post.
One afternoon, your cane slipped in the garden, your bad leg folding under you as the ground rushed up. A crackle tore through the brush, a crash of branches snapping, and before you struck the dirt a shape burst from the treeline. Mottled, Dark-grey fur and a snarl sharp enough to curdle marrow- directed not at you, but at the hulking shadow of a boar that had been creeping too near. The animal fled with a squeal, and the wolf lingered only a breath, gaze flicking toward you, before vanishing as though he had never been.
Another night, coyotes prowled too close. You sat frozen at your window, watching their dark shapes slink along the treeline and contemplating pulling out your gun. Then- low thunder; a growl so deep it seemed to shudder in the bones of the cottage. The coyotes yelped, scattering into the dark, and you pressed your hand to the glass, breath fogging it, certain you glimpsed a pale shape, moonlit and spectral, standing sentinel in the shadows.
And then there were the mornings.
Your path to the river always bore new prints- wolf prints, pacing and circling, shadowing your every step in mud. You never saw them, but the silence of the woods began to hum with a presence.
As though the forest itself had chosen you, and lent you its fiercest guardians.
You tried to deny it: tried to tell yourself you were imagining the weight of those eyes at your back, the sudden absence of predators near your clearing, the gifts of fresh-kill left like tithes upon your porch.
You told yourself it was only coincidence, only luck.
And yet, when you limped to the river one dusky evening, cane sinking into the soft loam, and felt the air shiver with the sound of an unseen growl as a bear wandered too close- only to watch the beast veer off suddenly, ears pinned, as though driven away by something far greater- you knew.
They had left your home, yes. But not you.
They haunted the tree line like shadows, like ghosts. You caught only glimpses- eyes blinking from between branches, the swish of a russet tail disappearing into the undergrowth, the heavy impression of a black pawprint pressed into the soil at your porch step.
And though you did not yet understand why, or what they truly were, you found yourself leaning into the protection of the unseen. For the first time since the war had sent you home broken and alone, you slept through the night without fear and without a hand clutching the gun under your pillow.
Because somewhere in the dark, the forest breathed- and you knew you were not alone.
