☽✩ the werewolf pack (au) romance meme ✩☾
There are many supernatural beings that congregate in groups for survival or protection or just for companionship, not unlike humans. Witches have covens. Vampires have nests. But none of those have connections that can compare to the bond of a werewolf pack.
You should know. You're part of one, either born a werewolf or turned. For humans, blood is thicker than water; for wolves, the pack is to the bone. Of course, with humans, romantic relationships can complicate closeness of other sorts. That's not the case with werewolf pairings, as they tend to grow out of natural pack dynamics and are viewed as just another facet of life. The only difference is that werewolves tend to treat relationships, even potential would-be-mates, with extreme seriousness.
After all, you'll fight for your pack, so you'll fight for your mate, won't you?
✩ how to play ✩
☾ Comment with your character, preference, and information!
☽ Reply to others.
☾ RNG. Also, please note that while the words "alpha" et al. are used, this isn't a meme for that AU.
✩ prompts ✩
☽ Born: Your parents were werewolves. Any children you have will be wolves, too.
☾ The Turning Process: Like any transformation, the after effects of the bite are painful. Luckily you have someone to guide you through it, either the person who bit you, or someone who's found you in the nick of time.
☽ With Who Turned You: You're romantically or sexually linked to your "creator," so to speak, probably because you have nowhere else to go. They seem to treasure you, though, no matter how much they hide it.
☾ Alphas: Both of you are top of the pack.
☽ Alpha and Beta: It's a classic case of the leader and the second in command: a perfect team up.
☾ Omegas: You two find solace in each other even when you're both at the bottom of the pack structure.
☽ Closer Than Family: The romantic and platonic lines are blurred. You honestly can't think of any reason why you shouldn't be mates, regardless of the pack structure or what your family thinks of your choice.
☾ Outside Threat: Your pack and your loved one is threatened. What won't you do?
☽ Reluctant: You don't want to be with anyone, but it's expected and they're the closest in the pack to you...
☾ All I've Ever Known: All you've ever known is the werewolf existence, the pack, and them. Of course you would never want to lose that.
☽ Can't be Together: You two should not be considering a potential pairing, either due to your status difference or because your alpha has proclaimed there will be no inter-pack mingling.
☾ Everyone Else Was Taken: You had no other option; everyone else was paired.
☽ Protector: Every pack has an instinctive protector or nurturer. You've lucked out and ended up with them.
☾ A Natural Closeness: It doesn't matter to you what you're defined as. You've always been close and you'll stay that way.
☽ Affection: Werewolves show their love in different ways that humans. Nuzzling and licking aren't considered odd at all.
☾ Fall into Step: The two of you have your pack positions and proclivities and they're the same in your relationship.
☽ Reverse: The submissive in the pack becomes a dominant in the relationship and vice versa.
☾ Two-Man Pack: The rest of your pack is gone, and you two have to stick it out.
☽ Rogue: You were once a lone wolf, but a special person brought you into the fold. Understandably, you're attached to them.
☾ Kin but Not: "Family" doesn't mean exactly the same thing in werewolf society as it does in human. There are fewer taboos between "siblings."
☽ Disciplined: You're a rule breaker, and your partner has to reel you in.
☾ Living Straight: Neither of you wants to hurt humans...yet there's always that urge.
☽ Bad Duo: Killing people and raising hell are your specialties. You're a real supernatural Bonnie and Clyde.
☾ Unrequited: Even werewolves can have feelings that aren't returned. However, it's an even more fragile scenario, given that you must still be pack after this.
☽ Got Your Back: Together, you hunt and fight. Always together.
☾ Love Outside the Pack: You've found love outside the pack, which is the ultimate sin. Everyone who isn't pack should be your enemy! The other person in this thread can be a human, vampire, etc.
☽ Life Mates: Wolves mate for life. Needless to say, this is not something you should go into lightly.
☾ Heat: The obligatory smut option.
☽ Fight for the One: Someone wants to challenge you for your mate. There's no question as to whether or not you'll fight for them - but will you kill?
☾ Leave: One of you wants to leave the pack. Will the other come along, or are ties too strong?
☽ A Brutal End: The life of a werewolf, especially those who let sentiment cloud their judgement, can be painfully brief.
☾ WILDCARD: Anything is possible. Feel free to make any option gen or non-romantic. |
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bakerstreet2025-09-15 05:12 am
Jessica Jones | Jessica Jones/The Defenders | F/M
Junpei Yoshino | JJK
cersei lannister | asoiaf
—for trailmark.
Hunting was no good; it never had been. She was not quick enough, even when her ears picked up the needle-thin sounds quivering in the brush. Tiny paws stepping and pausing, twigs holding taut before they snapped, leaves shivering up high. Heartbeats, if she really narrowed her senses. Her eyes were even better, slicing through sunlight and shadow, discerning shapes that human eyes could never find. Darkness parted before her, revealing all its secrets. Every movement of every living thing was laid bare; it was madness. Her nose was better still - the earth ached to give up what it knew, hiding nothing. Stagnant water, pulsing mud, hot asphalt, sweat, blood: they could each be opened and read like books, made of pages and pages of individual scents. She could not stand it. She lacked entirely the discipline to follow what was plain before her. She preferred when her brother brought her his kills.
Slipping into the skin of a wolf was a gift, a pretty pastime to do with as she pleased. She enjoyed luxuriating in the sun, knowing the light was turning her smooth coat to molten gold. She preened. She pursued, at her leisure, the hour's fickle pleasure. She liked best when Jaime pursued her. Never had the wolf's body been a means of survival. She had never needed it to be.
The gas station is half a ruin, like everything else, but it must still host the most intrepid of vermin. Her eyes glint like coins in the dark, padding forward in silence, and she refuses to reflect upon her beastly state. It is awful to be like this, scavenging, jaws agape, ribs heaving; but it is better to eat this way. Blindly, she can rip into flesh with fangs made for doing just that, wholly and unapologetically animal. She will detest herself later, when the hunger has lost its edge. Hunger, she had violently learned, always came first.
A person might strive to deny it, but a wolf is less complicated. A wolf will not refuse itself. In that way, she melded naturally into her shimmering lupine coat. Bristling and accusatory and driven by hunger. Beneath the fine pelt, her slim, untested muscle longed only for peaceful repose. Now, in these manic, horrid days, the change is abrupt and necessary - fangs arch where ordinary teeth had been, and she could see suddenly through any hour of the night. She could run, and if she were practiced in any of it at all, she might have been nimble and elusive and canny. As she fled through each new dark, however, all she felt was furious and afraid.
Where was her brother? Her father, she grimly suspected, was dead. He would have collected her by now if he still lived. To preserve the dignity of his own name, he would not allow the members of his hard-won dynasty to be scattered about, lost. She liked to believe Jaime lived, too, but where was he? Why had he not come for her? It was a mercy if Tyrion was gone. This gruesome world should by now have devoured him, like to like. She took faint pleasure in that when she slept alone, undefended.
Slinking through the greasy shadows now, nose twitching as she dreamt of something to sink her teeth into, she felt herself pause. Something within her, like this, was aware of things that her flustered mind was not. The wolf's ears were tirelessly alert, like the frantic nose, and still she did not heed her body's own warnings, the certainty of something approaching.
And then it was too late, there were two groaning shadows leaping upon her. Seething upon her, it felt like, detestable creatures with snatching hands and teeth and a bludgeoning hunger to match her own. She could not let those teeth find her skin, she knew, and it was as if the fear itself betrayed her, returning her to her own body, her own pale skin and scrabbling hands, forearms scraping across the rough, dirty floor as she fell. Never having had to protect herself before the world splintered into this nightmare, she was of no use to herself. A scream pitched out of her, and her heart shrank smaller than a sparrow, and she hated that Jaime had let this happen to her, wincing as glass and light fractured somewhere behind.
The two ghouls did not converge upon her - they were, instead, sent sprawling by a third shadow. This one was precise, not rabid. It was a man, she saw in a glimpse, not a raving animal or corpse. He was armed, tosses of light revealed, and not merely for show; he was rather taking control of the present disaster. He was, at least, killing the horrible things that were trying to kill her. In her fright, any rough victory looks like finesse.
Stumbling to her feet, clutching at the walls that would guide her out into the dying sunlight, she glances back, eyes wide and animal-bright despite being returned to her own body. Woefully human. Bewildered, she pauses to observe the figure who has appeared, bracing only briefly. He is not one of the dead ones. A cautious, more temperate mind might have weighed the risks, but something smothers caution back. It has been a long while since she'd last felt the luxury of relief. It's in her voice, if nothing else; she does not move to approach him, but the gem-green of her eyes is quick and appraising. Her hurried question simmers with curiosity, willing it to be true. ]
You've killed them before? [ Woven within the breathless words is excitement: he knows how to kill. Not as a fumbling misstep of luck, but because he means to. It's a prowess she lacks. ]
okay i'm here sorry i suck
He smells it before he sees her. Not a walker. Not some scared human lost and alone. The scent presses at the back of his throat and the hair on his neck lifts; it answers the part of him that's always been different. He's never fit in with people - never before any of this - and he's learned to keep his mouth shut and his teeth sheathed. The wolf's been a thing under the skin his whole life, pacing in his ribs, and now the world's full of reasons to let it loose and fewer reasons to trust what wears the face of a friend. Still, he's met a handful of others along the way - folks he traveled with for a spell, people he fell in with until something split them from him - and none of them have smelled like this. That makes him tighten up. It's different in its own way but it reminds him of his old man, Merle, some of the good-for-nothings that died like humans for stupid shit in a time before all this. Wolf don't mean safe. Wolf don't mean companion. It only means more to watch out for.
The noise drags him forward: the scrape of something heavy across tile, the shuffle the dead always make, then the raw, high scrape of a human scream that makes his ears hurt. He moves because he moves the way he always has when danger hits — boots cracking glass, crossbow up, breath thin and sharp in the rancid air of the station. He doesn't think. He reacts. Two walkers bear down on a shape on the floor. Her hands scrabble, eyes wide with a kind of frantic animal panic that fits something small, delicate. Something that fits prey, not a predator. She smells like fear, like sweat and salt, but layered under it is that same wild note he caught outside. Wolf. He registers it like a blow. Suspicion twists in him — why's a wolf getting run down like some cornered rabbit?
He doesn't hesitate. The bolt whistles and slides home; a second body takes the knife. Bodies slump, the immediate danger gone, but the tension doesn't ease. He wipes the blade with the corner of a rag and keeps his shoulders coiled. There's always another thing coming in, always a sound that means more trouble. He stands a breath away, crossbow not lowered all the way, eyes flicking over her like he's trying to figure out what kind of wolf lets herself get cornered.
There's a pull at him that's older than fear, a hungry tug that used to be easier to let loose, back when he was younger and less careful. Even now, in a world full of walkers and the living who'll put steel between your ribs without batting an eye, he hates that he still keeps the wolf leashed. The restraint is a habit of survival. Show too much, use the wolf too quick, and you draw the wrong kind of attention. Pull it out and you risk being hunted for what you are. Worse, you risk getting soft places ripped open by people who'd rather exploit a beast than understand it. So he keeps it caged with a chain of caution and a mouth that says less than his hands would.
Her voice slices the quiet — sudden and thin, asking if he's killed like this before. There's relief in it, but he doesn't offer comfort. He can sense the way hunger and fear sit together in the scent around her. She shouldn't have been in this situation. A wolf, and yet cornered. That makes something sour in his chest. Merle knew a few choice words for women, wolves like her.)
First time don't matter, ( he mutters, the words scraping out like gravel. He watches her, evaluates her like he always does people he's thinking of keeping near: can she pull her weight or is she dead weight? He thinks of the few folks he's traveled with -the temporary packs, the ones who stuck or the ones who split - and how easy it was for people to change once the dead started walking. He thinks about how the wolf in him wants to step up and wrap around her throat, put her down now before something worse happens to her. But Daryl knows better than to let the animal do the talking.)
Learn fast, or you're dead.
( He doesn't offer his hand. He doesn't step in closer to be warm or kind. Instead he keeps his distance, the crossbow a brace against whatever comes next, watching for the flinch that tells him she's going to be trouble, or the steadier breath that tells him she might be worth keeping around. The world's full of monsters now, the living and the dead, and he's tired of learning the same lesson over and over: instincts will keep you alive, but trusting them without a mind to match will get you killed.)
i, too, suck
Part of her wants to react without further thought: to melt into the wolf's swifter body and flee. Another part wants to seize the wolf's strength and bare her fangs, to lunge and vent her desperate fury upon a creature who can fight back in kind: reasonably, with tooth and claw. Yet another part of her, perhaps the most insistent, wants to return to the wolf's golden coat, to slink forward, eyes unflinching from this stranger's, and see how close he will let her get. That part of her wants to move up against him, to turn sleek and inquiring, to tempt one instinct against another. There would be a raw, reckless pleasure in plunging into the animal musk of another like her, in pressing flush against hot ferocity.
In the silence between one breath and the next, she weighs her handful of choices. Run, snap, plead? She won't beg him for his help; the collapsing world may have taken every last decadence from her, but her blood still runs gold with pride. He will beg her for the privilege of defending her. She must frame it this way, eyes flickering over his poised body, or else she will spend another night alone. She will get herself killed, her aimless hunger to blame, a body gutted among the others, blood running with every other common corpse's as if she were no different. Against the rotting dark, iridescent in places with wasted gasoline and broken glass, she lifts her chin and gathers herself up.
She approaches with an assurance she has not earned, with a grace belonging more to the wolf than to herself. She has never had to learn - she has never been forced to devote herself to the work of understanding how to fight. She has never wished to pick up a weapon, not like this, for she does not wish to endure the burden of carrying one, of learning how to use it and thus depending upon it. She has no wish to confront the possibility that she must rely upon herself for the work of protection. On that point, in this hellish, unending judgment, she has refused. ]
It must be in your blood. [ The consequences of confronting a stranger vanish in the face of what might be gained. It doesn't matter that he is armed and well-versed in the use of those arms. It doesn't matter that she is alone, and has just clearly demonstrated her own inadequacy. What draws her forward is that unmistakable scent, which goes unpricked by the thorns of caution or fright. The walkers frighten her because they are indifferent: blind and cursed and cruel. A wolf, however, has its senses still. A wolf can be driven by the possibilities of allegiance, or infatuation.
The forsaken world may have lost every currency, but it has not yet taken those worth the most. Beauty is not dead, though everything else in this place may be. A body still living still suffers the pangs of hunger and loneliness. A living body can still barter to have them satisfied.
Perhaps she is dressed only in the mud-streaked remains of former boutique gems, but her hair is still golden. Her bones were still crafted with artistry, she is convinced, and she has abandoned none of her vanity in word or gesture. The wolf is still a creature of unfailing and conniving beauty. She intends now to determine the nature of the wolf before her, closing the distance between them with a careful step, voice low. Only briefly do her eyes leave her brusque savior, reaching into the shadows for an answer before they return. ]
You're alone?
MJ Jones | MCU | OTA
John Walker - MCU - ota
Would also love to explore closeted Omega options.
Pregnancy will kick up serious angst given he's separated from his son, but I wouldn't rule it out.]
Hinata Shoyo | Haikyuu!! | m/m
Inumaki Toge ( JJK )
ruggie bucchi | twisted wonderland
Gagamaru Gin | Blue Lock
Asta ☘ Black Clover