Chapter Text
“Isadora, it’s good to see you again!”
Capri smiles “it’s good to see you too Willow.”
Tyler looks over at Willow and thinks, what the fuck, what’s her last name, Hill? The first person I meet in this house and she reminds me of the person and place that tortured me.
Willow suddenly looks at Tyler with empathy “my last name is Bennett, not Hill”.
Tyler looks at her slightly confused and wonders if he said that out loud instead of in his head.
“I’m a telepath” Willow says with a small, sweet smile trying to appear as non-threatening as possible. Someone didn’t need to be a telepath to know Tyler was apprehensive about being here.
“I thought this was a Hyde pack?”
“It is” Capri jumped in after hearing the tension in his voice. “The only non-Hydes allowed here are mates of Hydes and their children.”
“Why don’t you both come in, David is inside working on his next project, and Tyler can meet the others” Willow offered.
When he walked through the door Tyler was taken back by the actual size of the house. It is definitely bigger on the inside.
The living room was huge with high ceilings about 10 feet or more, the kitchen had a large center island with long counter tops, it looked like it was meant for a restaurant not a house. The dining room had two long tables able to seat 10 people each.
A girl about 8 years old with medium length, straight blonde hair hanging in front of her face sat at the table coloring a picture and a couple chairs down sat a tall, thin woman with brown hair, held up in a claw clip, breastfeeding a baby.
“This is Tyler, he’s going to be staying with us.” Willow introduced him to the woman, Jean and the little girl named Leah.
“Hello” Jean replied simply. Leah completely ignored everything and just focused on her drawing.
“Hello” Tyler replied trying to be polite.
In the kitchen a bald man on the shorter side stood in front of a large stock pot on the stove mixing in veggies that a woman in her early 20’s with medium length dark brown wavy hair was cutting up.
“Kenji, this is Tyler our newest member of the pack” Capri introduced.
Kenji gave Tyler a small bow in greeting, “Konnichiwa, nice to meet you” he said with a Japanese accent.
The woman stopped cutting the vegetables to look Tyler up and down with a flirty smile, “I’m Fiona”. The look she gave clearly suggested she wants to skip the friend stage.
Willow gives Fiona a pointed warning look as she goes back to cutting vegetables.
Willow takes Tyler to meet her husband David, who was working in the garage building a chair.
David, who was deeply focused on carving out decorative notches into the back of the dining chair, acknowledges Tyler without looking up.
"Well, that's everyone who's here right now. Ana isn't back yet and the other kids are out playing. I have a room set up for you. It's upstairs 3rd door on the left", Willow says.
Capri shows Tyler to his room and lingers in the doorway realizing that he has nothing to unpack, since he just had a hoodie with no shirt underneath and pants on.
“I was thinking we should drive into town and get you some clothes and anything else you might need”.
Tyler nods, "yeah, thanks".
They both head out and when they return, Tyler gets in the shower and is relieved to finally get clean, the simple task making him feel a bit more human.
As the water beats down on his skin his mind starts to wander to the events of the last few days. So much happened he hasn’t even processed it all yet.
His mom’s face flashes in his mind looking down at him with a smile and saying “love you” while he's strapped down to a table about to have is powers forcefully taken away.
That betrayal was only part of what hurt. Knowing that he was going to live and have to watch his mom slowly die from her Hyde was something he didn’t want to go through.
It didn’t matter; he had to watch her die anyway. By suicide.
Tyler wonders if Wednesday never broke his bonds, if he never fought his mom, never ended up on that roof, would she live for a bit longer. He thought about this earlier standing at her grave.
No, she was ready to die and she chose how she would die. A wave of grief washes over him and he lets out a loud sob, letting himself cry.
He doesn’t know how long he was crying in the shower, but after a while when he doesn’t have anything left in him, he gets out and puts on the new clean clothes.
For the first time that he can remember, he can’t feel anything. Like he just cried out all the emotion from his body and he’s now just an empty shell. He thinks about lying in bed and just rotting there but decides against it.
Tyler goes downstairs looking for Capri, hoping for a distraction from his own mind. He walks around a bit awkwardly, trying to find his way through a stranger’s house.
David comes in from the garage, wiping his hands with a stained cloth, Tyler smells wood stain as he closes the door.
“Oh, ah, hi.” David says awkwardly, “sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you earlier, was trying to get this chair finished tonight.”
Tyler shrugs, “it’s fine. I was actually looking for Capri”.
“Oh, yeah, let me see where she is, come on.” David leads Tyler through the massive house that he feels like he needs a guide for. As they walk through Tyler notices the furniture is all handcrafted wood.
“So did you build all this?”
“Yeah, I did. I enjoy woodworking…and it’s nice to create something instead of always destroying stuff, ya know?”
Tyler looks unsure of how to respond, not quite ready to open up and reveal anything about himself, gives a small nod.
Just then Leah walks up, oddly calm and quiet for a kid her age. “David. Brittany and Sajin are fighting”.
“Yeah they’re siblings they do that” David dismisses.
“But they transformed.”
David sighs. “Where’s your mama?”
“She’s still out hunting”.
He briefly closes his eyes and sighs, “alright I’ll deal with it”.
Tyler follows David to the back of the house, mostly out of curiosity to see if Leah meant what he thought she meant.
Looking out of the large sliding glass door, sure enough there were two small Hydes biting and clawing at each other as they wrestled.
To be honest Tyler thought it looked kind of adorable, like puppies fighting and trying to be intimidating.
David looked irritated as he walked outside and instantly transformed into a Hyde, grabbing each child, growling and throwing them away from each other.
As the smaller boy tried running back to attack his sister, David lets out a loud roar that puts Tyler’s Hyde on edge as he felt himself tense up.
Sajin backs away slightly and growls at Brittany across the yard.
Capri and Willow come running out after hearing the loud roaring. “Brittany and Sajin, get in the house and change back right now!” Willow yells.
Inside the house chaos erupts, Willow tries to calm her daughter as she dresses her and finds out what started the fight.
Capri is struggling with Sajin on the floor as she tries to put clothes on him while he’s thrashing in her arms and screaming. Her strength as a werewolf allows her to keep the little boy from escaping her grasp as she tries to calm him down.
Tyler never really having experience with little kids, especially Hyde kids, watches curious about how Capri deals with a kid still in his Hyde mind set.
Sajin looks like he’s going to smack Capri in the face when his hand turns into a claw, and he swipes at her neck leaving bloody scratch marks. Capri gasps and grabs his clawed hand.
“NO!”
Sajin begins screaming again, and his body starts to slowly shift into a Hyde; Capri tightens her grip around him and starts small vibrating movements to redirect his mind.
Sajin stops and looks up at her with his bulged eyes; he starts relaxing as he stares at Capri.
“You like this”? Capri smiles at him as the boy starts to shift back to human form.
Tyler wondered what happened to this kid for his Hyde to be unlocked so young, the other girl he was fighting wasn’t much older.
Willow brings Brittany over to Sajin and Capri, "Sajin, why did you attack her?"
"She wouldn't share the chips with me!" The little boy yells.
"Well they were my chips so I don't have to" Brittany retorted.
David had come back into the house covered with a robe at some point during the meltdown. Looking at Sajin, he said the same thing Tyler was thinking. "You transformed over not getting any chips." He had a slight tension in his voice.
"She should have let me have some!"
David kneels down to Sajin's level. "That's not the point. We are a bonded pack, so we do not transform and attack each other. You two are going to argue and annoy each other, that comes with having a sibling, but our claws and teeth are deadly, especially as you get older. I know you love your sister and don't want to seriously hurt or kill each other, right?"
"no, I don't want to" Sajin says in a small voice.
"Alright. Come here." David says with his arms open and Sajin gives him a hug.
As Tyler watched the exchange between them, he felt a bit envious. His dad never would have been that understanding or comforting with him after an angry meltdown.
Shortly after the kids calmed down, there was a loud rustling of trees and something big being dragged towards the back of the house.
“Ana is back from hunting, let’s see what she brought, and she needs to be introduced to you. She has a habit of killing strangers who wander too close to her children.” Kenji tells Tyler. “Fiona go help Ana”.
Tyler follows Kenji and Fiona outside where he sees a female Hyde with long almost white hair dragging a huge male moose and stop in front of them. She immediately looks at Tyler and slowly stalks over to him; teeth fully bared with an intimidating low growl.
“This is Tyler, he will be staying with us as a new member of the pack” Kenji says in a calm but confident voice.
Ana leans her head towards Tyler, sniffs and lets out a low guttural growl like she’s deciding if she should tear his head off anyway.
Tyler’s Hyde instincts can feel that this is a show of dominance. She is an older stronger female Hyde and he is a young male who needs to know his place. He stands there frozen and looks to the ground as instinct tells him to submit.
Satisfied with his response, Ana walks back to the moose and with her large claw begins gutting it with the same precision he learned how to do on hunting trips with his dad.
Fiona looks at him with a coy smile. “Guess you get to live another day”. She then starts taking off her clothes and hands them to Tyler fully naked, “hold these for me will ya”.
He mindlessly takes the pile of clothes trying to avoid looking at her body. She grins and walks away giving him full view of her ass before transforming to her Hyde form and helps Ana butcher the moose.
His first couple of days at the house was chaotic to say the least, and it was all from having four small kids living together, plus a five-month-old baby.
Tyler had been really taking his times of quiet solitude for granted. He was now in a house full of people and noise all the time.
Kids screaming, playing, fighting, sometimes until 11pm. Kenji, Jean and their baby Riku had a room right next to his and he woke up often to the baby crying during the night.
Fiona had also been openly flirting with him whenever they were in the same room together. It was getting a bit annoying since she wouldn't back down after seeing he wasn't reciprocating. He really wasn't interested in dating anyone right now and he's never been into girls that needed constant validation from guys.
On the second day, he was given a daily schedule of chores. Everyone in the house had tasks that they rotated. Looking over the list there was cooking, food prep, dishes, cleaning the house, hunting, therapy, recreational free time and childcare. Wait. Were these people really going to have him babysit?
The chores were meant to provide routine and structure, like what he went through during boot camp, except for the childcare part, which he was exempt from until the parents felt he was stable enough for.
He learned the kid’s names quickly. The oldest was Brittany, David and Willow’s ten-year-old daughter, and their adopted son Sajin who was seven.
Leah was eight years old and Abigail was six. They were Ana’s kids and feral. Not in the badly behaved way, but in a no human contact for years way. Ana had been stuck in her Hyde form for five years and took care of her daughters as such. Abigail even walked like a Hyde and could barely speak. She mostly made guttural groans, growls, and high-pitched squeals.
The adults worked with her on speech during home schooling lessons, but that was a slow process.
Leah had a much better vocabulary but didn’t talk unless she needed to.
She, Brittany, and Sajin were close friends and played together all the time, while Abigail often played by herself or hunted small animals outside.
Neither of them had their Hyde unlocked, which surprised Tyler given how they were raised.
While Tyler was drying dishes he was tasked with washing after lunch, he heard loud banging, thumping, and kids screaming in the living room. Knowing that Ana had childcare duty that day, he went to see what was happening.
He saw Abigail, Leah and Sajin all pulling on a large blanket with Ana holding the other end in a game of tug of war. After falling for the 3rd time the kids gave up on that and started climbing on her, holding her long arms as she picked them off the ground swinging them. She gently picked them up by both arms with her clawed hands and walked with them dangling in the air like they were vertically flying. The kids giggling the entire time. Ana made sounds that Tyler never heard a Hyde make, but it was like laughing.
He watched as this massive monster with sharp teeth and claws made for killing, had fun playing with a group of kids. He had never even considered a Hyde could do anything besides cause pain and destruction.
Brittany walked up and stood next to him. The kids had been curious about him, but she was the only one who said more than two words to him since he got there.
“Why do you always look like you’ve never seen a Hyde? Have you seen any other Hydes?”
Tyler glanced down at her, “only my mother.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s dead.”
“Did you kill her?” Brittany asks in an innocently curious way.
“No.” What the fuck kind of ten-year-old asks if I killed my mom?
“Well, I almost killed my mom being born. I transformed for the first time and cut her stomach open.”
Tyler looked down at her, brows furrowed in disbelief. “How did your Hyde unlock before you were born?!”
“I don’t know, my mom just told me it happened and she almost died.”
Tyler was uneasy hearing that, his apprehension of Willow building. Part of him wanting to question her about it.