<i>NO, STOP!  DON'T TOUCH ME!<br/>
</i><br/>Brienne hissed furiously, swiping a tiny claw at the scientists cornering her in the lab room.  They backed up, allowing a Hazmat suit take their place.  He reached down, grabbing her around the middle, as she hissed and growled and bit and scratched, but to no avail.  The gloves were too thick for her to pierce.  She struggled, but the suit scruffed her, immobilizing her body.  A sharp needle pricked the back of her neck, and she screamed.  The men laughed at her as the suit tossed her in a cage.  She felt her body convulse, and she shifted against her will back into her human form.<br/><br/>She suddenly sat up in the bed, breathing heavily, clutching the sheets to her naked body.  She gripped a pillow and squeezed it, pressing it to her chest and face, and cried into it.<br/><br/><i>Just a dream</i>, she thought.<i>It was only a dream.</i><br/><br/>She moved slightly, looking at the mass of needle track marks on the inside bend of her elbow.  She knew the other one looked the same.  She knew there had been countless needles, countless tubes of blood taken from her.  They'd taken samples of her skin as well.  She looked at her hip, eyeing the scars where her body had healed over the countless times they had removed large chunks of flesh from her body.  She was afraid to see the rest of her body.  All she saw was a well of scars.  Scars everywhere but her face and the tender parts of her body.  She saw them at odd moments on her legs, arms, torso...  She didn't want to know what her back looked like.  They had even taken a chunk out of her right ear.<br/><br/>She took the bed sheet and wobbled her way to the bathroom, staring at her tousled hair in the mirror.  She relieved herself and made her way down to the dusty kitchen.  Bri had been hiding here for nearly three weeks.  Maybe.  She could have miscounted.  But she didn't know what day it was, much less what year it was.  Her body had developed far beyond her scrawny teenage self.  She was entirely uncomfortable with it, mostly due to the scarring and the sudden existence of the chest she never knew she could have.  She had become comfortable with her own nudity, in this abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere, but she wasn't sure she would ever be comfortable with the scarring.  She thought it made her look monstrous.  She never wanted to go out into public.<br/><br/>Besides, she wouldn't be able to handle public anyway.  She could hardly control her shapeshifting.  If anyone ever found out that she was a freak, they would haul her back into a lab to experiment more.  She was determined never to be taken away to a lab ever again.  She'd done her time.  She'd served her purpose.  She had been punished well beyond what she deserved for her part in the crimes she and Clancy had committed.<br/><br/><i>Clancy...<br/>
</i><br/>She missed him dearly.  She felt a pull in her heart, painful, empty.  She much preferred being an animal.  Wild animals didn't feel this kind of loss.  They felt loss, yes, but not nearly as strongly as humans did.  Then again, Bri didn't see herself as human anymore.  She was a freak, an alien experiment, a hideous, deformed, mutated monster.  Like being Beauty and the Beast, in one body.  She knew she was shaped well, pretty, but her beauty was hidden under a monstrous mound of scar tissue.  She would never be pretty, never be presentable.  She hated the scientists who had deformed her.<br/><br/>But what she hated most was the longing and pulling and pain in her heart she felt any time she was human.  She grimaced at her reflection in the window and dropped the sheet, closing her eyes, letting her instincts do as they wanted, and when she looked into the window again, she saw a wolf.  The wolf was pale gold, the color of her hair, and the eyes that looked out from the wolf's face were as blue as spring skies.  She rarely changed color as she shifted.  She was pleased with herself, the painful tugging lessened, and she used the doggy door that smelled of golden retriever to exit the cabin.<br/><br/>She was hungry, and it was time to hunt.