Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You ready? Got your bag packed?” Dave slapped a hand onto Grady’s shoulder and grinned. Grady stretched his neck left and then right. They’d just wrapped a long week of filming and Grady’s muscles were tense with the need to be outdoors and in fresh air.

“Yep, although I’m still confused about why you needed my measurements.” A couple of weeks ago, Dave had sent Grady a text: I need two things from you: genus and shifted chest circumference.

“You’ll see.” Dave smiled, and it was only a little mischievous. “We do things a certain way, and everyone has their job to do.” 

Grady shook his head, smiling. When Dave, Doug, and J had invited him to join the Monthly Judges and Host Run, he’d thought he knew what to expect, but then Dave went all mysterious in a way that made J roll his eyes, so Grady had played along, pretending to be dying of curiosity (which he was, a little—did they all wear little outfits?) as the day drew closer.

And now here it was. Dave waved at Doug, who was Grady’s ride to the starting point. “Let’s go, friend,” Doug said, a little more glee than usual in his smile. Grady followed Doug to his crossover and tossed his overnight bag into the back. Just a 20-minute drive to Mianus River Park, and he’d know what all the fuss was about.

“Excited?” Doug asked, his smile wide and goofy. Grady said “yes” with a smile. Doug had been a steady, friendly presence since his first day on set, welcoming him to the team and easing any awkward moments when he did or said something differently than Wil had. “Just do you,” Doug had told Grady on his first day on set. “You got this job for a reason.” 

You’d think that being a Green Beret would make you immune to imposter syndrome, but Grady had known that fans of the show and probably some of the crew were missing Wil and comparing his new-to-hosting performance with Wil’s competent ease. When you were out on an op you didn’t have an audience. But Doug had been there for him, a fellow soldier and ally. And Grady hoped that tonight would cement his place in the group. 

“What’s the bag for?”

Doug shrugged. “We usually get breakfast at this great diner in the morning, and who likes wearing yesterday’s clothes?”

Fair point. Grady’s stomach rumbled as he thought about French toast. Or eggs. Or both. Bacon. Definitely bacon.

“Here.” Doug handed him a protein bar. “J and Dave packed sandwiches for everyone, but we’re going to be running all night, so it never hurts to pregame.”

Grady tore into the bar, taking time to swallow before asking, “So…is there anything I need to know going in? Anything I should or shouldn’t do or say?”

He saw Doug glance over at him and shake his head. “What have I been telling you? You belong here. And after tonight, you’ll really belong. Just be yourself. Usually J takes the lead for the first part of the run, but otherwise there aren’t any rules. You’ll fit right in.” 

Grady shifted in his seat. He didn’t doubt that Dave and J liked him just fine, and Dave especially had taken pains to make him feel welcome, but fitting right in was another level, and he couldn’t be sure that he was there quite yet. “If you say so.”

“I don’t just say so,” Doug replied. “I know so.” 

Grady knew not to push it. If he did, Doug would pepper him with dad jokes until he cried uncle. Not that he objected to dad jokes, but the sheer volume Doug could produce on command would overwhelm even the most tolerant.

“OK, I’m going to fit right in. And then in the morning we get breakfast at a diner.”

“And then there’s the mandatory snuggle and nap time.”

Grady turned his head just fast enough to catch Doug failing to suppress a twitch of his lips. Grady sighed. “Not that I object to a nap with friends, but you’re bullshitting me right now.”

Doug’s smile broke free. “Yes, I am. We usually retreat to our rooms for a nap, but one day I’ll make the puppy pile happen.”

Before Grady could reply, they were turning off the main road onto a gravel lane that wound into trees. Doug cut the lights as they pulled up behind J’s car. “The park closes at sunset,” he explained. “But it’s only closed to people at sunset.”

“I didn’t know you were a lawyer,” Grady remarked as they unbuckled and opened their car doors. 

“One of my many hidden talents.” 

“Hm, would your highway billboards feature you with a karambit? Would you be slicing up the red tape of the legal system?”

“Great idea.” Doug rubbed his hands together as they walked up to join Dave and J.

Dave handed them each a paper-wrapped sandwich. J was tearing into his with the same focus he brought to his strength tests on set. How Grady hadn’t figured out that J was a werewolf on day one still puzzled him. J had all the hallmarks: intense focus, tenacity, and a quiet ferocity that could be either reassuring or terrifying based on J’s current goal. Right now his goal was consuming that sandwich at a pace slightly faster than baseline human.

“It’s a perfect night,” Dave said between bites of his own sandwich, a towering corned beef monstrosity. “Clear skies, crisp air, what more could you want?”

“Sunset in 5,” J said as he finished the last bite of his sandwich. He turned and walked into the woods.

“He always gets like this,” Doug leaned over and said in a low voice to Grady. “But just wait 5 minutes and you won’t recognize our taciturn friend. He’s downright playful, if you’ll believe it. Still not chatty, but sometimes he’s almost…silly.”

Grady just grunted and focused on consuming his capicola on a toasty Italian roll. Goddam, they did sandwiches right out here in the east. Dave approached him as he wiped the crumbs off his fingers. “If you’re ready.” Dave pulled a small…saddle? out of a bag. It was like a thick belt with two D-rings in the center and what looked like an adjustable harness strap looping off of it. He then he pulled out a small cloth pad. 

“Surprise!” Doug said, “You’re my ride tonight. Well, not the whole night, but my night vision isn’t so good when I’m shifted, so if we’re going deeper into the woods I usually take a break from flying.”

“Flying?” Grady hadn’t asked Dave or Doug what their shifted forms were. He’d known they shifted because that little spidey sense in every shifter’s brain let them know when they were around another one, but it wasn’t exactly a “nice to meet you” conversation topic and he hadn’t wanted to presume that they were good enough friends yet to share that kind of personal information. Finding out that J was a werewolf had felt like a real sign of trust from the group, and he hadn’t wanted to push it.

“Yeah, man, I’m a crow. You could have asked me, but I just figured you were a private type and I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable if you didn’t want to tell me what your form is.” 

Grady looked at Dave.

“Spectacled bear,” Dave said with a shrug. “It’s a little on-point.”

A smile broke out across Grady’s face. “Nah, I was going to guess lion. You like meat so much.”

Dave laughed. “It’s a mystery: carnivore on two feet, mostly herbivore on four. But, ah, we should get cracking. Sun’s almost down.”

Grady shucked his clothing and shifted, muscles and bones reshaping themselves, hair changing and flowing down over his skin until he stood on four paws, head tilted to the side as he took in his friends from a new angle. 

“I owe you five bucks,” Dave said to Doug. “I should have known he’d be a Malinois.” 

Doug shrugged. “He’s got that ‘working dog but bouncy’ energy.” He turned to Grady. “May I?” Doug asked, holding out his hand. Grady answered by butting his head into Doug’s hand, enjoying the scratches Doug gave him around his ears. The first couple of minutes after shifting were always a little itchy as his nerves got used to their new configuration. 

“Are you OK with being Doug’s ride?” Dave asked, and Grady grabbed the harness with his teeth and tugged. Once they were all shifted they’d be able to speak mind to mind, but for now he had to work with charades. “I made this to the specifications you sent me,” Dave explained as he laid the pad high on Grady’s back and then placed the saddle-perch on top of it. “Let me know if I tighten the girth too much.” 

Grady could tell that Dave had made everything with care, the pad and saddle-perch fit him perfectly, and the underside of the girth had some sort of padding on it so that it rested soft and smooth over his skin and muscles. He gave himself an experimental shake when Dave stepped away, and Grady didn’t feel anything move much, which seemed good.

“Comfortable?” Dave asked, and Grady gave a yip of agreement. He pranced around the two men, nudging them with his nose, his version of saying, “Shift already! Let’s play!” 

Doug didn’t undress at all, just shifted and popped out of the collar of his shirt as a sleek, black crow. He ruffled his feathers and took off into the trees. Dave just shook his head as he collected their clothes and put them in the trunk of J’s car. He stepped around behind the car to take off his own clothing, put them into the trunk, and slip J’s car keys into a pouch around his neck. When he came back around, he was in his lumbering bear form. Grady sniffed the air to familiarize himself with Dave’s scent. He still smelled like Dave, but with a musky overlay that reminded Grady of another bear shifter he’d known in Army. At the shoulders, Dave was almost a foot taller than him, Grady thought, although his estimations could get wonky when he was shifted. Dave leaned in to sniff Grady, and Grady wagged his tail. 

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” he told them through the telepathic link. It had snapped into place as they each took on their animal forms, sending little pulses of awareness between them. Grady could feel J and Doug waiting out in the woods, J’s mind vibrating with the need to run and Doug’s busy with some sort of corvid mischief. Grady turned on his paws and sprinted for the treeline, barking, Dave loping behind, his big bear paws sending little tremors through the ground that Grady could sense through the pads of his own feet.

Now that he was in his Malinois form, Grady’s nerves disappeared. He relished the feeling of his muscles and tendons working to propel him forward, the way his nose decoded the complex scents of the woods, and how his ears swiveled to follow the sounds of the forest. Everything was pure pleasure and movement and existence.

As he reached the small clearing where J and Doug were, Grady slowed to a trot and then stopped in front of J, tail wagging, and then stretched back so that his chest met the ground in a play bow. In werewolf form, J looked like a turbocharged timberwolf, taller than Grady by a fair bit and heavier. His coat was thick, pale on his legs and belly, darker gray above, with russet around the ears. He regarded Grady with large, amber eyes. Non-shifters still told each other scary stories about werewolves: that their bites could infect a person (not true, all shifting, were- and non-were was genetic), that they were bloodthirsty (only if you were a rabbit, but there were also vegetarian and even vegan weres), or that they ran a secret world government (most werewolves found politics boring, but Angela Merkel was one famous were politician).

They were all wrong, and Grady pitied them their ignorance. Werewolves were more limited than other shifters because they only transformed at the full moon, but the sheer magnificence of the transformation made up for it. Grady had known a few werewolves over the years, and each of them were breathtaking when in their wolf form. Granted, some of the awe he felt was probably that of a dog meeting its wilder, bigger relative, but he had to believe that anyone, shifter or no, would be a little starstruck in the presence of a werewolf in their four-legged state.

“You ready?” J’s voice came through their mental connection.

“Try to keep up!” Grady launched himself and took off for the woods. J caught up and outpaced him in seconds, his strong wolf legs propelling him forward. Grady sped up to stay on J’s tail while Doug flapped above them, cawing so that Dave could follow at his own pace. J clearly knew these woods well, following a path that he had run before. 

As J leapt over a log, he kicked up his back legs high in the air. “Don’t trip,” he told Grady, and there was laughter infused through the message. Grady sailed over the log, absorbing the shock of the landing with ease, and nipped at the end of J’s tail as he caught up. “I never trip!” he told J. 

They sped through the woods, twisting and turning around clumps of trees and underbrush, occasionally crossing groomed hiking paths. Doug delighted in diving at their heads, and Grady could feel the whoosh of air against his neck as Doug’s wings beat startlingly close. At one point he dropped a pinecone right onto J’s head, and J didn’t even break stride, just sending a quick “Knock it off, crow” through the telepathic connection. Doug went and found another pinecone.

Finally, when the light faded from the sky, Doug landed on Grady’s back and held onto the D-rings with his feet, but Grady barely felt the weight and only noticed when Doug let out a loud caw that almost did make Grady trip. He recovered just in time, although J caught it out of the corner of his eyes and yipped a wolfy laugh into the night.

Finally, J led them to a clearing bathed in moonlight. Grady admired in his own canine way the strength and grace with which J moved, how he paced the clearing and circled a spot until he sat down, threw up his head, and howled at the moon. The howl pulled at Grady’s instincts, and before he could make a decision to join in, he had, sitting next to J and tilting his head up at the sky, his own howl weaving through J’s. 

Doug flapped into the air and circled the clearing, adding in his own caws and rattles. No one spoke through the telepathic connection, but it thrummed with contentment and joy. The animal harmonies and rhythms of their song expressed something their words never could. Grady had tried to explain the feeling to a non-shifter friend once and had gone so far as to journal about it, but he’d never been able to capture the pure focus and connection he felt when shifted.

There were lines from a poem that popped up on shifter Instagram every few months, always in different fonts, abridged at different points, and with various flavors of shifter inspo pictures as the background, that came the closest: “Living is no laughing matter: / you must live with great seriousness / like a squirrel, for example— / I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, / I mean living must be your whole occupation.” 

Grady felt that now. Nothing mattered besides this strange music, now joined by Dave as he entered the clearing, adding huffs and…squeals? He almost sounded like a monkey. Grady shook his head back and forth and howled anew. The answering yips of coyotes a good distance away joined them, and the thrumming happiness intensified across the mental bonds of the group. 

One by one they slowed the song, volume dwindling. Doug settled back onto his perch on Grady’s back. Dave went over to a tree and scratched his back against it, making a sort of purring sound. J was the only one left singing to the night, and even his voice finally fell silent. The faroff coyotes yipped a few more times, and then they were left with the sound of the wind in the trees, the scurry of small creatures in the underbrush, the distant hoot of an owl. 

Grady dared not break the silence that had fallen over the group. He sat there, panting and taking in the smells and sounds of the forest at night. Dave lumbered over and nosed J’s head. “Need more of a break?” Dave’s voice carried a bit of his bearish purr. “The new guy gave you a run for your money.”

J turned his head to nip at Dave, who backed up with a chuffing squeal that sounded suspiciously like a human laugh. “I didn’t get a good run in last month. I had extra energy.”

Doug launched himself off of Grady and flew over to Dave’s shoulder. “It’s OK, J. You can admit that you wanted to impress Grady.”

J leaped up at Doug, who flapped into the air cawing and swooping down at J’s head. If he hadn’t had the mental bond to reassure him that they were playing, Grady might have worried. But if it was roughhousing time, he was all in. Sinking his weight down into his back legs, Grady threw himself at Dave. 

Whump . He’d barely made Dave sway with the impact. “Careful, pup.” Dave contemplated Grady in the dim light of the clearing with shiny black eyes. “I’m bear-y dangerous.”

“Hey!” Doug interjected. “Bad puns are my job!”

Grady tried to use Dave’s momentary distraction to get under his center of gravity and knock him down, but Dave stepped into Grady’s attack, leaving Grady on his back squinting up at the night sky. Doug flew at Dave’s face and Dave swatted at him with a paw, Doug darting out of the way with a raucous caw. Grady rolled over and up and bowed to J before tackling him.

They went down in a tangle of limbs, nipping at each other and yipping as each tried to gain the advantage. J had the benefit of size, but Grady had just a hint more of speed, so neither of them had quite enough advantage to make it a short contest. J was clearly as laconic in wolf form as he was in human, but Grady could feel his enjoyment through the bond. He focused on J’s movements, trying to learn any patterns or see any weaknesses he could exploit, but J was clever and clearly probing Grady’s defenses as well. Too bad the telepathic link didn’t give him a way to see what J was going to do ne—

J pinned him, teeth in Grady’s neck scruff. How had that happened? Too much thinking, Grady thought to himself, and then shook his head in silent dog laughter. “Again!” he demanded, wriggling out from J’s hold as J let go of his neck.

They romped around the clearing until the moon began to sink, taking turns playing with each other and occasionally forming a chaotic scrum as a group. Doug delighted in making them try to jump to get him, somehow always an inch above snapping teeth or swiping paws. Dave was a tank, taking hits and shrugging them off, clearly holding back his full strength when he would bat them with a paw. 

As the moon sank low on the horizon and the eastern sky showed signs of turning gray, Grady, Dave, and J lay on the ground panting. Doug perched on a branch above their heads, preening his feathers to arrange them back in place. “We should go soon,” he warned. “J gets grumpy when he has to walk through the woods naked.”

J lifted his head an inch off the ground and growled at Doug. Doug took off from his branch and flew a circle around them. “It’s true! And for a werewolf, you’re weirdly shy about nudity.” 

That got J fully off the ground and on his feet. “I just believe in consent. And modesty.”

Dave hauled himself to his feet with a rumble. “Doug, stop teasing J. J, stop letting Doug get to you with the same old stuff.” He nosed at Grady. “Come on, pup. Time for breakfast.”

Grady’s muscles were tired, but the thought of bacon got him on his feet and moving. Doug landed on the perch on Grady’s back and they loped off as a group into the forest, keeping to Dave’s pace now that they had all worn themselves out.

Sitting in the diner booth, Grady knew he was about an hour and a half from keeling over from exhaustion. If he didn’t have a plateful of French toast, eggs, and bacon in front of him right now, he’d lay his head down on the table and snore. Doug looked unfairly awake, Dave had a sleepy contentedness about him, and J looked more relaxed than Grady had ever seen him before. 

“So, how was your first run?” Doug smiled at him over a cup of coffee. Grady took a second to chew the piece of bacon he’d just shoveled into his mouth. Strange, how spending a single night mentally connected to the other three men left him feeling a little lonely. Not that he’d want that connection 24/7, but he’d palpably belonged to the group last night and now he didn’t have that reassurance. 

“Good, great, really. I hope I didn’t hurt Dave, though.”

Dave huffed out a laugh. “You wish, pup.”

Grady raised an eyebrow. “I’m over thirty, Dave.”

“Like I said,” Dave said over the edge of his coffee cup. “Pup.”

J surprised Grady by jumping in. “It’s a compliment, Grady. He only gives nicknames to people he likes. You’re lucky. Wil was ‘Scamp.’”

Doug groaned. “Oh, he hated that. Or he secretly loved it. Or both.” 

“Both,” Dave and J said in unison. 

The post-telepathy loneliness eased a bit. Doug liked him. He had confirmation that Dave liked him. J, though…

J cleared his throat and shifted a little in his seat. “I—Grady, I did push it last night during the first part of the run.”

Doug gave a mock gasp, and Grady kicked him under the table.

Grady focused on cutting a giant bite off of his French toast. “Don’t worry about it. I was pushing too. My hamstrings are going to kill me tomorrow.”

J chuckled. “Well, we’re both idiots, then, because my low back is already mad at me. I just, well, I wanted you to have fun last night so that you’d want to go out with us again next month.”

Dave stage-whispered at Grady. “This is where you tell him that you wanted him to have fun last night so that you’d get invited again.”

Doug turned to Dave. “Seriously. First the pun and now this? Maybe you won’t be invited next month.” They began a good-natured squabble, and J leaned over to Grady. 

“Welcome to the pack,” he said, and patted Grady on the shoulder. “You’ll get used to their bickering.”

Grady smiled at J and then almost inhaled his French toast. He was starving, he was exhausted, but he belonged. Not bad. Not bad at all.