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jinx-xxed · 10 months ago

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Beautiful Thing Caged

Chapter 2; You’re wrong but you’re right

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆ .。.:*

A/N; We made it to part 2 guys let’s go!! Next chapter will be more fun I hope T_T definitely struggled a bit with this one

⇦ Part 1

Part 3 ⇨

Summary; You dive headfirst into trying to learn more about this beast-man you’ve been assigned to. You didn’t expect for things to run so deep.

Content; Werewolf AU, modern AU, werewolf Kylo Ren, human reader, scientist reader, soulmates, lots of research and sciencey things, blood testing, Kylo acts like a smartass, reader’s over him already

[Each chapter will have specific content warnings.]

Wc; 4.1k

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆ .。.:*

Your head slips from where it’d been resting on a closed fist. You barely catch yourself in time before you slam face first into the table beneath you. You’d been dozing off again, something you find yourself doing more and more as sleep escapes you night after night. You straighten your posture, groaning as you stretch your limbs out to try and wake them back up. Your laptop sits open and on in front of you, fifteen tabs open at the top—each one more incomprehensible than the last. Wolf-man hybrids, wolf shifter, wolf man, man wolf, what do I do when a weird guy is locked up against his will by a secret government agency??, wolf man illegal topic, guy with wolf ears and tail… That last one gave you some less than desirable results that you’d rather forget.

When you aren’t at the Agency, you find yourself in the town’s local library. It’s a rather large building for the size of your town, which you’re grateful for, so it’s been very easy for you to seclude yourself in your research in the past two weeks. It’s the same every day; the receptionist greets you as you walk in, you beeline for the back of the first floor, and you take the first empty table you see. Then you grab whatever books might be helpful and scatter them all around yourself and your laptop, which you’ve done now.

You grab a new handful every time, seeing if anything can help you at all. So far you’ve come up empty. You started with the basics, reading books about wolves and their behavior just to refresh and learn more about them, then a simple human biology textbook, then you tried myths and legends and folklore books, flipping through them and studying any diagrams you were provided with. You saw more than a few that were under the umbrella of beast-men, things that stood on two legs and were covered in grisly fur and muscle. When you compared those images to the man that’s been occupying your head, they just didn’t match. He’s more man than beast, a fact that’s been haunting you.

You wish he would talk to you. You’d spent the last two weeks sitting in that white observation room, watching him and what he does in silence that was only broken by the clicking of your keyboard and occasionally talking to yourself. Hell, you still didn’t even know if he actually could speak or not. He didn’t give you much of a chance to figure it out, and you didn’t have a partner or anybody to bounce ideas off of. Hux had threatened you enough about telling anyone else about your studies.

You sigh harshly and dig the heels of your palms into your eyes, making yourself see stars. Focus. You lean in a little more against the table, bringing your laptop closer so you can type something in. Your research had led you to a small, online forum consisting of people that seemed to be looking into the same things you are—real life human-beast hybrids, not just the myths. When you’d discovered it a day ago, it’d seemed like your saving grace. The people in it didn’t seem very active anymore, but you’d sent a message, a hopeful shot in the dark. You’re delighted to see a notification in your inbox from the forum. You honestly hadn’t expected a response, your hopes having been dashed so many times you didn’t dare get them up again.

Your original message had been simple, just an introduction under a fake name and a vague question about if anybody knew something about wolf-man beasts. Somebody by the user of JHunter12 responded.

You: Hello, I’m new here! I’ve been working on a research project for school and got stumped. I was wondering if you guys could help? It’s about wolf-man hybrids, like a man having actual wolf ears and a tail and all that. I just can’t seem to find very much on them.

JHunter12: Yeah I know plenty about them. The term you’re looking for is lycanthrope. People don’t talk about them much anymore after they went basically extinct.

Your heart leaps into your throat at this new information. You suddenly feel wide awake. That simple message gave you more information than you’d gotten in the past two weeks of your research. You open a sixteenth tab and copy the term the user had said and sure enough, a whole page popped up. You couldn’t help yourself from grinning, looking at the wolf hybrids you saw on your screen. None of them exactly matched your subject, but this is by far the closest you’ve gotten. Scrolling down, you see a couple articles from years ago about the mutation, or what they call a “disease”. You switch tabs back to the forum, your mind stuck on the last word they’d said.

You: Extinct?

You’re shocked at how quickly they respond.

JHunter12: Yup. Happened like 100 years ago or something. Lycans used to live with normal people no problem until governments decided it actually was a problem once they started mixing too much and a bunch of hybrid babies were popping up. People started going on man hunts like crazy and the government just let it happen, sometimes ordered it themselves. Took their numbers down to basically zero. Wolf populations struggled cuz of it too, everybody thought every normal wolf was a Lycan even though there’s obvious differences. It was a massacre. Awful stuff.

JHunter12: The government tries to cover it up by making it really hard to search for and not letting anybody talk about it. Only reason I ever found out is cuz my great grandpa was one of those hunters. He killed multiple of them. Now I spend most of my time researching them and finding out whatever I can. I’m glad someone else is also interested.

You sit there staring at your screen for a minute, rereading the messages a good few times. You had no idea that there’d been an extinction campaign against the very thing that sat about a forty-five minute drive away in an underground cell. It made you feel sick. It also explained why you’d struggled so much to find any information until now. Even working at a government agency, you knew nothing about this. You wonder if any of your superiors knew, or if they were in the dark like you were. It’s all very strange.

You: Wow I did not expect that at all. Thank you so much for all of your insight, you have no idea how much this has helped me.

Jhunter12: Of course. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

You shut your laptop quickly, irrationally fearful that you’ve learned a lot of things you shouldn’t have and you don’t want anyone else seeing. You look out the window near you, the sun having begun to set. The library will be closing soon, which means it’s time for you to pack up. You quickly put away all the books you had scattered about, shove everything into your backpack, and make your way out with a muttered goodbye to the receptionist.

Walking out of that library, even though you have so much new information to research, you can feel that sleep is finally going to come easily to you tonight.

» ☆ «

You researched as much as you could when you’d gotten home, fascinated by how much you were finding now compared to the barren wasteland you had before. The person on the forum had been correct, there was almost nothing you could find about the eradication of lycanthropes; the few articles you did manage to dig up were buried deep within Google’s results, clearly not wanting to be found easily. None of them were very specific, but when they were put together, they created a fuller picture. When you put in the right keywords and followed enough secondary links, you even managed to find a few small studies from years and years ago.

Lycans lived like any other person, they had the same diets, human habits, same intelligence, they just had a genetic mutation. Nobody seems to be sure where it originated from or what exactly caused it—there’s plenty of religious theories—but blood samples showed a mixture of wolf and human intricately tied together. Autopsies revealed other strange mutations within the body that allowed them to shift between a human form and a quadrupedal wolf form. When in the wolf form, they were unable to talk but could still convey communication through retained human intelligence. It was all so interesting.

Reading through stories of the Lycan Massacre on the other hand, was devastating. There was so much hatred thrown at these people who had no say in how they were born, who had families and whole lives ahead of them. Hunted down and killed just because of misunderstandings and misplaced fear—farmers thinking Lycans killed their livestock, townspeople seeing things in the woods, general irrationality and hysteria. All of the Lycans were taken out and it’s assumed that any who managed to escape live out their days in total secrecy or as wild animals. If they’re discovered, well… you have proof of what happens to them.

Walking in to work the next day, you have a bit of a spring in your step. You finally managed to sleep, and you have a document that’s about twelve pages long and full of your research sitting on your laptop. You feel like you’re finally getting somewhere, like you’ll finally have something worthwhile to submit to Hux instead of hourly play by plays of how many times your subject moved his legs.

You walk down the halls, you give a courtesy nod to whoever you pass, you get into the elevator. You go down, down, down, all the way to the twentieth floor where you walk through more sterile, white hallways. There’s been a few additions to this floor, a few new experiments. They aren’t your concern though, you don’t have clearance to look at them, just like no one else has clearance to look at yours. Speaking of which, your badge gives you that lovely beep and then you’re through the door.

The beast-man immediately snaps to attention once you enter. It’s the same routine every day, where you’ll come in and he’ll study you, those undeniably pretty brown eyes always finding yours and communicating something you can’t quite understand. It always feels like there’s something on the edge of your mind when you look at him, but you can’t get a hold of it despite your efforts.

His chains rattle as he moves from where he’d been lying on his cot, which has now been upgraded to a bigger size thanks to your persistence. You went to Hux and asked him to put in a request for more enrichment and comforts within your subject’s cell on the basis that “it would improve research results”. A lie at the time, but you have noticed he seems more engaged and at ease with the extra blankets, pillows, and padding on the floor. You also met with the nutritionist so that he isn’t just eating raw meat day after day.

You notice his held tilt as you walk in. He sees the change in your demeanor, wonders what it could be for. His tail twitches behind him. “Good morning.” You say out of habit, even though you know he won’t say anything back. You often end up talking to yourself when you’re with him, filling the empty space with whatever’s on your mind just to get it out. He seems to listen rather intently and oddly enough, your voice also seems to calm him. It encourages you to keep going.

You set a few of your things on the ground. “I’ll be back in an hour or two. I have a few tests to run.” He watches you intensely as you head towards a door to your right, his body leaning forward to follow you. You shiver as goosebumps rise along your skin.

There’s blood samples waiting for you in the lab. They’d been taken in the dead of the morning and were prepped for processing, one of your coworkers on this project having let you know via email. They also let you know that those samples were not easy to get and required more than a few rounds of sedatives. Apparently, your subject had been able to smell the sedatives in his food and refused to eat so they had to do it the hard way. You can only imagine how much of a struggle that must’ve been.

You sigh and pull out one of the rolling chairs, using it to wheel around the lab room to get everything ready. Turning on the microscope, preparing the blood vials and testing strips, the glass slides, your notes. You start with a blood smear, the smear just a little wonky because you’ve never been able to get it perfect. You shake it to dry it—your least favorite part—and then slip it under the microscope. You take a minute to adjust it correctly, to get the image to come clearly through the lens. When you finally get it, you see all the little red blood cells come into focus. You move the slide around with the knobs of the microscope, inspecting carefully. You scribble things down on a notepad you have next to you that you’ll put in to your laptop later. Everything seems perfectly normal; no malformed cells, regular cell counts, and just all around healthy blood. That’s good to see.

Now to test something you’re far more curious about. You prepare all the reagents and machinery you’ll need for obtaining a DNA sample through blood, and then get to work on separating it from the rest of the blood sample. With the high tech of the First Order Agency, it’s able to cut down the wait time on a DNA blood test significantly from a few days to only a little over an hour. While working, you think about how much easier this would’ve been if you could’ve just gotten a swab of the inside of his mouth. Having seen those fangs though, you were not keen on trying to get one.

You wait for the final step of the testing to be finished, deciding to put in all your notes in the meantime. Hux will probably groan as soon as he sees your long, long document in his inbox. Once the test is done, you eagerly roll your chair over and start transferring the results. They come to you in the forms of graphs and charts, detailing the intricacies of his DNA and general ancestry that you aren’t really concerned about—he does have a good amount of German in him though. You’re more interested in what makes up his DNA and sure enough, you find it. On the second page, there’s a sector for anomalies noted within the coding. The one that takes up the most space is labeled under the Canis lupus family, making up about 51%. The other 49% is Homo sapien, as expected. So those studies online were correct, the DNA of Lycans is an almost perfect mix of wolf and human.

“Fascinating,” you mutter to yourself, feeling like you’re on cloud nine with all the new information you’ve been able to gather just in the last twenty-four hours. You’re finally getting somewhere.

You transfer the charts to your laptop and attach them to your document before beginning to clean up. You put in what needs to go in the autoclave, you toss the glass slides, and you make sure to sterilize everything. Before you leave the lab, you can’t help but hesitate. Your eyes slide to your right, where there’s another door. You know that door will lead to a hallway that’ll bring you to his cell. Bring you inside. The thought lasts for about a second before you dismiss it as you being insane.

The beast-man perks up again as you finally enter back into the observation room. You settle yourself in your usual spot on the floor, a comfortable distance away from him. “Sorry that took a little longer than expected. I was just testing your blood. Everything looked great.” You tell him. He doesn’t seem all that bothered either way. It amuses you.

You study him for a while, just like you always do. You watch how he moves, how he looks at you, how he inspects his dinner so carefully—definitely paranoid after the other workers tried to put sedatives in there. You’re glad to see his meal is a mixture of both raw and cooked meats, along with vegetables and fruits. You’d written to the nutritionalists to tell them what kind of meat he didn’t like based on your studies as well, so they no longer included those. He seems much more eager to eat with the new variety and it makes you happy.

He settles again afterwards, lounging around and staring at you. You work on your observation logs, inputting information, organizing it… it’s all a very familiar pattern. One you’ve grown accustomed to throughout the entirety of your-

“Kylo.”

You jolt, nearly jumping out of your own skin. Your head shoots up, brows deeply furrowed in confusion. Who…? You look towards the beast-man, whose intense eyes meet yours not a second later. Surely not?

But you watch as he speaks with a voice deep and rich. “My name is Kylo. Kylo Ren.”

You stand up so abruptly that your laptop falls to the ground with a clank and you stumble over your feet. “You can talk?!”

He squints at you. “Yes, of course I can. Are you stupid?”

You’re excitement deflates a little, an annoyed frown settling on your mouth. So his first words he says to you are mean, great. You push past that. “Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” You think about how much you’ve talked to yourself around him while he understood every word and just chose not to speak. You feel embarrassment sizzle under your skin.

He sniffs. “I didn’t like you.”

“If you’re just going to be rude then feel free to go back to not speaking.” You say through gritted teeth.

“I feel that you can’t get on me for being rude when I’m the one locked in a cell.” He points out, shifting his body to sit facing you with his legs crossed. “I only speak now because it seems you’re trustworthy. I believe you don’t want to do this either.”

You falter at his words, at the way he’s able to see through you so easily. It’s like all those hours he’s spent staring at you was really just him reading you, gathering information of his own. You try to make some excuse. “Well I… it’s just a job.”

He hums. “I can see that you care too much, though. It eats through you. That’s why I decided to trust you.”

You don’t know what to think of his analysis, of him basically taking your thoughts from your head and laying them out before you. You sigh through your nose and sit back down on the ground. “Okay… well… would I be able to ask you some questions, Kylo?”

He seems delighted by you saying his name, his ears perking atop his head and his tail giving the smallest twitch. His head tilts to the left. “Go ahead. I’ll answer what I want to.”

“I figured.” You mutter. You pull your laptop back to you, opening a voice note to record. You press start. “Alright… let’s start with the basics. How old are you?”

“I think 29.”

You cock a brow at that but continue on. “What are you?”

“You’ve done enough research to know that.”

You sigh again, heavier this time. “Please just answer.”

“A werewolf.”

That’s a new term you haven’t really heard before. You saw it once or twice while researching; it seems to be a modern word to describe what Kylo is. Older reports preferred to use the more common, scientific term of Lycan. “Okay, and where are you from?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

You lift your head, confusion on your face. “What?”

“I don’t know where I’m from.” Kylo says. “I was taken from my home as a child, because of what I am. The man that took me wanted me for my strength and potential to bring him money.” You can see how his eyes glisten with pain from the memory. Perhaps that’s what all his scars are from.

“Who is he?” You ask.

“It doesn’t matter. I killed him.” He says it so bluntly, as if there’s nothing to it. Like he didn’t just admit to a heinous crime that would normally get somebody thrown in prison. Though you guess his cell is a prison enough. “Although, he did exactly what you all do. He studied me, ran his tests. Kept me in a cage.”

You shrink under the accusatory tone even though you know none of this is your fault. You clear your throat. “What happened after you… killed him?”

“I had nowhere to go. I stayed as a wolf, it was easier. It’s been years.” He says, right ear twitching against his hair. You catch on to his words, on to anything he gives you that’ll improve your research. So he can turn into a wolf… that must’ve been what that first report you got of him had been based on. “I wanted to go back home, but that man affected my memory. He took me halfway across the continent. But it’s coming back now, I can feel it. I know where I need to go.”

“You do? Could you explain that?” You ask, a little too eager.

“It’s not something to explain.” He snaps. “It’s just… something leading me in the right direction. I was close before I got caught here.” He’s angry about that, you can see it in the way his brows furrow and his fists clench. You understand him, if you’d been within reach of your goal after years of work and then it got ruined, you’d be pissed.

Then he looks to you. “That’s why I need your help.”

“Wh- me?” You splutter. “How would I help you?”

“You’re smarter than that.” Kylo taunts. He’s right, you know exactly what he means, but you don’t like it. “Get me out of here. Help me get home. You know you don’t want to see me in here.”

“Quit assuming you know me. I’m here to do a job, that’s all this is. I can’t give up my entire livelihood just to break you out.” You say roughly.

He leans towards you, big black tail swishing against the floor behind him. “But you feel it, don’t you? Something deeper.”

For a moment, you don’t know what he means. But then something inside you seems to click, and you recall that first day you saw him. When you’d met his eyes, and you’d felt that tug. A tug that came from some higher plane, a thing you had no control over. It made you feel right when you were near him but then felt wrong when you weren’t, like when you’d gone home and a new type of loneliness you’d never experienced before had consumed you. You’d chalked it up to just stress from the new assignment, and that’s exactly what you’ll do now. You have no idea what it could mean and despite your job, you don’t have an interest in finding out. Kylo smirks at you knowingly and you realize you haven’t dealt with someone this aggravating for a while.

You press stop on the voice note. “I think that’s enough for today.” You shove all your things in your bag, being less than gentle. You stand as the lights begin to dim for the evening, turning towards the door.

“Wait.”

You stop, even though it’s probably against your best interest. You twist your head to look back at Kylo.

“Don’t send them that recording.” He says. He doesn’t explain himself, he feels like he doesn’t have to. He knows you’ll understand. You hate that he’s right. You hesitate for a second, debating on whether to give him a response. You can’t promise you’ll do anything—this project would benefit heavily from it being known that he can speak and communicate but… it’ll probably only bring him harm. You want to slam your head into something. If you knew this damn assignment would cause so many conflicting ideas and emotions, you wouldn’t have accepted it. You rip open the door without saying a word to him.

When you get home that night, in the dimness of your living room with only the light of your laptop, you delete the voice note.

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆ .。.:*

Tags (comment if you’d like to be tagged next time!); @bullet-clubs-bitch @hazydespair

⇦ Part 1

Part 3 ⇨

#was trying to remember when I did blood testing in my class 💀#fighting for my LIFE #star wars #star wars fanfic #star wars x reader #kylo ren #kylo ren fanfic #kylo #kylo fanfic #kylo ren x reader #kylo x reader #kylo x you #werewolf kylo ren #werewolf au #werewolf fanfic #werewolf x reader

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