AN: A very different interpretation of punk!Tessa. This piece is canonverse and a modern au with a Tessa who is far less cute and fluffy than the one in the Wessa drabbles.

Make Me A Monster

Canonverse AU - One Shot

Tessa Gray was a poor kid. She knew her way around the darker corners of New York City. She carried a knife in her boot and another in her pocket. Her brother dealt drugs and Tessa kept the math on his deals while telling him over and over again that he needed to get out of that life. When he disappeared to London, chasing the score of a life time, she told herself she wouldn't follow him. It was only a month and a half before his pleading text messages and slew of London pictures finally led her to tell him if he could find the money for a plane ticket, she would use it.

With a clockwork angel slung around her neck and everything she owned packed into a single carry on bag, she left behind New York City with a pang in her chest. Her aunt died while Tessa was still in high school and with no one to take them in, she and Nate had slipped through the cracks in the social system. She wondered sometimes what would have happened if she had put her foot down and demanded they go to the meeting with the social worker but she hadn't. She had let Nate convince her that running away at 15 was a better choice than foster care. He was already 18, he wouldn't have been able to go with her and his business deals would have not only made him unfit to be her guardian but probably would have landed him in jail if anyone went looking.

She stepped off the plane at Heathrow to be met by a pair of women in jewel toned business suits and a sign with "Theresa Gray" printed on it in neat letters. She should have walked by them. Should have just run. Headed off into the city. It was safer on her own. But she had introduced herself instead.

And it had landed her here.

Here was an ancient, empty building. She hated every inch of it. She wore a dress more than thirty years out of style and sat in the room down in the basement of the rotting structure where the moisture seeped out of the wall and the Dark Sisters attempted to teach her magic. They stayed behind their desk and lectured her on the theory of magic and transformation and tried to bully her into doing what they wanted her to.

The sisters no longer kept anything on their desk. The globe, a pen, a crystal paperweight, all of it had become weaponry. For the first few weeks she had let threats against her brother keep her from behaving too badly but then they'd shown her a video where he'd looked out of the screen without a single bruise on his face and asked her to do as she was told.

Nate sold people out. She knew that. He had let a childhood friend take the fall for him so he didn't have to go to upstate. He had cost Aunt Harriet more than one job. He had lied to a drug lord once and one of his friends had wound up with his legs broken while Nate walked away free as a bird.

She had thought she was above it but apparently she wasn't.

After that realization she hadn't been so well behaved.

She had stabbed one of them. The thin one. She had finally changed as they wanted her to. Her body had cracked and stretched and become other and she'd fallen to the floor in a pool of her own vomit. They'd stood over her, not even checking if she was breathing, and chattered about how well it was going. She had come up with the knife from her boot and hit the woman in the throat. The blood had fountained but it might have been a paper cut for all the good it was. Tessa didn't know what they were but they weren't human. Neither was she but she didn't heal that fast.

That had been the last time she had seen her own clothing. After that it was these old dresses and no shoes. She crossed her arms and tucked her feet up under her on the chair she sat on. She was still bruised. Not from the stabbing incident, from something more recent. She fought often enough that the sisters were wary of getting too close to her but that didn't mean she wasn't still the weakest one in the room.

She was better at the change than she pretended to be. She could change without fainting now and practiced it over and over in her room while they weren't there. But when they were, she always collapsed. This time when the shorter woman came to roll her over with a little kick to her shoulder, Tessa let her hand fall out and touch her shoe. Just a little, not enough to be noticeable, but enough to pull in the change.

She didn't wrap it around herself. Not yet. She held onto it, like a treasure as one of them, she wasn't sure which, took a cheap shot kick at her ribs. She groaned but didn't get up. She made them call the horrible maid to drag her back to her room. Miranda was strong enough to do it. To lift Tessa and carry her like a child back up all those steps.

"She's too fragile for the change. Her mind cannot take it, perhaps we should try meditation training?" one of the sisters said as they followed Miranda and the unconscious Tessa out of the room.

"Or medication, drugs would perhaps make her more docile," the other said.

"She is a nasty thing. The Magister could find better than this for a wife," Mrs. Dark said.

"She'll break eventually, perhaps he wouldn't mind if we did some of that work for him," Mrs. Black said.

They had Miranda drop Tessa not on the bed but on the floor. She didn't react. She stayed still and limp until the door clicked shut and the lock turned. Then she scrambled to her feet and changed into Mrs. Dark. The change was different, harder to hold, unsettling and nauseating. Not human, not human, not human. It was in every beat of this heart.

"Neither am I," Tessa told herself in her borrowed voice. She held onto the rail of the bed with hands that weren't right, too large, clawed and the colour of elephant skin. She held the change and waited for the swirling nausea to stop. She was not going to break and she was not going to let them be stronger than she was. She had no one in the world who cared about her but that didn't give them the right to treat her like that. If they were going to teach her how to be a monster, they were going to regret it.

Once she had control of the change she reached out one of her clawed hands and the brass bed lifted and spun once. She didn't know how to do that but Mrs. Dark did so it didn't matter. She lay her hand against the door and the locks clicked and rolled back. Tessa looked at it for a moment and smiled. She was going to learn how to do this for herself without this awful borrowed body full of bitter thoughts. Just knowing it was possible made her feel better.

She was too curious to just run for the door, she picked through the rooms and was rewarded with her own clothing. Her jeans were still bloody from the stabbing incident but both her knives where there. She gathered the pile up, pausing to use a spell to life the blood out of the fabrics, and tucked it under her arm. She stepped out the front door and looked down the steps to see a man standing by the gate. He had driven the car that had brought them through the snarling London traffic. He looked up at her with bulging eyes but didn't react. Tessa, barefoot and wearing a stolen body, walked past him and out into the city of London without him so much as lifting himself away from the fence.

She went back that night, after dark, wearing her own body and her own clothing, and set the place on fire with a spell she had stolen from Mrs. Dark's own mind.