Bonding (Julian)

[Jamie Morrigan]

Late afternoon found Redención House very nearly empty and Jamie Morrigan lying on her bed feeling incredibly bored.

Normally her imagination could take her a long way on her own, but as hectic as life around the House had become, she'd been leaning on it an awful lot lately. Jake had taken Anna to a doctor's appointment. Aidan, Tess, and Alex were at work. Jen was in her room on her cell phone, Jim was elbow-deep in some kind of computer science project, and Aimee was with her boyfriend somewhere. Ronnie and Scott had just headed to the park, and Polly... well, Jamie wasn't sure where Polly was, but she was still just a little afraid of her.

And that left perhaps the most enigmatic member of the house. At least, Jamie thought he was enigmatic. She'd just come across the word in a book about south Pacific island cultures. Apparently it meant "resembling an enigma;" which wasn't terribly helpful as definitions went, "perplexing; mysterious." Well, there was no question he was mysterious. He never talked about his past - hardly ever talked at all, for that matter. And for the number of times she'd seen Anna walking away from him shaking her head or muttering in Spanish, he had to be perplexing. She still wasn't sure if he resembled an enigma, though. Most of the time he just looked like a wolf.

Jamie sighed and rolled up so she could sit cross-legged near the edge of her bed, cradling her hot pink cast in her lap. She'd tried talking to Julian before and had never made much headway. When he was wolf-shaped, it was almost easier; you could talk to an animal and you didn't have to feel awkward when he didn't talk back. But even then Jamie couldn't be sure how much was actually sinking in. Anna always said the best way to connect with someone was to find out what you had in common with them. But it was awfully hard to find something in common with someone who didn't even like being human--

And that was when it hit Jamie. In fact, it was so simple she was astounded she hadn't thought of it before. It would take some doing of course, a level of complexity beyond her normal brand of illusion... and she'd have to do something about the cast on her arm. It probably wouldn't fool him, at least not for long, but maybe, maybe, it could help him feel a little more at home. Very carefully, she slid off the edge of her bed and went down on the floor onto all fours.

The door to Jamie's bedroom squeaked open, and a lanky, juvenile wolf with reddish fur went limping on three legs out into the hallway.

[Julian Davitt]

The house was quiet, and Julian huffed a breath out his nose as he lay beneath one of the other residents' beds.

Nearly everyone had left; a few of the others were still in their rooms. He could hear the newest addition to the house, the woman who practically exuded aggressiveness, moving about in the distance, though he wasn't particularly sure where she was at the moment.

His ears twitched as another sound, familiar, but one he'd not heard for some time, softly echoed across the wooden flooring. A rapping, a tap-tap-tap, that had his head pick up as his nose twitched to confirm if there was another canine in the house.

Shimmying out from the bed, he bent his nose to the floor and followed the noises, growing ever more curious when he couldn't find a scent to match the sounds he was hearing.

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie heard a shifting of fur and clacking of claws in Aidan's room, so she ambled on that way and cautiously nosed open the door. She looked like a yearling wolf, half-grown, with rusty brown fur and bright yellow-green eyes. Her right-front paw was raised gingerly from the floor as she hobbled into the room and--

Oh, wow. Julian looked much bigger from this perspective. Jamie gawked a moment, and then realized looking straight into his eyes was probably exactly the wrong signal to be sending in wolf. She ducked her head and gently laid her ears back, and she even threw in a little wag of her tail. Wait, did wolves do that, or was it just dogs? Language barriers were so tricky!

"Hruff?" she said, hoping that would pass as a friendly hello.

[Julian Davitt]

He was perplexed. The timber wolf cocked its head at the little one that limped in, and he took a deep breath. It wasn't a wolf, but it was. What was this?

He stepped forward, and recognized the scent; it was the girl. The younger girl, that is. She huffed, and her eyes drifted from him quickly to the floor, making him think she was worried. She was being very submissive.

Julian was perplexed. He wasn't the leader, nor even the second.

He took a few awkward steps back, and settled fairly solidly on his haunches, She was awkward, and seemed so even despite the lame leg.

He transformed, making sure to do it slowly so his legs wouldn't ruin the new fitted jeans Anna had gotten him a few days before. He settled down into a cross-legged position and slowly reached a hand towards the red wolf-girl in wonderment.

[Jamie Morrigan]

Watching him transform was amazing. Probably some people would find it disturbing the way Julian's bones bulged and shifted and the way his fur slithered back into his smooth, shiny skin, but Jamie couldn't help but marvel at how clever the transition was. Did it ever go wrong and leave him with one arm shorter than the other, or a limb coming out the middle of his back? Wow, that would be awkward.

Eye contact meant friendly in human, so she lifted her eyes back to Julian's, opened her mouth in a panting grin, and wagged her tail again, not caring now if her mannerisms were more doggy than wolven. Carefully, she leaned in to sniff theatrically at Julian's hand.

She leaned in a little too far, and instead of meeting the cold, wet sensation of a canine nose, Julian's fingers passed through the intangible borders of the illusion, sending up a tiny swirl of colored sparks. Jamie rocked back onto her haunches and sneezed.

[Julian Davitt]

Julian bounced back, caught off guard by the reactions of the little wolf.

"What?" he asked, looking at his hand and then back at the wolf-girl. "How are you doing that?"

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie tilted her head and lifted one ear. Julian's face was never very expressive, as if he'd never really gotten the hang of using it, but he was beginning to look a little more startled than curious.

"It's okay, I'm just pretending - oh!"

Her mouth hung open for the instant when she realized that a talking wolf wasn't likely to come across as reassuring. She closed her eyes and dispelled the illusion, and the wolf dissolved into sparkling motes of light, leaving behind a red-haired girl with a pink cast on her arm kneeling on the floor.

"Sorry about that," she said. "I wasn't really a wolf. But I thought it might be fun to pretend. You don't mind, do you?" And then, because she couldn't resist, she grinned and asked, "Did I fool you?"

[Julian Davitt]

Julian couldn't help himself. His mouth stretched slightly into a smile of his own, however muted it was.

"I thought I was dreaming," he answered. "I could see a cub, but I couldn't smell one."

He gestured to his nose, redundantly, but the action was unconscious.

"But you almost had me," he admitted, wiggling his toes and looking at the girl in front of him curiously. "You just... pretend, and can look and sound like a wolf?"

[Jamie Morrigan]

Oh, right - she hadn't really thought much about smell. Jamie had put a lot of thought into how to fool a person, but not nearly as much into how to fool an animal.

"Sort of," she replied wrinkling her nose. "It's a little trickier than that. See, I can make illusions with my mind. If I want to change how I look, first I have to imagine I'm invisible, and then I have to imagine something else on top of me. Like how I had to turn my cast into a limp leg. Most of the time I just make stuff up, and it's a lot easier."

She held out her hand as if cupping something in her palm, and an iridescent dragonfly materialized there, all metallic green and gossamer wings. It fluttered, then hovered in the air between Julian and Jamie.

"You can see them, and you can hear them, but you can't touch them. That's why my nose turned into sparks."

To illustrate, she passed her hand through the dragonfly's body. Green swirls of light spun off of it like loose threads of silk, but the dragonfly kept hovering, unperturbed.

[Julian Davitt]

"Ah," Julian said, awed by the display in front of him. His hand rose and waved through the construct, eliciting another wave of sparks. "Wow."

He smiled.

"That's awesome," he said, watching the sparks fly and fall.

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie's smile brightened, brilliant an unguarded. The dragonfly darted to the side, did a celebratory loop around Julian's head, and disappeared with a rasp of wings.

"Thanks!" she said. "I think turning into a wolf is pretty cool, too. What's it like? I mean, I can picture myself as a wolf, but I don't know what it feels like to actually be one."

[Julian Davitt]

Julian went silent, unsure how to describe it.

"I don't know," he said finally. "I don't know how to say what it's like. It's like me right now. I'm a wolf, and I'm a person."

He wasn't satisfied with that answer, and it showed.

"It doesn't hurt to change. It's like changing clothes."

He shrugged.

"How did you hurt your arm?"

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie wasn't really satisfied with that answer, either. But maybe the problem wasn't with Julian. Maybe there weren't really words for what it felt like. Which would make sense, seeing as wolves didn't talk.

His question made her eyes drop down to the cast resting in her lap. She rubbed forlornly at the rough plaster.

"I fell off the stairs," she said. "After the Fourth of July, when the house got broken into." Even now, she resisted the idea that Apollos had done it. She'd heard what Aidan and Jake had said about him, even some things she wasn't meant to hear. But it was hard to accept that someone who had worked so hard to be her friend could do something so ugly to her family.

"You went out with Aidan to go chase him, didn't you?" she said. "When... When Anna got hurt."

[Julian Davitt]

Julian backed away, physically shying from the memory of that night.

"Yeah," he said, nodding once. "I didn't know you got hurt then, though."

He looked down at her brightly cheerful cast and felt a stab of shame.

"'M sorry," he muttered.

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie almost rattled off a perfunctory, "It's okay," which is what you're supposed to say when someone says they're sorry you got hurt. But she didn't think Julian was saying it that way. He said it the way you say you're sorry for doing something wrong, or possibly for not doing something right. She frowned.

"What are you sorry for? It wasn't your fault."

[Julian Davitt]

"I know," he said. "But I could have done something; and we didn't catch... that man."

Even now, his voice grew more subdued on thinking of the phantom-like personage of Apollos.

"He can come back. We didn't really chase him away. If this were a wolf family, we'd move to another den and keep our noses to the wind."

He shook his head. It was hard; how else could he think and feel than as a wolf?

"But this isn't. I still have to get used to that."

He shifted from his crouching position, letting on leg fall to the ground, and was sitting. He smiled, letting the warmth of the air and smells of the house comfort him. Even as a human, he was very sensitive to scents.

"What does it say," he asked. "On your cast, I mean. I can't read very good."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie didn't like to think of the prospect that he might come back, however much she told herself that he'd have to be some kind of moron to show his face near the House again. Who went out of their way to torment a house full of mutants? That was just asking to get frozen in a block of ice, burned to a crisp, and brain-scrambled, and that wasn't even counting what the kids could do to you. But Julian was already on to something else - something better, in Jamie's opinion.

"Oh! They're names," she said, and she scooted forward to give Julian a better view. "When you break your arm and you have to wear a cast, all your friends sign their names to make you feel better. See, there's Ronnie and Jim, and Aimee, and Jen, and Alex and his girlfriend Lana, and Tess, and Jake, and Aidan, and Scott, and Anna. I haven't gotten Polly yet... and I don't have you, either. Would you like to sign it?"

Jamie was on her feet before he could answer. "I have a marker in my room! Hang on!"

She dashed out of the room in her stocking feet and came back triumphantly holding a fat blue marker.

[Julian Davitt]

He regarded the marker with an almost bemused expression, until Jamie pulled the cap off the marker and pushed the marker into his hands. Her smile was infectious, and he grinned slightly as he bent over and placed the marker to an empty spot of her cast and began to write his name.

JuLIan.

He looked at the end result of his endeavor with a satisfied grin, before he placed the cap back on the marker. He hadn't written his name in eight years, so the fact that he remembered how to spell it at all was a victory he took pride in.

"How long will you have to wear it?" he asked, his melancholia broken.

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie beamed at the big, sloppy name over the crook of her elbow. She wasn't sure she'd be able to get him to sign it. So what if it looked uneven compared to the others? He'd signed it himself, and that was the whole point.

"Five more weeks," she said wistfully. "And then I have to have a splint for another two weeks after that. So it won't be back to normal until school starts, really."

The little girl shrugged. "I can still write with it, but I'm not supposed to carry any heavy stuff or throw anything with my right arm until it's better. But that just means I have to do stuff a little differently."

It seemed like Julian was starting to come out of his shell. Except wolves didn't really have shells. Neither did people, for that matter. It was just one of those expressions you just had to accept.

"So what do you like to do?" Jamie asked.

[Julian Davitt]

Julian frowned, unsure of how to answer that, or worse, what to answer with; he didn't know what he liked to do. He liked to eat. And sleep. But he felt somehow that Jamie wasn't looking for answers like that.

"I like running," he said finally. "When I'm not running after or from something. When I can just run because I'm full and I want to, it's one of the most fun things in the world."

He smiled, and wiggled his toes. Smiling was coming more easily to him now, but the expression still felt weird, as if he was doing it wrongly.

"I don't know what else I'd like to do," he admitted. "I haven't done much but be a wolf for a long time."