savetheearth | [Closed] Fly, pigeon fly, cross your windblown sky

Or unless one knew the animal tolerated or enjoyed being grabbed by the face. Julien's head seems much bigger, what with the dense feathers and the way his face elongates and narrows towards his beak. Still his jawbones at that point feel almost human, incongruous given the rest of him. The feathers are damp and a little bit crusted. He's wept since the last time he washed his face.

"None of this should've happened," he tells Aaron faintly. Straw is scattered over his face and head like the lattice for a disorganized geodesic dome. "I don't know what to do. I don't know how to go forward."

"Sometimes, you don't," Aaron says, keeping his hands where they are. "Sometimes, the only thing you can do is get up. But it's important that you do. You'll figure out where to go from there."

If Julien doesn't fight him, he'll tug gently upward. It's barely enough to pull Julien's face off of the ground -- it's intended to help Julien get his head up, not to do it for him.

"Come on," he murmurs. "Off the ground with you."

Julien heaves a huge and gusty sigh that goes on for almost ten seconds, and then draws his head back so it's over his shoulders, the S-curve of his neck hiding in feathers, which rouse enough that his face is partially obscured. Only then does he shift his feet and rise off his heels.

Small horse. Tiny car. Refrigerator box. Between the bulk of his keel and the density of feathers it's hard to tell how this came from a human body, he's so big and seemingly shapeless. His body is arranged more horizontally than vertically, especially when he doesn't feel up to holding himself upright, but like this the level of his eyes is close to what it was when all this started. His body feathers are kept ruffled and round, disarrayed against cold and unhappiness enough to feel ill.

"All right." Resignation and weariness slow his voice. "I came out here to feel better. It's not working."

Aaron climbs back to his own feet. He reaches forward and brushes some of the straw off of Julien's head and shoulders, quick and deft, like patting down someone who fell in grass. He squares his shoulders, taking in a deep breath himself and letting it out.

"Time to try something else, then. Where do you think you'll go?"

He shuts his inner eyelids while Aaron is brushing off some of the straw, instinctively protecting his eyes. "I don't know. Not where I was before. I can't stand that. People shouldn't just... look at me. Not right now."

"Do you know anyone you can stay with?" inquires Aaron. "Anyone you trust, who you're less uncomfortable being around?"

Julien has friends, Aaron knows; he's never lacked for them. Surely there must be someone.

There is a long pause. Julien does make friends easily. Lately though many are either in spite of or because of what he's looked like. He knows it.

So many of his friends on the network have gone off, and he has more contact with some than others. Ariel, maybe, though Killian being there would make it awkward.

On the network just now all he can think of are Liam, and Gabriel, and Isabela. Liam came to help and Julien sent him away, he'll think of the difference. Gabriel came after and tried his best, and petted him. -but he has a house in Locke which he isn't living in, not right now. Isabela... he can't cringe very well. How do you go up to your lover and say It's me?

"...yeah," he says at last. He can break in at the Stark mansion if it comes to that. "Sure."

Yes, that's incredibly convincing. Aaron is very sure you thought of someone to stay with.

"Do you need one?" he presses. Without his echoes, maybe he would have thought it best to let it lie, but now? He's been giving Julien space for a year, and it's left Julien lashing out. Space is clearly not the best thing here.

He flicks his wings partially open and refolds them. "I know a couple places I can go," Julien says defensively.

It will be warmer in one of the other zones. He won't need shelter. He can find food and water. If Julien has learned anything in the two weeks he's been out here, other than coordination and what it is to fly over mountains on his own power, it's that his body is very good at surviving, discomfort or not.

Aaron's mouth pulls into a taut line.

"My house in Locke City isn't ideal," he says. "There's not much space, and it would be hard to come and go unnoticed. But if it's better than where you're thinking, and especially if where you're thinking is hiding in the middle of nowhere again, you'd be welcome."

"It has doorknobs." He's been there, he remembers. Julien has had so much trouble with doorknobs. Scales slide off them, feathers can't grip them well. It won't be any better now.

"Anyway if I go to Locke it won't be the middle of nowhere, and that's a shitty place to hide when you turn into a- a giant- this." Somehow he can't bring himself to say anything more specific just now.

Edited 2015-02-27 03:39 (UTC)

"As if you couldn't work around that if you put your mind to it," Aaron says, mildly challenging.

"But I won't deny that Locke is a terrible place to hide." In the TV show that is this game, there is a dramatic beat there, and the audience will wonder what's up with that heavy-handed foreshadowing.

"I won't tell you where to go. But you can come to me, if you need it. That hasn't changed."

Julien does not want to fight, not really. He's tired of all this. His wings come out of their tight fold to droop, the tips of his primaries touching straw.

"I do know a place," he mutters. "It's not good for me in the long term, but that's incentive to leave, isn't it. I wouldn't be a strain on the owner."

Because if he goes with Aaron, he will be a strain. Julien knows how small that house is, how big he is now, how much he eats, and Aaron will want to help him, when he's putting plenty of himself into work as it is.

He looks at Julien for a moment -- it's that look, the Striderstare, the piercing one -- and then relents. He nods, satisfied.

"All right. Pack up whatever you've got here and we'll go."

He looks back, eyes huge and round and blue. Minuscule adjustments in the sizes of his pupils, drawn small now with effort, are all that make him look less opaque than a trapped animal. It's a hell of a poker face, or it could be if weariness and hurt and defeat hadn't made themselves far too clear by now.

"Just the cloak. I can't fly wearing it." He'd had a pin that he was pretty sure he'd taken from Aaron, but it had vanished days ago, and even Julien's ridiculous eyesight, expanded even farther now that his eyes are so enormous, hadn't helped him to find it. Anyway even with the pin, the cloak had flapped like a flag in a high wind and got unmanageable.

Julien turns his head - with his neck held coiled like this the motion looks almost owl-like - to face away. "I hate you," he says, and in the same breath, "I missed you."

....

Aaron takes a breath, closes his eyes, and sighs it out.

"I know," he says, resigned. "I could have made last year easier for you, and I didn't. I'm sorry."

He offers no excuses. Aaron recognizes that some of it was not his fault -- that losing his Echoes was out of his control. However, that doesn't change how it made Julien feel.

He bends down, picks up the cloak, and shakes it out. He begins to fold it.

At last Julien shifts on his feet, taking a couple of steps. He's so painfully aware, here, of how he's forced to move his legs, crouched and wide, almost waddling. The center of his gravity is around his knees instead of having much to do with his hips. Ponderously he swings the keel of his chest through a turn.

And mushes the crown of his head against the back of Aaron's coat, between the shoulderblades, pressing hard enough to splay out his feathers, to feel through the layers. "I," he says, and stops, breathing slowly.

He hadn't meant to hurt Aaron. -well, yes. He had. Julien was so, so endlessly good at picking himself up and dusting himself off and carrying on like everything was fine. People expected it. Give him time and he was always okay, like it came automatically and had no cost, like backsliding was never an issue. They all hung above him, uncomprehending. He wanted...

So, okay, he had meant to hurt Aaron. But having done it didn't make him feel any better. Julien presses against him with the crown of his head, and his operculum, and the point of his beak. "You need to hug me," he says.

He stops moving when he feels the pressure against his back.

Aaron stoops, a moment later, and sets the cloak down.

He turns, and looks down at Julien. He is sad, but not out of hurt to himself. Aaron knows he's the one who always leaves -- his pulses are notoriously unstable, and it's upset Julien before. This is the worst of them all. Protesting how unfair it is will do no good, but it is. All Julien has said is already forgiven.

Arms wrap around Julien's neck.

Julien shifts so he can lean the side of his head against Aaron's chest. His wings open, part of the way. Can he even really be held like this, not just around the neck?

He pulls back a little so he can rear up, and it's stupid he can feel how his legs should be able to work, he should be able to stand, all he can do is fold his calves tight against his thighs and extend his ankles. Even then his body will not become upright, and he can feel the weight of all the muscle attached to his keel trying to drag him back down.

Julien rests that on Aaron - try not to stagger - and lowers his head over the man's shoulder, hooking over it. Then he can, gradually, move one wing to circle him. His wings don't quite move like arms anymore. Some motions aren't as free.

[Totally this.]

He can take the weight -- he's stronger than he looks -- and keeps one arm around Julien's neck. The other goes as far around as it can. His hold tightens, and he makes no move to pull back.

It's been a while.

Another deep, deep sigh. Okay, Julien can't be held close, sheltered. He's just too big. And sensation is more distant through feathers, spread out and insulated to a remove; he feels them pressed down, not the kind of heat and texture he'd taken for granted once. Still. It's something.

"Okay," he mutters down Aaron's back. "I don't hate you. Just..." He turns his head, rubbing his face, the velvety shape of his operculum, against the jacket, and closes his eyes.

"...my God. My God."

"I know." It's murmured. There is meaning to it -- it's not just repeated because he can't think of what to say. Aaron knows Julien doesn't hate him, and he knows that what has happened to Julien is frankly beyond words. His hand moves over the feathers on the back of Julien's neck -- left and right, like rubbing someone's back. It, too, cannot be mistaken for a pet.

Gradually the way the feathers on his head and neck are raised shifts, making it easier to sink through them.

"I need to stop falling apart." The only control he's had here, all along, has been in how he's reacted and what he's done with what was handed to him. It's had a cost and is so much harder than anyone knows, but it's his. "I need to - pull myself together."

Nothing will be the same again. Nothing will be how he wants it. Telling someone, even Aaron, changes nothing. He hates to pretend he's okay, now, but it's the only thing he can think to do.

"Everyone falls apart," Aaron tells him, getting his fingers in the feathers. His head is turned in, leaning against the side of Julien's neck. He's not shying away. "You've done a remarkable job controlling when and how for the past two years. It's okay if putting yourself back together takes a little time."

He sighs out a breath. This is a situation he's never handled before, and what he's telling Julien is -- well, uncalculated. There are times Aaron Strider will tell someone what they want to hear, or what they need to hear, or what he needs them to hear. With this, though, he's got so little reference, so little grounding, that he's got no choice but complete honesty.

"I didn't come here to hurry you."

Julien hadn't quite realized before how touchstarved he was, how much he wanted human contact. With a kind of distant disgust he thinks it's like he's engulfing Aaron in feathers, covering him; he thinks he'd let Aaron lay on his back if it just means continuing, staying there. It makes him want to start tearing feathers out, like he'd done in March.

He doesn't think of it this way but he is incredibly resilient. A few words and some time to collect himself is usually enough that he can work to adjust.

This time, he had not been on the verge of coming back on his own. This time he could probably have stayed out for a long time. "Okay, I'll play," he mumbles. "Why did you come out here? Besides 'I know you'."

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