savetheearth | [Open] One day you think we'll wake up

Julien gets his cloak off and tosses it at the couch and follows it with his long-strapped messenger bag, which is heavy with paper. He's preoccupied by the question of furniture. "Yeah, basically my entire weight is muscle and feather, it's dumb. This is why I was never a gym bunny."

Eyeballing the armchair, whose back and arms aren't too high, Julien cautiously puts a foot on the seat, toes splayed. It does not make any ominous noises, then or as he applies more of his weight. Carefully he gets on it and settles crosswise with a foot taking up the entire width of the seat, his tail and chest supported by the arms and jutting or curving out past them, and folds his wing along the back. His other side still projects out and he's not sure if he should tuck that foot up onto the seat or leave it on the floor. If he flicks his tail the lamp on that side is in danger, or at least its shade is.

But, he is sitting in a comfortable chair. More or less. What were they talking about? Right. "The truth?"

Edited 2015-02-06 13:58 (UTC)

"Mm." He nods. "I gave you the crystal ball because I knew the chances of losing my pulses again were high, and thought that if I did, something that useful should be in the hands of someone who could use it. I was hoping it would stick around like the athelas. Since that's not the case, I might as well hang onto it, if it's all the same to you." If Julien really wanted it -- if he asked -- Aaron might lend it out. However, the original reason for giving it is moot.

He'll wait a second for confirmation from Julien, taking the pause to take a seat on the couch, on the side kitty-corner to where Julien's sitting.

"Maybe it stuck around and I didn't put it in an easy to see place. Then again, I only have so many spots I could put giant marble where I wouldn't have seen it, sick or not." Julien's eyesight, where most of his field of view is at least partially in focus, makes it harder to miss things. He's killer at Where's Waldo.

He moves the wing that's not clamped over the back of the chair in something like a shrug. "I wouldn't mind using it if you showed me how! But if you make a present of it I'd rather it wasn't to me, thanks. Really big gifts make me nervous! Red flags in the back of my head."

Julien doesn't want to think of Aaron losing his pulses again. It's clearly possible, though, and Julien can make it without him. He hadn't known that a year ago. If the only person he can depend on is himself, then he should be someone he can depend on.

"Fair enough," says Aaron with an easy shrug.

"As for the pin--my reasons for giving it you also had to do with the possibility of losing my pulses." He turns it over in his hand. "My pulses have never been the most...stable. They come and go; I wish I could control it, but I can't. If I had the choice, I never would have lost them in the first place -- I don't like having gaps in my memory, gaps where I know important things should be. But if I did lose them again..." he goes on, but trails off.

"I gave it to you as a token of a friendship," he says, switching to Sindarin, "that would persist even when you had memories that I did not have. It is a friendship that is important to me. This brooch was borne by Aragorn's people, his kin. Will you receive it again?"

There is a caution to his voice, an awareness that this is a gesture that makes him emotionally vulnerable. That's not a feeling Aaron particularly likes, especially with Julien as prickly as he is. But there: he has said it, and it was important to him that it be said.

Better though he might be Julien hates the way his body is now. How people react and might react is a significant part of that. He no longer snaps and bristles at the word 'bird' but it stings to be called that, to be considered differently by people he knew.

So he looks at Aaron with narrow pupils that then dilate, and his head and neck fluff. Delicately he removes himself from the chair without knocking anything over, though his tail brushes a lampshade and sets it askew, and he stands up and steps closer, and lowers his body so his great rounded chest rests mostly on the seat just next to his friend, leaning against his leg.

He can't really do this with wings. If he wasn't this he'd have had more options but he supposes Aaron might have taken it wrong if Julien sat next to him to cuddle. It's hard to hug someone who's sitting in a couch even if you're not a misshapen lump thing, okay. Julien reaches with his head and slings his neck across Aaron to rest his head on his other shoulder, closing his eyes. The heat of him doesn't radiate as strongly through feathers but from here it can be felt.

"Of course I will receive it," he says in kind, though of course his Elvish is less fluid and easy. "Not because it was important to Aragorn. He means nothing to me except that he means something to you. It is important to you. Thank you."

Edited 2015-02-08 14:52 (UTC)

The tension actually leaves Aaron's shoulders when Julien does that -- he relaxes, Julien will feel it.

For a second, Aaron has the urge to run a hand along Julien's neck. Aaron nearly does it -- his hand lifts a few inches, but then he remembers that that's something he wouldn't have done if Julien had still looked fully human and that touching Julien without permission right now is probably not the best thing, and his hand closes.

When he does reach up, it's not a pet. It's a steady hand on the far side of Julien's neck, a returned hug, the way you would touch a human. It's light, at first -- ready to pull away if he gets any indication that this isn't all right.

Julien sighs quiet and deep. When his feathers are raised like this it's very easy to sink a hand in, past the smooth contour tips and through the down. Somewhere in there is his skin. He turns his head so he can mash a lipless corner of his mouth and the side of his operculum, what used to be the tip of his nose and the curved cartilage over his nostrils, against Aaron's neck. Other than his eyes those are the most sensitive parts of his face.

"You can... touch me, you know." Part of him recoils at the word pet, so he swaps in another word. Aaron probably knows what he means. "Just don't pat me on the head. And ask, later."

Even more quietly he says, "Everything's sort of shut away. I get... It's so hard to touch anything."

A sense of calm settles over Aaron as he buries his hand more firmly in the feathers, against skin, less hesitant. Aaron finds that he feels grounded in a way that he hasn't in a long time -- something that had not been right has slid back into place.

"I knew it wouldn't be easy," he says quietly. Aaron has known that for a long time. "What you've gone through is something most can't even imagine. Few, I think, would come through it as well as you."

He's been trying to act his old self, like he always has. It's never felt more artificial at times than lately. Too often he still feels disassociated, or has a phantom sense of something he's lost, or feels like his face is too tight and he can't stand up out of a crouch. Or just that his scales and the density of his feathers are shutting him away from the world, he can only touch anything through them, and a little bit of his face, and only the wind feels real.

Aaron is here, and that is real, even if it's only for now. Julien's breath is deep and very hot against his neck. He shifts, trying not to press so much. "Your fingers are cold." His body temperature is so high that warm doesn't feel as warm as it used to. "Keep them there. They'll warm up."

Even if it's artificial at times, Julien hasn't stopped. He has kept going, rather than sinking into a depression, or an addiction, or worse. There are those with far milder cases of being in the wrong body who succumb to things like that.

"You're much more to me than a hot water bottle," he says dryly, obligingly getting both his hands as far in the feathers as they can go.

If Julien saw that thought he might have contested it. He keeps going, but he folds in on himself when there isn't someone to see. Waking up is unhappy in a way it wasn't before. He takes athelas to help him get up, and to make things that have little value anymore seem like they could be worth something. Left to his own devices and without athelas he doesn't want to do anything but lay in place, and sleep, and fly.

"You sweet-talker you." Now he shifts to ~~give Aaron a peck~~ prod Aaron's neck with the hard tip of his beak and shuffles his feet on the ground, backing up a step or so and trying to sidestep onto the couch next to him. He can't quite get it until he gets a wing over the back and half pulls himself up. There he settles loaf-like and lays his neck over Aaron's lap, beak indenting the cushion on the other side. "How old is this thing?"

But even that level of functionality is something. Julien is coping better than he could, and that's impressive.

He puts a hand on the back of Julien's neck -- still not petting, just keeping the contact.

"Older than you," he says gravely. "Older than Locke City. The Amerindians made it before white men came to these shores."

It's really only about five years.

Julien has very mixed feelings imagining his friends becoming birds. If it was for a day, a week, of living like this, absolutely it would be great. He'd make concerned noises and try and help them out and secretly be highly entertained, and probably more withdrawn when they changed back. Longer... well.

This is nice, though. He doesn't have his head on Aaron's lap, so when the hateful thought like a dog comes and his feathers start to slick down he argues it off. Not like a dog.

"Ah, yes. I recognize it by the pattern on its hide. And lo, upon your arrival the guardians of the land entrusted this most secret artifact to you, the bearer of way too many names. You will fulfill the prophecy! Imagine my expression," he adds dryly.

No, not like a dog. Like a person leaning on another person, and while hands in hair is a little too intimate for what's actually happening, it's closer to reality than dog.

"I've got a good idea," he shoots back. "So, you never did tell me what you were doing in my neck of the woods."

It's at least comfortable. Julien still likes and wants to touch people in a way that sometimes feels desperate. It really does feel nice. He needs to find a way to balance that with the horror of being considered a friendly animal.

"It's in my bag." Right in front of him. He'd exchanged the strap on his favorite messenger bag, a leather one scavenged from a secondhand store years ago, for one long enough to work with his body. "You can take a look. I had a pulse last summer... it was a book some kid put together. In the future page sizes are smaller, you know. I went and paid someone to translate... you know Kenjiro Tomisawa? He had that cough? Some of these characters even he wasn't sure about."

He has two documents in the bag. One is a series of small pages, a little larger than those of a hardback book, scanned, blown up, and printed on to normal printing paper. On some the feathers he used to hold the book against the scanner are visible. Its pages are covered with enthusiastic Japanese characters, sprawled in not particularly neat columns, and manga-style drawings in inks and watercolors. The drawings are amateurish but done with great love and attention to detail. All are high fantasy, some have a blue-haired human who looks like an anime Julien in armor and a cape.

The cover has the artist sign his name with kanji and then "Angle" in English letters. There's more English scattered here and there as names and titles, more carefully. "Cain Reprobos", "Disciple of the Violet Rose", "Seere Reprobos", "Jeare", and so on. The other document is just printed text attempting to translate each page, with lots of guesses and uncertainty.

Edited 2015-02-20 02:27 (UTC)

Aaron is very carefully thinking person person person. It would be easy to slip into animal or petting, and he refuses to do it. He takes his hands out of the feathers to flip through the book.

"Someone put a lot of care into this," he observes. "Someone with more love for their work, I think, than skill." It's not unkind, just amused.

Continuing to lay there, Julien doesn't look up. He knows this stuff well enough. "Anghel Higure. It's a pen name. A really ridiculous one - the way it's written, the characters, those are two different shades of red. Literally he's going by 'The Crimson Scarlet Angel'. He's... this kid with a fantasy world, and he writes all his friends into it."

"That's where that 'Apostle of the Violet Rose' thing came in. I don't know if that memory was before or after he wrote this, but it's what he called the other me. To his face. He's... he can't be fourteen." 'Fourteen' to these talking pigeons is young adulthood. "Feels like it though."

In a dull and distant way he wishes he could be Cain, instead, pulsing back ridiculous clothing and weapons and divine healing powers. Summoning lightning in poorly-defined and inconsistent ways. He remembers thinking that's what would happen, when all this started, he remembers trying to cram everything new he learned into a picture that was better than this. Julien closes his outer eyelids.

Aaron doesn't miss the tensing, and when he puts a hand back in the feathers, it's steady. It's not a stroke, far from it -- it's a hand on the shoulder, a touch to the back.

He flips through the book with his other hand, thoughtfully. "And you said this came back with a pulse?" The inconsistency -- no, that's not right. It is consistent, and that's what's strange. The strange coincidence is staring him in the face. If the other Julien was a great bird, why did Anghel Higure draw him as a human? And how is it that the human Anghel drew, purportedly before Julien himself was born, resembles Julien? It's harder to explain than Aragorn's skill in healing. It's tempting to write it all off as pulse nonsense, but it is one hell of a coincidence.

Aaron won't voice it. He'll just keep his hand on Julien's neck and look at the illustrations thoughtfully for a long moment, then close it and set it down.

"Interesting."

"It did. And some stuff about this kid... Anghel's like psychic or something, he can make his stuff seem real. He was in the first memory I ever got. Guess that's why it was so weird."

In truth this version only resembles Julien so much. The style is huge-eyed, small-mouthed, spiky haired. But the hair and eye colors are similar, and he has glasses, and in most of the pictures where he's not the blank mind-controlled Knightmare Fantail - written without the K in some cases - he's smiling and doing goofy things like flashing the V-sign, or wearing someone else's hood while the owner looks cross.

"The kid claims it's all reincarnation stuff - everyone he knows, he knew before in this really high-fantasy setting." It's so ridiculous to think this might be why Julien was born looking as human as anyone. He shifts his neck. "But he's always changing things, if someone was an angel or a god or a saint, what they did, how they died, what their titles are. And everything's overblown. I don't know how seriously to take it."

"I couldn't say," says Aaron, dryness creeping into his tone. "As someone who came from a high fantasy world, who has hit a bat with half of what I suspect is a legendary sword, I am the wrong person to tell you how seriously to take that.

"Oh! That reminds me -- I was going to show you that ring from the poem."

"I've seen the pieces. It's not a sword you could use as the wing of a plane, so I say the Apostle's is more ridiculous than anything Aragorn had. Though the crystal ball comes close."

Julien lifts his head. Despite his body resting half on the couch cushions his neck is so long that keeping it conversationally curved puts his beak near Aaron's eye level, and he turns his head so there's less risky proximity there. He hasn't made the effort to shuffle back and get some space in, and the deep feathers of his neck brush Aaron's arm. "Yeah, let me see it! I'm curious. You still need to tell me how the thing ends. I'm guessing tragedy."

"It's bittersweet," Aaron replies, reaching into a shirt pocket and pulling the ring in question out. He holds it at eye level, between a thumb and forefinger. It's a decently-sized thing -- the band, Julien might notice if he's particularly observant, is a little too big for any of Aaron Strider's fingers.

"Are you sure you want me to spoil it? There are still a couple of cantos I could inflict on you."

"Are you carrying that over your heart? Nerd. Lemme see." Julien extends his neck to inspect the ring up close. He tries to brush his operculum across it to feel the texture, and if Aaron allows that he will try to take it delicately with the tip of his beak, just for a moment, to try and feel the weight. No, there won't be any saliva on it. "Huh. Made for big hands."

Then he bunts Aaron's hand with his forehead - head-patting isn't objectionable when he's the one moving - and starts looking for another comfortable way to rest his neck. "Might as well take the long route. If you ever recited much for me it was before I knew enough Elvish to understand."

It's the pocket that makes him least nervous to carry it in, he does not protest. This is something Aaron absolutely does not want to lose. But he'll let Julien take it, feel it out, and then accept it back.

"Are you serious?" he asks, looking over at Julien. "You want to hear it? This is your chance to say, 'No, Aaron, I don't want you to recite an hour's worth of poetry your past life was nerd enough to memorize. And translate. And memorize again.'"

It's still hilariously nerdy. Did his tail just quiver?

Loftily he says, "Yes, Aaron, actually I do. I am a modern poet. Part of my degree involved making a thirty-page cut-up poem - rearranged words and phrases - out of the tax laws of Arizona. Nothing you can say can surpass that. I know man's depths of pretension and how to plumb them."

More normally, he adds "Besides, you want to dork out at someone. I see it in your beady little eyes."

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