I was disturbed one day soon after from my studies by Amelia almost slamming the front door and then yelling for me loudly enough I was pretty sure the entire apartment building could hear her. Somewhat alarmed, I slipped from my trunk room and hopped up onto the back of the couch.
Amelia spotted me and practically darted to me, snatching me up in the same moment, the huge smile on her face allaying my fears but also making me curious. Then she swung me around in a circle, which was less fun, but she was excited enough I didn’t think I minded.
“Zar proposed!” She announced. “And I said yes, of course.” She showed me her left hand, wiggling her fingers at me to show off a ring she was now wearing. “We’re going to move in with each other and get a place with plenty of room for you, too! I wish we could properly adopt you now,” she stopped spinning and rubbed the top of my head gently, before her excitement overtook her and she gave the top of my head a hard smooch instead, “but I guess that’ll have to wait until you’re 18. But you’re going to come to our wedding anyway! We won’t stand for a no. We’re going to tell Zar’s parents that you’re basically like our kid but that things are complicated so you’re staying in cat form, and she thinks they’ll be fine with it and not ask questions because they’re nice that way. My family will be there, too, but they’ll just think you’re a cat, unfortunately.” She sighed and made a face. “Don’t worry, we can eventually introduce you to my parents and siblings as your grandparents, aunt, and uncles, but it’ll just take a while.”
She began talking about what she wanted for the wedding other than us to appear, but I was kind of stuck on the part about them adopting me. Zahara had said they could be my parents if I wanted them to, but I didn’t think she meant that legally. Did that mean they really would officially become my moms once it was safe for me to turn human again? I…I would really like that. I watched Amelia as she practically danced around the room talking a mile a minute. Amelia reminded me of my own mom sometimes, and I liked it when she hugged me and was so careful to try to make food I liked. She already kind of acted like a mom to me. Zahara, too, really, taking care of the practical side but also giving me the security I really needed when I was so scared about my place in the world.
My moms. I found I really liked the idea, and while listening to Amelia chatter on, I settled onto the back of the couch happily, unable to hold back a purr. We might not be official family yet, but someday we would be. Someday, when I could officially put my past with my aunt behind me, then I could have a real family again. Well, no, I had a real family now, but it just wasn’t official.
A thought occurred to me while I sat there. Maybe…maybe I should introduce my new family to my first family? I hadn’t planned to shift back until I was 18, but maybe I could make one exception. Just one, and just for a short period of time, but Amelia and Zahara had proved they weren’t like all the other adults I’d had in my life since moving in with my aunt. They’d proved that I was safe here and didn’t have to worry.
So maybe it was time to properly meet them.
~~~~~
I waited nervously for Amelia and Zahara to come home, trying not to chicken out and shift back. I was fidgeting, watching the clock as time got later and later, knowing that they’d said they’d get back from their date “pretty late” but not sure when exactly that was. I’d spent several days still working up the courage to shift and tonight I’d finally decided to go for it, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a part of me still scared. I hadn’t been in human form in over a year and it was kind of weird, but I was still determined to stick this out. I probably wouldn’t shift back again until I was 18, but I wanted to have one talk with them first, one talk in human form just so I could explain everything easier.
And because I wanted to show them I trusted them. I might still be scared, but I did trust them, and the best way to prove that to them was by showing them.
I heard the key turn in the lock and for a moment I felt panicked and almost shifted back, but then I swallowed hard, reminded myself that it was just Amelia and Zahara, and that everything would be fine.
Amelia pushed the door open, looking back over her shoulder at Zahara. “I didn’t realize getting a house could be so complicated! We even have to look at school districts in case we decide to give Ari siblings one day?” She groaned as she flipped on the light and dropped her purse on the counter by the door. “Can’t you just take care of all of it? I’m sure I’d like whatever you pick out.”
Zahara rolled her eyes and she shut the door behind them, looking amused, but then she caught sight of me, sitting in the corner where I couldn’t be seen from the doorway by accident, and froze, her eyes widening slightly.
Amelia turned to see what surprised her, and stared at me for a moment, too, while I tried to work the courage up to say something.
Then Amelia flung herself across the room and hugged me tightly before I could finish finding words again. “Ari! You’re human! You’re smaller than I thought, I forgot to ask how old you are? Fourteen, right? I think that’s what some article said. Nevermind, is everything okay?” She pulled back to look at me anxiously, gently brushing my hair out of my face as she did. “I didn’t think you were going to turn human again until you were older!”
Her gentle but immediate love helped me finally find my voice, and I swallowed before nodding.
“I don’t want to again,” I admitted with a somewhat rusty voice, “until I’m 18, but I did want to talk to you once before then just – just because I wanted to talk.” I looked at her and then Zahara a little anxiously, worried they wouldn’t like the idea of me not shifting again now that I’d done it once, but neither of them seemed surprised or bothered by my announcement.
Zahara, who’d also come over to us, wrapped her arms around me, too. “You can tell us anything, Ari.” She softly kissed my hair. “But only if you want to.”
I felt the tears I hadn’t been able to cry come to my eyes now, but they were happy tears. They were just so nice to me.
Which made me all the more sure that I was right about doing this.
“I want to introduce you to someone,” I announced, a little more confidently. They both looked a little confused and looked around expectantly, before noticing that I was pulling out a folded piece of paper from my pocket.
I unfolded my precious photograph and carefully handed it over. “These are my parents, Theseus and Lyssa. They were really awesome and I loved them a lot and I miss them.” I quickly wiped at the tears on my face. “They were killed by this radical group of supernaturals that didn’t like the idea of cross-species marriages. Dad was a shifter, like me, but Mom was a sphinx. They were planning to kill me, too, but my parents tried to protect me, and Mom sort of distracted them, and they thought I was dead so they just – just finished killing them instead.” I’d been in a lot of pain, and terrified, but living through my parents’ deaths had been a nightmare I could never forget. “They destroyed almost anything in the house that represented us, too. All the pictures and stuff they could find. This was the only one that survived, and it’s the only thing I have left of them. My aunt – she’s human, she didn’t know about Dad, or me, or any of that, and she didn’t have any pictures of Dad from when they were young, so when I went to live with her, that…that was all I had left of them.”
I took a trembling breath, both from the fresh reminder of losing my parents and from what I wanted to talk about next.
“At first I thought my aunt was nice. I didn’t know her but I knew she and Dad hadn’t gotten along, but she seemed helpful and all – not exactly thrilled about having to take care of me, but not mean about it, either. I mean, I was kind of worried about how I was going to hide being a supernatural from her, but I figured if Dad had managed it growing up, I could, too.” My brows furrowed. “Then…that first article. The local one praising her for being some kind of saint for taking in a nine-year-old with an injury like mine. Something changed with her, and she seemed to just relish the attention. Suddenly it was all about the attention and I thought it was weird and sometimes really annoying, but I didn’t realize anything was off at first. She moved us to a bigger city and in retrospect, I think it was because she could get more attention that way, more than she could ever get from a small town. She was thrilled the first time she got the attention of a national TV station.” I had not been. I didn’t think me being sick should be a source of entertainment for other people. “But even with all of that, she still seemed like she cared – she’d make sure to help me and watch out for me, so I thought the whole attention thing was annoying, but at least she was nice enough. Even when she told me that I’d developed some kind of complication, I believed her at first because she was an adult and a nurse and I was just a kid. I did think it was weird because I’d been feeling a lot better and thought my spine was mostly healed, and as a shifter we usually heal faster, so complications like she said were unusual, but not impossible, so…I believed her.
“But then it just kept adding on more and more and at some point I realized she actually didn’t want me to get better because it was a bad thing for her. She wanted me to stay sick. I started to get suspicious of all these things she was saying just appearing when I knew I’d been healthy before, and, well, I was a shifter. It’s not like we can’t get a bunch of illnesses, but it’s not necessarily common, either. Something about it just sounded all wrong. But I never had a chance to ask another doctor without her present, so I did a test instead. I, um, well, see, Dad used to like magic tricks. Sleight of hand, that kind of thing. He taught me a lot of stuff, so I knew how to make it look like I’d taken the pills she was giving me without actually taking them. And sure enough, when I stopped taking the meds she gave me, I felt better. The nausea, the vertigo, the anemia – all the stuff just disappeared as soon as I stopped. I couldn’t keep doing that forever because she’d notice, but once I realized the connection, I started reading the labels on all the medications and learning that all my supposed symptoms that supported her claims of illnesses were actually just side effects from these meds. And I knew I could walk, too, even though she would tell me every time she caught me doing it that it wasn’t safe and I could paralyze myself if I moved my back wrong. I knew that part wasn’t true, because my back was healed and the doctors before I’d moved in with her had told me that wasn’t even a risk. So I just knew stuff was wrong, but I didn’t know why.”
I hugged myself, trying to breathe steadily, and Zahara reached out to squeeze my shoulder reassuringly.
After another breath, I continued. “I talked to her about it first. I told her I thought the meds were making me have side effects and I wasn’t really sick. She got super mad at me and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, I should leave that kind of stuff to professionals, and all of that. Then she started taking the labels off the bottles so I couldn’t even tell what they were any more and find out what the side effects were. I was really confused about her response because I had thought she genuinely cared, but she was ignoring the truth and just insisting that I was sickly – and I knew it wasn’t true. And it just kept getting worse as time went on. I even tried to tell other adults. I tried talking to school officials, but my aunt got hired as the school nurse at any school I attended – supposedly to help keep watch on her wheelchair-bound, sickly nephew – so of course the school officials saw her as a saint and didn’t believe a word I said. Then I tried talking to neighbors, but they did the same thing, just dismissed what I said, telling me I was probably too young to understand what some of these illnesses really meant. I tried talking to doctors if I could manage to catch them without my aunt, but they always repeated what I said to my aunt and she found some way to explain it away as me just being nervous or scared of new doctors. As a last resort, I even tried calling the police, but they just listened to my aunt, believed her story, and left me with her. And every time I said something, she got mad about it, and by the time the police did nothing, I didn’t know what to do. No one would listen to me.”
The frustration of every single adult in my life failing me still made me feel lost and angry at the same time. I was just a kid and I needed help. Yet none of them would listen because my aunt looked like the perfect caregiver. It didn’t matter if I said nothing was actually wrong with me and I didn’t need the wheelchair. They always believed her.
“Then this one time I coughed up blood and I started to get scared. I knew from researching the meds she was giving me on the internet that some of them could have serious side effects, especially when taken long-term, and then on top of that I had no idea how they’d interact with each other. Seeing the blood really scared me that something might actually be wrong now, but only because of what she was doing. I managed to hide it from her and didn’t tell her because I didn’t need more fuel for her imagined illnesses that would inevitably mean more medications for me. So instead…I decided to run away. I didn’t know what else to do, but no one would listen to me and I didn’t dare stay any longer. I secretly stopped taking all the medications but tried to keep up the pretend symptoms so she wouldn’t notice until I was able to run away. I knew I could survive as a cat, though it probably wasn’t ideal, so I just figured out when the security system in the building would be down and when I could make my escape. Then I ran and got as far away as I could, in cat form, and you kind of know the rest from there.” I looked at them a little anxiously.
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