Tattletale {Tag: Erik}

[Arielle Orion]

Arielle threw the small bright green Nerf football to Tyler as he ran around in circles. She had surprisingly lost two of them, finding out that her throws were slightly more enhanced now that she was a shapeshifter. She made it a point to keep several in the car, now.

"Mommy," Ty said thoughtfully, throwing the ball five feet to the right of her. She dove for it, catching it impressively, something she'd never been able to do before.

"Mommy, will I grow up to be a tiger like you?" he finished, trying to catch the ball as she threw it back.

"Sssh, Ty. We don't talk about that, okay?" she said. She sighed a little, and then flopped down in the grass as he came to rest next to her. She laughed a little and brushed off some grass from when he'd done aerobatics to try and catch the ball. This animal instinct thing had brought her closer to Tyler, but she didn't like the feel of it sometimes. It was too invasive, this.. disease.

"Why not?" he asked, audibly confused. "Doesn't everyone get to be a tiger when they grow up?"

Arielle pursed her lips. This was a hard subject to approach. "No, baby. I won't be a tiger forever. It's just sometimes. And I'm going to make it so I'm not anymore - so no more tiger talk, okay? It won't be long before I get it fixed."

Tyler sighed. "Okay, mommy. But I like you as a tiger, too."

Arielle frowned. "Enough, Ty. Come on, it's getting late. Let's go see if dinner's ready, okay?" she asked. She stood up and held her hand out. Nonchalantly, she glanced around to see if anyone had overheard Ty. She could always pass this off as an over-active imagination, but the concept of so many other people that could turn into.. well... animals - it was a little... overwhelming. She never knew who or where they'd be, and she wasn't too keen on being found.

[Erik Lucio]

Apparently, getting kidnapped and feline-ified earned you a little time off, since that was what Erik had gotten from Batten.  Personally, he'd have been fine with going right back into the thick of things, killing some vampires, and working through it.  That wasn't in the plans for the day, however, so he made new ones. 

He went to the park.

The park really wasn't one of his usual hang out spots, since it was calm, had no alcohol or lethal enemies, and was generally a peaceful thing, but he tried it out anyway.  Who knew, maybe he'd find his inner zen.

Or a really hot blond making a spectacular catch with a football.

Who needed zen when you had that?  Maybe time off wouldn't be so bad, after all.  He almost might have been discouraged by the 'Mommy' factor that followed it up, had he not been a fairly cool guy when it came to kids (and mature enough to see them as a potential good thing, instead of a turn off).  Of course, what the kid had to SAY got his attention even more.

Tiger, huh?  It wasn't like he'd made it a habit of eavesdropping on random people in the park, particularly since he wasn't to be found in the park often, but his hearing had improved pretty drastically since China.  He heard what 'Ty' said, and her response.  He knew better, naturally, than to believe that she'd be 'cured' anytime soon, but he was intrigued nonetheless.  When Arielle looked up to see if anyone had overheard her son, Erik wasn't far away, or subtle about the fact that he'd heard.  In fact, he was looking at her rather curiously as she approached him in her movements towards the park exit.

"You mean, not everyone gets to be a tiger?" he asked, raising an eyebrow and winking at Tyler.  Cute kid.

[Arielle Orion]

Arielle stared at the man speaking to her, and narrowed her eyes a little at him. She instinctively tugged Tyler closer to her, and the little boy only smiled broadly at the man speaking. "Well, I want to be a tiger when I grow up," he protested, despite having been previously warned.

"Sorry," Arielle said. "He's got a bit of an overactive imagination," she explained, though inwardly she knew she was facing someone who had the same disease as her. She couldn't explain how she knew, but the way he smelled.. it was almost like Jaime, except.. nicer. Not more pleasant in an aromatic sense, but more pleasant to her, specifically. She caught herself staring, and shook her head a little.

"Excuse us, we were on our way home for dinner," she said sharply. She started forward with Tyler again.

"Bye!" Tyler said, waving to the man.

[Erik Lucio]

Sadly enough, Erik had learned firsthand that Tyler's wishes for when he was grown were entirely possible.  Hopefully not probable, but possible.  It almost made Erik feel better about his own situation, though.  There was nothing like the adoration, even if it wasn't directed at him so much as at something he had, from a child to make you feel a little special, and not in the 'special ed' way.  That's the kind of thing he'd have said to Ken, but Ken wasn't around. 

The pretty blond tiger and her son were.

"Um, I'm sorry, I really don't mean to look creepy or anything," he backpedaled, twisting around to keep up with her and her son.  He didn't know why, but he didn't want her to just LEAVE.  That'd be really anti-climatic, and he hadn't yet met a tiger that he didn't intend to kill.  The fact that he'd met her AFTER his own infection was kind of....neat.  It didn't quite occur to him yet that it mattered, but she also smelled REALLY GOOD.  "You were saying something about getting your problem fixed?  How's that supposed to work?"

He was honestly curious, since the guilds had the best technology in that area that he knew of, and they only had a vaccine.  He didn't think there WAS a cure.

[Arielle Orion]

Arielle hadn't expected that question. She'd been met with skepticism and downright hatred the few times she'd brought it up before - as though a human was naturally just supposed to prefer being a shapeshifter. No, thanks, she thought to herself. I'll pass.

"They're still working on it," she said curtly. And they were, or so she thought. Being the apt pupil for V&S meant you got access to things that other people didn't - the problem was, Ms Scarapino and Mr Valefar weren't too keen on actually letting Arielle become rendered back into a human, not that she knew - Iloquil and Justinian would rather the lawyer at the top of their firm be as hard to kill as possible. It saved them trouble. She'd be getting the news in a few days, actually, that they'd concluded it was incurable.

She stopped walking only briefly, to pick Tyler up because he'd begun to bitch about walking so fast. "Why? You have the same problem?" Because it was only notable of the title 'problem', uncontrollably turning into a large feline.

[Erik Lucio]

Still working on it.  Hell, the guilds had been working on a way of dealing with infected hunters for as long as anyone remembered.  It could take AGES for someone to come up with a cure for it.  He hoped she didn't have her heart set on it, because as far as he knew, they were both stuck.  He wouldn't disillusion her, though.  It wasn't his job to do that to her, and he didn't want her to get mad and take off.  He was already having enough trouble keeping pace with her without actually chasing her.

"Actually, yeah, I do.  Tiger here, as well," he told her, taking note of just how negative she was on the subject.  'Problem.'  He couldn't say he WANTED to be a shifter, but he had to admit that a tiger wasn't so bad.  He'd have felt kind of dumb if he'd somehow gotten infected by a bird or something, but a tiger was pretty badass.  It'd be helpful in hunts, he was sure, down the line.  It was just....taking some getting used to, and he still wasn't thrilled about it.

"Hey, you guys are hungry?  If you want, I'll pick up the tab for dinner out, and we can talk awhile," he offered, hoping she'd accept.  Otherwise, she was going to be gone pretty fast with the way she was moving.  "Whaddaya say, Ty?  You hungry?"

Naturally, the kid would be, and he was hoping that if she saw that her kid was happy about it, she'd agree a little easier.  Most moms would, right?

[Arielle Orion]

Arielle caught a low growl in her throat. She didn't like strange men pandering to her son in order to sway her opinion, tiger or not. "Unfortunately, that isn't up to Tyler, and I'm pretty sure dinner is already ready for us at home." Nice going, Erik. It was obvious that Arielle was still very new, if nothing else by the way she acted over the entire ordeal. It boggled her mind how easily someone could just accept all of this for what it was. Arielle's job was not accepting things, and then convincing other people not to accept them either - no matter how true they were. And she was good at it.

Arielle was a very hard person to talk to, about a lot of things, but it was usually easier when she didn't have Tyler with her. Her phone rang just then, and she picked it up skillfully, still wrangling Ty. "Orion. What? Oh, that's horrible. Did you call someone to come fix it? Well, thanks for letting us know. No, no trouble. We'll just grab something on the way in." She closed her phone bitterly. "Tyler, the power's out at the house. We're going to have to go out to eat." She gritted her teeth, visibly, and looked at Erik.

"Why don't you run over to the car and grab your coat?" she asked. She set him down, since the car was easily within 20 feet, and let him go. To Erik, she simply said, "My son knows as little about this as possible. I want to keep it that way, do you understand me?" He was treading on maternal ground as far as she was concerned - Arielle was trying to protect Tyler, as best she thought she could, anyways.

[Erik Lucio]

Okay, so she obviously wasn't like 'most moms'.  She was actually pretty hostile, which was something he wasn't altogether expecting, though it wasn't too surprising.  She was obviously a shifter who'd been infected, not born that way, and she wasn't happy about it.  Well, he wasn't too thrilled, either, but at least he wasn't that mad over it.  Maybe talking to her was a bad idea.

"That's your choice as his mother," he offered with with a shrug, not about to take being scolded by some woman he'd just met to heart, especially when she was trying to keep the kid in the dark and apparently failing at it.  From what he'd heard, Tyler knew plenty about it, and was far more willing to deal with it than his mother was.  Good for him.

"He seems to know enough already.  How'd you end up as one?" he asked, going along with her desire to keep it down.  He didn't need to say any of those words she disliked, like 'shifter', if she didn't want him to.  Somehow, he had trouble figuring out what she could have possibly done to manage it.  Most hunters were infected during a fight, which explained the shifter's blood getting into their system.  All that bleeding tended to get messy.  Erik's situation had been a strange one, but he hadn't heard of anyone else dealing with the same kind of situation he had, and this woman didn't look like much of a fighter.  If she'd been attacked by a tiger, he would have expected her to end up mauled.  He was definitely curious.

[Arielle Orion]

She watched Ty carefully, unlocking the car only as he drew close enough to it to grab the door. She turned to Erik, though only with her body - her head was still mostly watching Tyler. She finally took her eyes off him for a moment, to look Erik directly in the eye, before speaking, gaze traveling back to her son.

"I was attacked by a man in the parking garage of my law firm," she said, voice very bland. "He bit me. I started getting sick not long after, and then, well. You can guess the rest. The problem is, it seems as though everyone around me is more than willing to accept an abnormal change such as this, wheras I was perfectly happy with my life before these complications."

Of course, Erik couldn't possibly know that Tyler was one of those complications. Nobody did, not really.

[Erik Lucio]

No, Erik had no clue that she thought that Tyler was a complication, but he understood her happiness before being a shifter.  He'd accepted his situation because he had to, not because he wanted to.  He just knew there was absolutely nothing he could do about it but deal.  So, as always, he dealt.

"I wouldn't exactly say 'willing' on that one.  I was locked up for days because I refused to shift, and I still wouldn't say I'm comfortable or happy with it.  It's just not going to go away, and I figure I'll get used to it eventually.  In my line of work, it might even be useful at some point," he told her with a shrug.  Healing was definitely useful, and how was he to know if being a tiger might be more useful than being a human on a job at some point?  Ken used HIS ability to shift pretty often.

Of course, a raven was good for reconnaissance. A tiger wasn't.

"Believe it or not, there ARE people who understand what you're going through, including how much you hate it, and they're not all Single Earth," he pointed out.  Hell, he was one of them. 

[Arielle Orion]

"Look. I think it's really nice that you're throwing ideas out at me, but really, the last thing I want to do is immerse myself around a bunch of other people who are like this, whether they're warm and fuzzy about the idea or not. I'm just getting on with my life, waiting for a fix to this one, small, insignificant detail, and putting more effort into worrying about my next case than about anything else." Arielle found solace in her work. Ripping the city's best prosecution attorneys to shreds was about as fun as sleeping to her these days, and sleep had become mighty fun. "No offense," she added, as an afterthought.

"Tyler, watch your... step," she began to shout. The effort had been useless, however. The child was as accident prone as any other his age, and had tripped and fallen flat on his face. She sighed angrily, and raised her eyebrows at Erik. "Excuse me, I need to collect my young," she said through clenched teeth. She stooped down next to him and brushed him off, making sure he wasn't mortally wounded.

"There's nothing to cry about, Ty. You got a mouthful of grass, it could have been worse. Next time no running, okay?" she said firmly. The little boy nodded, but still stuck closer to her than before.

[Erik Lucio]

So, she didn't want to have other people around her with that 'problem'?  He stopped where he was, a little surprised by that, actually.  As a hunter, he was used to having shifters around, and actually preferred them now.  Not that he didn't like being around normal humans, since he naturally did, but being around other shifters made him feel like less of a freak.  If he'd been one of very few shifters surrounded by normal humans all the time, he probably would have felt even more awkward than he already did. 

Ironically, she was causing that sort of reaction in him.  Even with a 'no offense' added in there, it was pretty obvious that she didn't appreciate having another shifter around, so what the hell was he doing there?  He'd thought he'd run into another tiger, which would have been cool for him to talk to her, but she was even less pleased with it than he was. 

The last thing he needed was to talk to someone who would point out all the bad things, when he was pretty desperately trying to keep his mind on the upside of things.  He was some strange cross between a realist and an optimist, but he wasn't impervious to pessimism.  Ken was going to give him hell if he started getting all funky over this.

"Hey, sorry I bothered you, then.  I had no idea you were holding your breath for a miracle," he told her, shaking his head.  "You know this is a genetic mutation, right?  You can't just change your genetics back, but good luck with that cure."

He knew better.  He wasn't a genetics professor or anything, but he understood it all on a basic level, and he knew what the shapeshifter infection did.  He didn't see a cure in the near future, at all.  "Here, you can call me if you end up disappointed and actually feel like talking to someone else who's like this," he offered, reaching into the inner pocket of his coat for one of the plain white cards with black print that Batten encouraged them to have.  All it had was a name and a phone number, his cell. 

[Arielle Orion]

Arielle just stared at the outstretched card. "First, you take offense exactly where I told you not to, than you insult me, now you want me to call you. Right. And you wonder why I don't want other shifters around. I don't know what planet of acceptance you all got dropped off from, but really, it's very alien to me, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm not just ready to jump right on to the fur train with the rest of the happy family."

What Arielle wanted to do was take a swat at him, but she was betting that was more because she hadn't seen the courtroom for a few days in order to unleash her anger, and she wanted to get physically violent with a bystander to sate it. Not that there was anything wrong with that - except that there was something very wrong with it. Still, it would have been gratifying to biff him in the face with one of those large-looking paws she'd seen a few days ago. Instead, she just turned and gathered up her son. Arielle was above a petty verbal squabble when it didn't aid her paycheck any, especially with someone who seemed so ready to condemn her for wanting her normal life back.

She was aware as she walked away that her senses were much more keen than they had been moments before. She was starting to make the connection between this thing and anger, and she didn't know how psychologically healthy that was. She was going to load up on some tranquilizers when she got home. She'd found she could take twice her normal dosage and instead of killing her, all they seemed to do was mellow her out well enough for her to function without wanting to kick the living crap out of everything around her. It made Ty's life easier, too, because he could be as loud as he wanted without driving her insane.