After the tantrums

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Liverpool was an interesting city. I'd been there for two days, and already I had a broken arm from a fomori attack, and had had to spend two hours hiding underneath a rusted fridge in a junk yard while a frenzying vampire tore the place apart. The broken arm would take a while to fix, and so I had settled (slightly pathetically) into the form of a small and rat-like terrier, with one poor leg held up off the ground, and had been scavanging in the dustbins of Walton.

I didn't mind the broken arm. I was lucky to be alive, and it would be fixed soon enough. Sooner or later I'd find someone who needed something from me, and could heal. Failing that, time would heal me. It always did.

Leaving London had been an odd experience. On one hand, I did feel this strange and glorious rush of freedom. Once again, in Liverpool, I was unimportant. Not unimportant like a Garou kinfolk (who are powerless, rather than unimportant), but truly, wonderfully, happily, anonymously unimportant. No one knew who I was. No one gave a damn about me, about what I was, about what I meant. No one wanted to kidnap me, or yell at me, or threaten me. No one believed I owed them a damn thing, and that was amazing.

I slept rough, in piles of abandoned cardboard boxes, in this little ratty terrier form, and I felt free.

Yet, for all that, there was something nagging at my mind. Well, not even one thing. Lots of little things. I kept worrying about the magi. I worried that my plan for a Chantry (and it had been a good plan) would fall apart without me there to organize it. I kept worrying about my kids at Kew - especially the ones from the rough neighbourhoods, who had never been given a chance before, and who had been coming on so well. I worried about Zack and Petra, and the thing that had possessed them. The Ratkin would protect them against the Garou, but they wouldn't be able to stop the thing from possessing them again.

I worried less about Michael. I missed him sometimes, but I didn't worry about him. He would be fine. He was tough, and this way he wouldn't have half the Garou Nation hassling him. Sometimes I wondered if anyone would notice if I slid back to visit him, maybe with a different face, but I suspected that folk would be suspicious if a new Fianna kinfolk turned up and fell into the boy's bed.

Still, I worried. I hated worrying. It never does any good. I would have been better off putting it out of my head and moving on.

Still it niggled at me.

On the third day in Liverpool I took human form again, whimpering slightly at the rush of pain to my arm. Thankfully it was my left arm, so I left let it rest against my knee (and tried to ignore the burning pain) and scribbled down the list of possible Chantry places I had found.

I could put that in the post, right?

But that didn't feel right either. If I was going to leave London - leave all the mess and all the pain behind - then I needed to leave London entirely. Writing letters wouldn't help. It would just remind people that I existed and I was hoping they would forget. Either I needed to go back, which meant picking a fight, or I needed to stay away.

The thought of going back made me feel slightly nauseous again.

People shouting...people snarling...stupid Tegan...selfish Tegan...fists and claws...blood and bruises...people...werewolves...magi.

So I dropped the pen and the piece of paper, and simply sat there in the gutter, nursing my broken arm and staring into space.

No one looked at me.

I was just another homeless bum.

I stayed that way until dusk fell.