rodeo

ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58532443/chapters/188797251

There was a set of eyes watching you, wary and distinctly canine. 

No, they couldn’t be watching you. It was you. You had somehow shifted and were staring up at yourself from the ocean’s surface. You’d never seen the water so still. It may as well have been glass. There was no wind, no birds cawing, and yet the shore was still familiar, if eerily quiet. 

The yellow eyes blinked back at you, then the animal dipped its head, moving even as you held still. The animal dipped its head then split into three. The original with yellow eyes, another with muddled brown, and the third with mismatched eyes, one sky blue and the other the color of toffee. You stepped back, but your paws weren’t on the rocky sand you knew. You were standing on the water’s surface. You whined, startled. The two new creatures, proper wolves, you observed, rubbed up against the first, all the while staring deep into your eyes like they weren’t wild animals, but a person, like you. 

The three wolves multiplied again, and again and again until no matter where you spun, your paws splashing in the frigid water, a wolf was watching you carefully. You barked and snarled, but they stood, ever-staring. 

They weren’t aggressive, feral, like you were, but they must have seen something. 

Finally you came to a stand still, panting out whiny breaths. You felt pathetic, barking at nothing but shadowy figures below your paws. 

A wolf, with the same intense yellow eyes as the original rose above the surface, much larger than the first had been, and stared with its intelligent, all seeing eyes. 

It took a step forward and opened its huge, sharp maw. Your ears pinned back and you whined, backpedalling and feeling impossibly small. There was a pounding in the distance that must have been your heart beat. You half expected it to talk. 

“Delta!” 

Huh. You thought its voice would have been deeper. It opened its maw again. 

“Delta, up and at ‘em!”

A lady wolf was not a possibility you had considered, somehow. You needed to reexamine some personal biases.

“If you miss the bus, you’re walking!” 

Oh. That made more sense. 

The ocean and the sky and the wolves melted away as you pried your eyes open to look at the water-damaged, sagging ceiling. Your heart continued to pound away in your chest and you felt your bones creaking as the urge to shift flooded your chest and limbs, right down to your finger tips. 

Andrea pounded on the door again before marching off to deal with the rest of your ill-begotten siblings. Echo and Foxtrot must have already been up, if the sound of their cartoons coming from the living room was any indication. 

The anxious urge to shift passed. You took a deep breath and rolled off the mattress. 

—

The last few months of school had been some of the best of your life. You spent every lunch with Mr. Morgan, learning to control what little magic you could do. Both him, and the binder he’d gifted you explained that it would be hard for you to do any externalizing of magic, since you were a shifter. 

That was a new thing too. Mr. Morgan never called you a werewolf or a lycanthrope, a word you’d seen in your early research that consisted mainly of romance novellas. You were neither, you were a shifter. He’d explained that while wolves were the most common form of shifter, there were countless other kinds of shifters. 

You told him that you weren’t a wolf, but a coyote most likely. He’d laughed and asked how you knew. You explained that when you were shifted, you were rarely able to see yourself. The ocean was almost never calm enough, the shore never empty enough, for you to really investigate your reflection. But, when you could, your watery reflection was small, about the size of Mike’s hulking pit bull. Your fur was a sandy color. From what you could tell, wolves were huge and varying in color, but nothing like yours, as dirty and matted as it was. 

And you didn’t tell him, but you were sure he knew. You didn’t have a pack. 

Another thing Mr. Morgan had compiled for you was handwritten notes and advice from the alphas of both of the wolf packs in the area. 

Ben Allen was the alpha of the Allen pack with territory on the east side of the river running throughout the city. In his scratchy handwriting, he came across as an easy going man, freely offering you a meeting with him, on your time. At the bottom of his note was their den’s landline number, as well as his personal landline, should you not get a hold of anyone at the den. You had a hell of a time trying to picture what a den must be. You were imagining a cross between a cave and a corporate office. Wolves in ties were involved in the daydream. 

Much more serious in nature was Maryam Lopez. Her pack held their territory on the west side of the river. She spoke of Allen kindly, though with an air of superiority about her words. Instead of letting you know you had an open invitation to come meet with her, she informed you of which days of the week she was available for a meeting and didn’t leave a phone number, but an email through which you could contact her. 

Both of them intimidated you. You didn’t feel comfortable asking if you could use Andrea’s landline to make a private phone call and you didn’t know how to hell to send an email. You hadn’t used a computer before all of this started, you barely knew how to use google. You were too scared to ask Mr. Morgan for help. 

However, both of their advice struck chords with you. How to control the shift, even though it was still difficult in moments of high anger or stress. They gave instructions on how to phase (whatever that meant) your clothes into your shift so you weren’t tearing through fabric every time you shifted. Or so you weren’t stuck wearing your underwear as a wild animal. 

The way Mr. Morgan and Allen and Lopez spoke about shifting and magic as a whole threw you off. They spoke of it like it was commonplace, something just in the backgrounds of their lives. You couldn’t imagine it not being the most important parts of their lives. Mr. Morgan was an average public middle school math teacher. Allen’s pack ran a popular car mechanic shop in town. And Lopez was a lawyer. It was absurd to you that magic wasn’t the only thing they cared about. You’d be shouting it from the rooftops if you could. Mr. Morgan had warned firmly against doing that. 

He taught you what he could about the Department, or DUMP, but he was no legal counsel. Most of the jargon he used went straight over your head, but you got the jist of it. 

You + Telling non-magic people about magic = Magic juvie. 

You + Showing non-magic people magic = Magic juvie

Basically any scenario that involved non-magic people and magic resulted in magic juvie. You weren’t even sure that magic juvie was a thing but it made sense. There was definitely magic prison, why not magic juvie? If you asked Mr. Morgan that, he’d ask what you were thinking of doing that might have that end. 

It wasn’t like you had anyone to tell anyways. You didn’t have friends. You’d never trust Andrea or Mike with that sort of information and you weren’t sure any of your siblings would believe you. It wasn’t like any of you were that close to begin with. 

And at the end of the day, despite everything you’d been told, it felt good to keep a secret. Sure it was stressful at times, but you liked knowing things that only you knew. Besides, it was a cool secret. 

You loved magic.

—

School was almost out for the summer and for the first time, you were a little bummed about that fact. You’d no longer have your daily lunches with Mr. Morgan, you wouldn’t see him after school. You felt a little cheated that you only got to have him for the back half of the school year, but neither of you were to blame for that. 

Most of all, you were worried about the school year to come. You would be transferring into high school. You wouldn’t have Mr. Morgan at all. He insisted that you could still come after school, under the guise of extra math tutoring or helping him with something in his classroom, but the high school was on the other end of town, meaning that you would have to miss the bus home and walk back to middle school, then home again afterwards. You told him that wasn’t an option. Andrea wanted you home and accounted for as soon as the bus dropped you off at 3:15. You had to watch the littles while she ‘worked’. 

He said he’d see what he could do, but that was just adult for: “There’s not much I can do here”. You thought about reaching out to one or both of the packs finally (it was something Mr. Morgan asked you about at least once a week, claiming you needed community beyond himself) (You were fine.), but the thought of being turned away, or worse, accepted, terrified you more than you were willing to admit. 

It had been every man for himself since you could remember. You didn’t know what to do with community or friends or family. At the end of the day it was just you. And that was enough. 

You started dragging your feet, wanting to milk every last second with Mr. Morgan you had left. You’d sneak out of your class before lunch early, beg to stay even after the lunch bell rang. You even brought up the idea of purposefully failing your classes (though your grades were the best they’d ever been) just so you could be held back and get more time with him. He’d just given you a hard look at that suggestion. 

For once in your life, you were okay with admitting your fear. It was a terrifying prospect, your only form of support, the only one who understood you, being taken away. Change. High school was a scary transition for any teenager, but especially for you. There was almost no magic in your class. Magical signatures, you’d learned to call them, were few and far between among your peers. And there were certainly no shifters, so any magic you did find gave you a wide berth and wary eye contact. 

—

School had been largely uneventful that day. There was only about a week left, full of studying for finals or busywork in your elective courses. The sun was high and bright, the air was sticky and thick and you had cried through your entire lunch period. 

It was weird. You couldn’t remember the last time you’d cried from something other than anger. And this wasn’t anger, it was pure hopelessness. The closer you got to the end of the school year the more the pit in your stomach grew and grew. You still hadn’t been able to force yourself to contact either of the packs, even when Mr. Morgan had dialled the number for you and held out the phone for you to hold, fed up with the excuses you were giving him. You’d almost cried then too, but hadn’t been able to explain why. 

Mr. Morgan had sighed and patted your shoulder then explained why he found it so detrimental for you to integrate yourself into a pack. He couldn’t help you with your shifting or phasing or any internalization of magic. He couldn’t teach you proper pack hierarchies or positions beyond his base understanding. A hierarchy sounded like more rules. You didn’t want more rules. You didn’t want a bunch of strangers telling you what to do all the time. You didn’t want them to have silent expectations that you didn’t know how to meet. Mr. Morgan had told you that the instincts would come naturally, but you weren’t so sure. 

This time, the tears did come. And once they started flowing they didn’t stop. Mr. Morgan gathered you in his arms like you were something delicate and substantial. And for a minute, you supposed you were delicate. You were only a kid.

You couldn’t remember the last time you cried and you couldn’t remember the last time you’d been hugged. And you were only a kid.

Mr. Morgan didn’t hush you or try to get you to stop, he just hugged you through it all and gave you tissues once the tears faltered. He didn’t ask why and you figured he knew that it was all a bit too much for you. You were only a kid, after all. 

The magic, the shifting, the packs, and secrets. All on top of being a teenager on the brink of high school. Your chest was heavy with the weight of it all. You’d been snagging more and more cigarettes from Andrea’s purse, lighting them up when you wandered in the woods before shifting. They helped a bit, but not much. The kind of help you needed wouldn’t be found in a half-empty pack of Marlboros. 

—

The bus ride home was noisy, but your head was noisier, full of worries about the coming year and what you were going to do without Mr. Morgan. You were itching to shift, wanting to indulge in some, admittedly, wild things. You wanted to chew on a stick, dig a hole, chase rabbits through the brush. Your mouth always filled with drool when you did that and you were scared to see what would happen if you actually caught one of the fuzzy things. 

Mike’s dog barked when you got inside and you felt the animal in you bristle at the sound, the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end. You dropped your bag inside your room, careful to stuff your lighter and a couple cigarettes in your pocket. 

When you wandered back out, headed back for the door you heard a shuffle and a huff from the kitchen. 

“Delta, come see me.” 

That was never good. Andrea never addressed you directly unless you were in trouble. You started racking your brain for what you could’ve done, conveniently skipping over the contraband in your pocket. She never noticed when you borrowed a smoke, chalking it up to her own bad habits. 

Mike was sitting at the small round table in the kitchen, paperwork in one hand and a beer in the other. He didn’t even glance at you when you walked in. Andrea was bent over a different pile of paperwork at the counter, ashing her cigarette into the full sink. Your heart jumped into your throat. Nothing good happened when those two were together. Andrea sighed and sat up, taking a drag. 

“Just so you know, the judge approved it and we're moving to California next month.” 

Your heart dropped back down and began to pound. 

“What do you mean we’re moving?” Your voice was tight. 

“I swear I told you…Maybe it was Charlie. Eh, anyways,” She took another drag, the room slowly filling with smoke. “By moving I mean moving. I would start packing, there’s grocery bags in the cupboard for you to use, don’t even think about touching the garbage bags.” 

You took a deep breath, starting to shake. 

“But um, we-we can’t move.” You couldn’t move. Not to California. What about Mr. Morgan? What about your potential packs? You couldn’t be ripped from the only person who’d ever truly given a damn about you. 

This time Mike spoke. 

“Why’s it matter? S’not like you got friends or anything here.” He snorted at his own dig.

“What about school?” Andrea rolled her eyes. 

“What about school? They got schools in California, too. Better ones.” She shuffled the paperwork she was looking at around. 

“Well I just won’t go.” You were determined to stay. You were finally starting to make a life for yourself in spite of the system so intricately designed to make you fail. You squared your shoulders and stared Andrea in the eye. “I don’t want to.” 

“Well as far as me, the judge, and the state are concerned, what you want doesn’t matter.” She huffed a laugh through her nose. “We’re leaving at the end of next month.”

“I’m not. I’m staying. I don’t give a shit what ‘the state’ says! I’m not going.” You were breathing heavy and your bones were creaking again. Your teeth and fingernails and scalp ached. 

Mike’s chair scraped as he stood abruptly. 

“You do not speak to your mother that way, Delta.” You whirled around to face him instead.

“She’s not my mother! She’s not anything to me! Neither of you are! You couldn’t care less what happens to me, I’m just a damn paycheck to you!” 

Mike took a large step towards you, towering over you with clenched fists. You growled, grinding your teeth. 

“Go to your room, start packing, now.” 

“Shut up!” 

You couldn’t think of anything more clever and you were shifting. You ran out the front door, slamming it so hard the frame cracked. There goes the security deposit. 

You ran and ran and ran.