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Interlude with a Bear
by Cat
NL belongs to Anne. A reminder to readers -- J.J. is Smudge's older sister, who lives in Chicago with her boyfriend and his family.
Interlude with a Bear
“Russell! Give me the remote!” J.J. Black laughed as she chased her boyfriend around the Harris’ living room. “Russell Brian Harris, if don't give me that remote you're going to regret it, I swear!”
Laughing, Russell jumped over one of the dogs, and waved the remote at her. “No! I will prevail! The remote is mine!”
“Dammit Russell, my show is on in ten minutes!”
“There's plenty of time! Shit.” A yelp sounded, and he swore as he tripped backwards over another dog.
“Hah! Revenge is mine!” crowed J.J., grabbing the remote. “Good dog, Prince,” she cooed to the dog before plopping down on the couch and flipping through the channels.
“Ow.” Russell observed from the floor. “Thanks a lot, Prince,” he muttered.
Tail wagging hesitantly, the dog crawled out from underneath the coffee table where he had hidden, and crossed the room to lay down next to Russell.
Russell sighed and glanced at J.J. “You may have the remote, but I have the dog,” he said smugly, before sticking his tongue out at her.
“The dog may be lying next to you, but that doesn't mean he's yours,” J.J. said without taking her eyes from the television. “Seems to me that it's my orders he follows.” She finally glanced over at him, grinning, and then stuck her tongue out at him.
Russell snorted.
“Children?” a voice asked dryly from the kitchen.
Russell and J.J. looked up to see Russell's mother, Rebecca, standing in the archway separating the living room from the kitchen. Standing behind her, giggling, was Russell's little sister, Samantha.
“I don't need to separate you two, do I?” she asked.
“Yeah, don't make us come in there,” Sam mock-gruffly added, eyes dancing.
“Of course not,” J.J. said, smiling. She thought with a pang of her own little sisters, Katie and Amy, back in Iowa. I wonder how they're doing… “We're absolutely perfect in here,” she added brightly.
“Yeah. Perfect.” Russell added from the floor.
Giggling, Samantha crossed the room and threw herself on the couch next to J.J.
“How do you voluntarily stand this guy?” she joked. “He's such a klutz!”
“I know,” said J.J., grinning. “He just tripped over Prince.”
At his name, the dog stood up and crossed over to the couch, tail wagging.
“Oh sure,” Russell joked. “First my remote, then my dog. What next?”
“Hard to say,” J.J. said, grinning. “You have so much stuff.” She started to add onto that comment, then jumped as her link started buzzing.
“Yes!” Russell yelled. “Give me the remote, will you? Since you're on the phone, I mean,” he added, grinning.
J.J. made a face at him, and handed the remote to Samantha as she pulled her link out.
“Crap, it's Mom,” she muttered. “What could she want?”
“To say ‘Hello’ maybe?” Rebecca mildly questioned from the kitchen.
J.J. shrugged. Rebecca didn't understand the tension between herself and her parents.
The link rang again, and J.J. swore, then raised it to her ear.
“What?” she snapped. Behind her, Rebecca sighed.
“Sammy, why don't you help me with dinner?” she called softly.
Samantha looked up at her mother, then back at J.J., curiosity evident on her face. “But…”
“Now.”
J.J. turned her attention back to the phone as Samantha slouched off into the kitchen. “What? Oh. Sorry about that,” she said grudgingly. “What's up?”
A long pause. Russell looked up from the floor, and Rebecca and Sam peered through the archway into the room.
Unnoticed on the floor beside the couch, Prince sharply looked up at J.J. and began whimpering.
“J.J.?” Russell asked, cautiously.
She didn't answer, and her face paled as she listened to the link.
“J.J.?” Russell asked, worried. “J.J., are you okay?”
On the floor, Prince began to drag himself away from J.J., keeping his belly as close to the floor as possible.
J.J. dropped the link to the couch, and looked over at Russell.
“My little sister is dead,” she said hollowly..
Russell bounced up, shocked.
“Hell! What happened?” he asked, shocked.
“She drowned…”
J.J. looked down at her hands before rubbing them lightly up and down her arms. “My sister is dead.” Her voice lowered into a growl, and she absently scratched at her arms which were beginning to horribly itch.
Russell and his family looked on puzzled, as J.J. began stood up and began to pace, absentmindedly scratching the whole time.
I'm a terrible person. I just found out that my baby sister is dead, and all I feel is this horrible itching.
Frustrated, J.J. pulled up her sleeve. Then she froze as she watched long, brown hairs grow on her arm.
“Russell…”
He jumped up and started to walk to her, but stopped as she held up a hand.
“Wait,” she started to say, but stopped as an unfamiliar low voice escaped her lips. “I think you and Rebecca and Sam had better leave,” she said, with a small hitch in her voice. “I think I'm growing fur.”
Russell drew in a quick intake of breath, and then quickly backed out of the room, grabbing his mother and sister on the way out.
J.J. stared at her hands in shock as her nails began growing longer, and the brown fur crept down her arms. There was a pain in her back, and she lost her balance as her body began realigning itself. A loud tearing noise sounded in the room, and J.J. lifted her head to see her clothes ripping apart at the seams.
She felt tears finally coming to her eyes.
My sister is dead, and my life is over…
Then darkness.
J.J. slowly woke, stretching out to relieve the kinks in her back and shoulders. She started to sit up, then blushed and made a grab for her falling blanket as she realized she was naked.
She blushed more when she realized that she was lying in the middle of the Harris’ living room. Wrapping the blanket around her like a toga, she got up and made her way into the kitchen.
“Hello?” she asked, peering through the door.
Russell looked up in surprise as J.J. spoke.
“J.J.!” He dropped the newspaper on the table and ran over to her. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I think so…” J.J. frowned at him. “Why?”
He hesitated. “Do you remember what happened last night?”
J.J. paused, trying to remember. “I was watching TV,” she slowly spoke.
“And your mother called,” Russell prompted. “She had some news for you.”
J.J. took a quick breath as she remembered.
“Katie is dead. How could I have forgotten?” She spoke quietly, almost to herself.
“There was more though. You're a theri, J.J. After hearing the news, you turned into a bear.”
“No, I can't have!” J.J. protested.
“You did.”
J.J. tried to suck in air enough to breathe. No… “Did you call the DTC?”
Russell snorted. “No way. Let those idiots get their bigoted hands on my girlfriend? Those bastards still think that theris have no souls. We know better than that.”
J.J. tried to smile. “But I could hurt someone. God, you said I turned into a bear!” She made her way across the room to sit at the table. “I wasn't a big bear, was I?” she asked suddenly.
“You are the biggest bear that I have ever seen.” Russell started to grin. “I have no idea what kind of bear you are. We could check the library though, or the Nets.”
She frowned at him. “You're not taking this seriously, Russell.”
“Yes, I am,” he said seriously. “J.J., TAPT has been saying all along that theris weren't just animals. That they could control the transformations.” He paused, then gave a small, self-conscious grin. “I believe in you. You've always had such great self-control anyway. You can control this.”
J.J. looked down at the table. “What if I had hurt Rebecca or Sam? I mean…” She paused, then added, “What did I do last night? I must have torn up the room some. Wasn't the coffee table gone this morning?”
“We saw that,” piped up a voice behind her.
Sam brightly smiled as J.J. looked towards her.
“It was crazy,” she added, crossing the room and plopping down in the chair next to J.J. “You were this hulking bear! You just kind of laid down where you were—which was half on the coffee table—then started, like, keening or something. Then, this is the really weird part,” she leaned closer as she spoke. “Prince comes out from behind the couch and lies down next to you. I was really, really, really scared you might eat him. But you didn't! You just kind of curled around him and went to sleep.”
“After a while you changed back,” Russell added. “And Mom went in and put a blanket over you.”
“You're kidding! Rebecca wasn't scared or anything?”
Russell shrugged. “Probably. You'd have to be nuts not to be.” He sat down on the other side of her. “We all sat down and decided to help you control your transformations though. There's got to be a way to do it. Mom's scouring the Nets and the library for stuff about psychology and self-control,” he added.
“Yeah, and ‘how to control your inner beast’,” Sam added pompously.
J.J. snorted at the comment. “Guys, this is dangerous though. It's not like I'm a fluffy white bunny rabbit or something.”
“We'd just stock up on holy hand grenades, J.J.” Russell interrupted. “We'll move your bedroom to the basement for a few months, until your transformation is controlled. It's not finished yet, and Dad says it's unlikely that you could break anything there.”
“Or bring the house down,” Sam added helpfully, ignoring the dirty look that Russell sent her.
“We can deal with this.”
J.J. sighed. “What about my job?”
Russell hesitated. “I haven't thought about that one…” he admitted. “But we can work it out. I'd support you, if nothing else.”
Sam nodded. “You're, like, one of us now.”
J.J. slowly nodded. “It worries me that we don't know how or when I'll transform from theri to human, and back again.”
“We'll figure it out.”
“And if I get dangerous, or hurt someone? You'll call the DTC.”
“Agreed.”
J.J. worried a lot that week. She started to go bear three separate times, and was able to hold back the animal twice. Sam had suggested that they let the dogs, Prince and Yippy, stay downstairs when J.J. went bear. Rebecca worried that Yippy, the poodle, might get hurt and only let Prince into the basement.
That helped a lot, or so Russell said. J.J. didn't really remember.
On Monday, J.J. had gone downstairs, seen a picture of herself and her sisters and starting sobbing. Russell attempted to comfort her, but then the bear took over. He had left the room—And hadn't that been a funny sight?—jumping over Prince and the back of the couch on the way out. Russell told her later that the bear had slammed one huge paw into “yet another” coffee table—“what do you have against coffee tables anyway?” he asked later, teasing—before the bear had lain down in one corner of the basement. Prince had lain next to her, and the bear had spent the night moaning in that corner.
On Tuesday, she started to cry over her pancakes. She had seen long brown hairs growing on her arms, had grabbed the table, and held on tight. She had dimly heard Sam call out, asking her if she was alright. Then the hairs were receding and it was over.
She was okay for a couple of days and then, on Friday, the change tried to take her again, and she had held it off again. J.J. began to hope that they would be able to figure out how to control the change. Russell and Rebecca had found several articles on the net about self-control that might be useful. Even Sam was doing her part to try and help J.J., by going through her father's old comic book collection to see how superheroes had controlled their superpowers.
“Well… You never know!” she had defended her efforts. “Turning into an animal sounds an awful lot like Wolverine or… or… I don't know. What's-her-face that turned into a dog!”
Then, on the next Monday, J.J.’s link buzzed with another call from Iowa and she went down into the basement to take the call—just in case.
Amy's voice came across the link, sounding very scared, very distressed. “J.J.?” she asked. “Mom and Dad keep telling me that Katie's dead…”
“It's not true though. It can't be.” Amy's voice came through the link faster, words tripping over each other in her haste to get them out. “J.J., she can't have drowned. She doesn't like swimming, knows that she can't swim—she doesn't go swimming! Plus, some of her things are missing from our room. Clothes, pictures, books…”
“Do you think she ran away?” J.J. sharply asked.
“No. There's also…” She hesitated. “There's also…”
There was a long silence.
“What is it, Amy?” J.J. prompted.
“Katie's a theri.” Amy whispered over the line. “I think they came and took her away.”
J.J. felt her heart skip a beat. “What?”
“Please, please don't be mad,” Amy begged. “We were afraid to tell anyone.”
“Amy, it's okay. Calm down, and repeat all of this.”
“Katie's a theri. We found out a couple of months ago, and we were hiding it from Mom and Dad. We got her transformations under control easily enough,” Amy stated. J.J. felt a hint of jealousy over that comment. Easily enough?, she thought, annoyed.
“Some of her things are missing—the kind of things that she'd take to a desert island, you know?” Amy continued. “I'm afraid that the DTC came and took her away,” she added. “J.J., help, please. I don't know what to do, how to find out if that's what happened. Please help me,” she pleaded.
“Amy. Stop it. Of course I'm helping!” J.J. said, sharply. “You're both my baby sisters. I have no choice but to help.”
“Really?”
“If I say it, it must be so,” J.J. teased. “Although, there is something you could do for me…” she added.
“Just tell me what to do,” Amy declared.
“Teach me about control? Because I'm a theri too.”
What happens next will be shown in Amy's story, Enter the Jackal, once I finish the first chapter.