Sitting in the waiting room of the hospital with my mother silent beside me was… awkward. Especially because as my emotions simmered down, I was realising that I had basically exploded at my mum over stuff that wasn’t even relevant. Why did I do that? It was so stupid. She was just… No, wait, she was actually an idiot when she said all that true name stuff. Her lack of interest in our family’s legacy had really screwed her. If she’d known, she wouldn’t have said any of it. She just barfed up whatever half-remembered knowledge she had gotten from growing up around my granddad and grandma before one, then the other was… gone.
Still, having a full crashout about how my parents argued all the time while Saoirse was there needing things to be calm was… not very cool of me. I should’ve waited til a later time when we were all yelling at each other to bring it up.
Sudden screaming pierced my brain, and I looked up, fingers twisting into a stasis-field spell before I realised I wasn’t wearing my gauntlets. My magic activated anyway, but it fizzled out as the spell unravelled before it was fully born.
It was just as well, too. The screaming was from a person on a wheeled bed who a bunch of medical people were crowding around while they rushed the person further into the emergency room. I caught a glimpse of blood-soaked bandages and wild, pain-filled eyes, then they were gone.
Things were intense right now, in Concord. There were so many people coming into the ER with really bad injuries from the spirits falling out of the sky.
“Mum…” I said quietly. “I'm… I'm sorry I yelled.”
Mum sighed heavily and turned her gaze on me with a complex expression on her face. “Tia. You said some very hurtful things. That being said, you're a kid, and unlike when you were a boy, you seem to actually be going through puberty.”
Unable to meet her eyes, I dropped my attention to the floor.
She looked like she was making a huge effort to control the words that were coming out of her mouth. It was scary, to be honest. “You were also in pain, and scared for your new friend, and whatever else it is you're dealing with that you aren't telling me. So, I understand why you lashed out like that. However… you're not always going to be in the perfect emotional state to handle tense situations. Controlling the things you say and the actions you take while you are overwhelmed and in pain is hard, but we have to try. Do you understand?”
Everything that she was saying made sense. Except… she wasn't very good at taking her own advice.
“I… I do,” I said solemnly, deciding not to say the shit I was thinking.
Mum smiled, and her arm lifted to land protectively around my shoulder. “I expect you'll have a hard time putting anything I said into practice, but so long as it's in the back of your head, it's a start.”
I nodded, then we slipped into a much more comfortable silence that lasted through another hour of waiting. During that time, I made a very hearty stew out of my thoughts, until I had to say something.
“Mum, when you threatened Saoirse with true-name stuff… did you understand what you were doing?” I asked tentatively.
“True names are important to spirits, yes,” she nodded. “That's why I wanted her to promise on it.”
“Mum…” I winced, balling my hands up into the front of my T-shirt. “That was the equivalent of like… putting a gun in her face. It's a massive social faux pas for spirits. True names can be used to basically turn a spirit into a slave, if the wrong magic-user gets their hands on it. You can't do that again. If Saoirse was a more powerful spirit that didn't care about human life, she would've just killed you. Maybe me and dad, too. Our great, great uncle died when he tried to find out the name of a powerful spirit.”
Mum stared at me, confused, until she slowly began to comprehend everything I said. I watched it happen. Her eyes widened, her ears slowly folded back, and her tail swept around to cover her chest like it could protect her.
“You read the book,” she whispered, biting her lip in an I-will-chew-a-hole way.
I nodded a little, bringing my own tail around so I could hug it. The fur was so soft and comforting to shove my face into.
“I'm not happy about that… but thank you for the warning,” she said with a deep breath. Her hand landed on my back and started gently running up and down my spine.
Letting my tail drop so I could peek out through the less dense upper fur, I looked over at mum. “It's hard to read because English has changed over the centuries. I can only understand like… four, five generations back? Then the words start meaning slightly different stuff, or there's words I don't know.”
“That was my experience, too,” she said, then gave me a look. “Except I didn't get as far back as you seem to have.”
“Barely any spirits on Earth in the last couple hundred years,” I agreed.
I should've been panicked that mum knew I'd been reading the book, but I was just too tired. I felt like a sponge that'd been twisted too far while squeezing water out of it, and now it was taking a while to retake its proper shape.
Ah, I'd have to come up with a reason for why the gauntlets were missing. I'd need to find a way to hide them better, too.
I hope Saoirse was doing okay with Dad. Hopefully she wasn't driving him too crazy.
Mum stopped patting my back, but she kept her hand there while we kept waiting. At some point, a mother, father, and daughter trio came in and sat opposite us. The mother looked like she'd broken her arm, the way she was holding it.
The daughter was maybe five or six. She had big, curious eyes that were fixed to me and my mum, staring at our fox features. Her parents had noticed us too, of course, but knew not to stare the way kids do.
I flicked an ear at the kid. She watched it with somehow even wider eyes. I undulated my tail slightly, revealing my toothy grin for a second, and giggled when the girl gasped and tried to hide behind her dad.
“Stop scaring the poor thing,” mum berated me, but I knew her — I could hear the amusement in her voice.
The father placed a protective arm around his daughter and shot us a look.
It took nine hours to be seen by a tired, stressed radiologist who took approximately thirty minutes to declare that I had what he called a ‘minor greenstick fracture’ in my ‘femur’. A different doctor-looking person double checked the images. Then, he handed us to a nurse who got me into a big, bulky fibreglass cast. It wasn't one of the new, fancy ones with sensors or the big breathing holes, either. Just a big purple wrap of tough plastic-looking stuff.
This was going to suck. At least they weren't expecting a full recovery time. Spiritborn were apparently only taking half the time, on average, to heal from wounds. That still meant two months for the kind of break I had. How I'd actually fought a battle on that break was beyond me.
A horrible thought occurred to me as mum was wheeling me out of the hospital in a wheelchair. If the Hunter was smart, he'd look around for reports of fox-girls who had leg injuries. Was that kind of data available to him?
Okay… before I went out again, I needed to find a way to patch myself up, or to not get hurt in the first place. That second one would be ideal, period. The hits I took from that tendril monster had hurt. Like, I'd never felt such sharp, instant pain before in my life. The fact that my ribs hadn't broken was a miracle. I probably had thicc-ass bruises under my clothes. I forgot to check in my rush to get changed earlier, but it for sure felt like it.
I wasn't going to be running around as Gauntlette in the near future, unless I felt like being a total idiot. Hell, it might be a good idea to like… beg for fighting lessons somehow. Martial arts or whatever, so I could actually do better when I was out there.
That actually made me wonder, though. Did I want to be a — gag — superhero?
I seemed to be doing okay at it — sorta. Okay, so the two times I’d gone out, I died, then got my leg broken, but I saved some people! That had to count. I’d survived, too, despite, you know, dying. Had I mentioned that yet? The fact that I knew what happened after death, at least for Spiritborn, made it a lot less terrifying to risk my life.
That was all just flavour, though. If I was being truly real with myself, I liked… I liked combat. It was a fucking rush. I liked saving people too, and the fact I had a worthwhile reason to be there made it a lot better — took away some of the uncomfortable feeling I got. Then, of course, when people were actually in trouble… I mean, I’d feel like shit if I didn’t help.
I don’t think I’d actually directly helped anyone in a more… personal way? I’d mostly just put myself between some monsters and some people. I’d never just run in to save someone — get them out of a bad situation.
Okay, I could admit it… my thoughts were a jumbled mess. I didn’t know what I wanted. I should wait til my leg was okay, then see how i was doing. Plus, I had Saoirse to deal with while I healed. She was going to be a handful.
That proved to be very true when we got back, and dad was standing in the dining room with utter bewilderment while Saoirse absolutely shredded a chicken. There were bits of it everywhere.
“Yo, what the hell, Saoirse?” I laughed, causing both her and my dad to look over. “I know you’re a fox spirit, but that’s feral.”
“Huh?” she blinked, then looked down at the food, then back up at me.
I pointed to a piece of chicken that was at the other end of the table. “That. It’s a waste, first off. Plus, it’s gross. Throwing food everywhere is dirty. Did you even wash your hands before you started clawing at the poor bird?”
Behind me, mum was carrying the folded up wheelchair, and she dropped it with a surprised guffaw of laughter. “Tia… wow. Hearing that come from you? George, I think we did alright with our parenting job after all.”
“I do distinctly remember a Toddler-Tia doing something very similar to this with his— uh, her first roast dinner,” Dad said with a grin. I also noticed the little slip up with the pronouns. At least he wasn’t avoiding using any pronouns at all. Hearing someone do verbal gymnastics to dodge gendering someone was so cringe.
Of course, then mum had to go and lay the gender on way too thick. “Saoirse, Tia is right. If you’re going to be staying here, you’ll need to learn the basics of being a… well, a human. For starters, you need to eat in a way that is neat and tidy, not this… warzone. Oh, and in case it becomes a problem, you use the toilet to get rid of, um, bodily waste. Except for period products, you throw those away in the trash.”
All the air left my lungs. “Oh no.”
“What?” Mum asked, at the same time that dad’s eyes widened.
“How long as it been since I got turned into… into a girl?” I squeaked.
“One week, why— Oh,” Mum said, as she got it too. “I… why didn’t I realise that would be a thing to worry about?”
“Because a lot of shit has happened, mum,” I said, my voice rising into a squeak.
My dad, my mum, and I, we all just stared at one another, until mum said matter-of-factly, “Well, we’re going to be having a talk soon, then.”
I swallowed a sudden huge lump in my throat. Crap. Fuck. This was going to be… Oh man.
“Uh… sorry to sneak in here, but…” Saoirse said tentatively, a piece of chicken flopping from her cheek into her lap. “You got turned into a girl? You weren’t created that way?”
My head thumped into the doorframe. Great, I forgot to explain everything about that too. She probably wasn’t going to have too much to say, though. I imagine the kind of thing that happened to me isn’t as uncommon with spirits as it was with humans.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Saoirse continued thoughtfully. “Why would your body have been anything other than what you have now? Your spirit smells—”
I choked on the air. “Okay! That’s enough for now! I’ll explain it all later!”