Secrets Kept

Elisa was dating someone? Wasn't that just... another wrench in the works?

She was basically living an entirely new life. Jude had the rampant urge to just text Chloe then and there, to just ask what do I do, because... well.

Even if Elisa's line of reasoning made perfect sense to her emotionally, answering desires she'd had for a long time, Jude was... well, not unmoved. He was uncomfortable with the crying and trying not to think about how it would look to anyone else, but he wasn't close enough with Elisa to really reach out and comfort her.

"Your power is... totally normal here. But your power isn't something other people are ever going to really notice. And becoming someone else... isn't going to solve anything in the long term. It's living a lie. You aren't making friends because you're a girl, you're making friends because you're putting yourself out there."

Okay, maybe he was spit balling. He didn't really know. But the logic was there, wasn't it? And at least Jude was being a bit less cold about the whole thing.

"What's going to happen when your boyfriend finds out?"

Jude was, like it or not, stressed. He could handle danger. He could handle a gun in his face, a life or death situation pressing down on him. He couldn't handle this kind of social nightmare, where he was dealing with someone upset and crying. This wasn't his territory. This was Travis's. Why wasn't there some kind of social swapout button where he could just say 'hey, it's not you, it's me, here's my friend instead'?

So he did what he often did in social situations like this: He broke it down.

"I understand the desire toe start fresh, because you feel like you've wasted your chance. I get that," he said, because he very much did. Only his change hadn't been a conscious one. His change had been forced on him, and he'd never gotten it back. "But lying to people isn't going to help things on the long run. People who like you in the short term will feel betrayed by the fact that you lied to them. Most friendships you made will crack once you stop lying."

Jude kept his mental distance, counting down through things.

"So now you have to decide what you're going to do. Are you going to tell the council? Are you going to keep being Elisa? The big one is ignoring all the stuff about how people react to you, do you actually identify as female? Because if you're female, that's one thing, but if you're actually a gay man, Lucan might not be alright with that."

Okay. He could do this. He was horribly, horribly out of his depth, but he could do it. He just had to break things down, piece by piece, until he stopped feeling so horribly awkward.

"You need to talk to someone... professional. Or at least someone with more experience then me. You need to sort out who you want to be, because otherwise this entire thing is going to blow up in your face. You're keeping a huge, huge secret from people, and a lot of people aren't going to just be cool with it when they find out. They're going to say why would you lie to me?, and then you'll be in an even worse position then you were at the start of all this."

Kind of like Jude was right then. He was asking why, and getting a whole lot of 'I don't know'.

"I won't tell Lucan, but you need to. And you really do need to talk to someone who knows how to handle this sort of stuff."

Could Jude had handled it better? Probably. And even in that moment, looking at Elisa's red eyes, he realized as much. Even so, he couldn't feel a hint of... something. Anger? Frustration? That she'd handled things in such a way that he'd ended up in this position, wondering if she was plotting murder or something else equally awful.

"Goodnight," Jude replied, more out of instinct than any actual thought, and then reached up to rub at his eyes. He wasn't cut out for this. And now he was going to end up on council with her.

Fantastic. He was going to have to talk to someone, wasn't he?