The Burdens We Carry [Romi]

Jude wasn't entirely clear why he was there, but the range of possibilities was very wide. The odds that she was coming to suss out how much of a bad influence he'd be on her 'little boy' seemed about equal with the odds that she was trying to plot his murder.

There were the markings, for one. The things that were absolutely undeniably seals, but apparently weren't, according to Ezra himself. It was suspicious. Really suspicious. And Asteria had been very insistent on meeting with him.

So Jude had gone full good boy. He'd been raised by someone who understood the importance of appearances and first impression. He'd been raised to be the perfect student, the well behaved boy that no one had a single bad word to say against.

And he had it turned up to eleven when he arrived at the house. Dressed neatly, his hair brushed, a friendly smile on his face. He'd considered (and decided against) gloves, counting on the fact that Manta Carlos meant the silver wasn't that unusual.

He'd wait for the door to be open before he greeted Asteria, bright and perfectly pleasant. They'd met before, but not formally. So when the door opened he gave her a wide smile, offering his hand for a well practiced handshake.

"Miss Vrall? Thanks for having me over. I'm sorry it took so long to get over here--I've had a busy week."

If Asteria was trying to help Jude settle in by playing on his nostalgia, she wasn't so much barking up the wrong tree as barking in the entirely wrong forest. Jude had never had anyone who was going to bake cookies for him, and he had almost never gone to friend's houses. He'd always kept friends at a safe, respectable distance, avoiding too much entanglement for risk of the potential fallout. He had too many secrets, too many things for people to trip over. The guns. The office. Anyone in his house had to be watched all the time back at home, so he'd never quite gotten to the point of getting invited over for milk and cookies with any of his school friends.

Maybe Travis or Janelle, but they'd never quite gotten to that point. They'd had other things in mind.

"Water's fine for me, thank you," Jude said. "I already had some coffee this morning." Coffee, he'd found, didn't do much for him now that he was never tired.

"I have some guesses," Jude answered to her not-quite-a-question, "but probably better if you ask instead, rather than having me fumbling around guessing."

Jude had most definitely had experience in dodging questions under a watchful eye. He'd learned it from his dad first, and then he'd had to use it on his dad, dodging questions about his heroic activities until the whole thing had blown up in his face. But even before that, he'd gotten very good at giving non-answers. People often asked things like Was your father home this weekend? and Jude, even from a young age, had learned to give absolute non-answers.

Her questions were to the point, which he liked, but also very broad, which he was a good deal less fond of. But it gave him more room to work, so there was that.

"Ezra's really nice," Jude said. "I can definitely get your concern that someone might take advantage of them, but I guess they seem... ah, wary? Like, they are cautious. They aren't completely oblivious."

Maybe it was just specific things they'd been taught, but they had enough self awareness to know that, for example, you couldn't just hug random people. They were learning, at least.

So was Asteria just a concerned parent, or was there another layer to it? Was there something he was missing?

"I think they'll do well once they've had more experience. They seem like a pretty quick learner in terms of picking things up."

Jude followed Asteria's gaze, wondering for a moment if Ezra was actually there, off somewhere else in the house. He'd assumed they'd actually be out of the house for the meeting, but there was not necessarily any need for that to be true. Or maybe they weren't there, and Asteria was just looking towards their bedroom, or...

Jude cut off the line of thinking where it was. There was nothing to be gained about wondering over something like that.

"I haven't heard about them getting into fights or anything. They use Salem to visit the community center, but I met them in the school once before. They're still a bit... uh, unusual, but the island's a pretty weird place, so it's not like they stand out particularly outside of the fact that they use Salem to communicate."

Jude took his glass of water, downing about half of it in one go. He was too easily distracted, and he didn't want to leave a full glass of water he'd asked for just sitting on the counter.

Was she reading into his actions? Probably. Jude had grown up around his father, and that meant a certain amount of over-analyzing the actions of others. Especially when it came to vaguely parental adults. It was a bit too easy to run in a mental loop, a constant line of are they just doing that because they think I've caught on?

Better to skip that entirely, act as if there were no layers at all, and keep that first layer in mind. Trying to figure it out was only going to be awful.

"It wasn't an issue," Jude said. "Ezra asked before they touched it. They're hardly the first person to ask, and I doubt they'll be the last. Most go for the hand first."

Despite her expectations, Jude was very open about the nature of Giltenn. Or at least mostly open. There was one very specific thing that Jude was a bit more wary about talking about, but it wasn't as if it was something that would make much sense to Asteria herself.

He held out his left hand, flipping it to be palm up. It wasn't quite a human hand--the tips of each finger ended in claws, and there was a segmenting that was very scale-like. Up to just short of his elbow, the metal was more accurately described as a gauntlet than an actual hand.

"You can touch it yourself if you want. The metal isn't earthly, and especially on my upper arm it feels kind of like... very stiff skin. It's probably more accurate to say that Giltenn is the metal, because the gauntlet is their manifestation on this plane of existence. I was in an... accident that nearly killed me. Giltenn spread the metal through my body to keep me from bleeding out. Several of my organs are at least augmented with metal."

Jude would have said an MRI was right out, but his metal bits were apparently very firmly non-magnetic. An X-ray though? That looked like an absolutely unreadable disaster.