lukeoutbelow | (no subject)

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Julien had been feeling unwell for a couple of days. He'd spent all of yesterday in, doing nothing much but sleep and eat, feeling hungry almost constantly. Putting away the detritus left behind by that seemed unusually difficult. He had to leave some wrappers where they lay, and couldn't focus to cook, and that thing kept happening, where it was like he couldn't remember how to move his face, and somehow his resting expression was a Mona Lisa look.

He'd wanted to think he was just sick. It didn't happen much at all, his body wasn't used to it. But on some level, he knew. It was in the occasional paralysis of his face, and the thick warm feeling in his sternum, and the way both his hips clicked when he stood up.

So in a way it wasn't a surprise when he woke and that feeling was pressing out, hot and throbbing and painful, getting worse as he pressed his wing against his chest. It was a surprise when he tried to get up, and fell. He'd wanted, when he thought about this day coming, to do it alone, but he couldn't manage to heat water or pick athelas. It hurt. Eventually he couldn't take it. He had to call for help.

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It had been only a day or so since he'd gotten his echoes back -- for the second time in two weeks, it seemed. Aaron was still getting used to it -- to keeping an eye out for the little creatures that targeted the Numbered, to remembering to check the Network -- and so it was sheer luck that he found himself in a lull, and thought to look.

Where is he? was his first thought. Germany? His mind went through the time the message had been sent, what light had been coming into the room, and calculating time zones, and Germany seemed the most likely bet.

We're going to skip the travel montage: the asking for advice over the network on a phone, the palantir-search, the throwing of supplies into a bag, the use of the teleporter, the climb, the walk, the double-check in the palantir around a quiet corner and the grim tightening of his expression, the ride, the shouldering of the bag in front of the hotel. No, we're going to skip to the door opening, to him stepping inside, and to him searching the rooms for Julien. He had to still be here, he would not have left--

Edited (because fuck boring travel details, that's why -- I ain't here for german scenery) 2015-01-12 03:48 (UTC)

We will assume that Julien leaves his hotel door unlocked. This isn't a normal hotel anymore; the maids come through far more rarely, for one.

He has managed to get to the kitchenette portion of his suite, where he's rolled onto his side. Julien's legs want to be in the fetal position, but his back is straight. One wing lies open along the tiles, touching the far wall. The other is folded but sometimes beats, trembling, trying to cool the burning in his chest, which has... stretched out. A ridge has formed along his sternum and is pressing against his skin, visible through the primitive feathers scattered along his skin.

Around him are the shreds of his shirt and, in the tiles of the floor, the Network flowing and pulsing with life. Julien lies breathing heavily and with great damp heat, eyes closed, feet clenched.

Details. Who needs 'em? It's easier to say it was unlocked, or that he had managed to unlock it somehow, than to say that Aaron had talked to someone on staff to let him in, which he could have, or broken the door down, which he would have if the former hadn't worked. He is getting in that room.

And the first thing he does is cross to Julien with long strides (carefully avoiding any of the feathers from the outstretched wing) and drop into a crouch. He scuffs out the number on the floor -- he thinks that this is not something Julien would like broadcast. Aaron has already let the network know he's here -- there's no need for them to see any more.

Then, he drops the bag to the ground, and leans in close, to get a better look.

Good god. He knew this was going to happen -- he knew a year and a half ago -- but that doesn't mean he knew what it would be like.

"Julien," he says quietly -- quietly but evenly. "Julien, it's me."

Half in a trance Julien opens feverish eyes, his tinted inner eyelids staying closed. His eyes are larger, their whites less visible, but they focus fine, pupils adjusting in size.

"Oh," he says indistinctly, lips not moving. He can't remember the last time he saw him. "Aaron." There's something he should say, if he can focus a little more. Focusing is bad, though. Flailing and thinking don't help either. He has to endure this no matter what he does. It's more peaceful to just lay here. Julien closes his eyes again, a hint of water showing under his eyelashes, and cups his wing over his chest.

He reaches out -- slow, careful, intending not to startle -- and places a hand on the curve of Julien's wing.

"I'm going to give you something for the pain," he says, slow and even, calm. "All right?"

He had done this research over a year ago, when he first put together what Julien was becoming. He had asked vets for help, and had found analgesics that were safe for humans and birds, and had calculated dosages, and had kept a supply in the clinic, for cases like this. But as long as Julien was conscious, Aaron was going to get consent before administering any medicine.

Under the feathers - and many of those are powerful things hooked to projections in the bone - his arms are relatively human, if elongated and with weird wrists and hands. Fingers can be pushed through the plumage and his arms can be felt. For a little longer they will stay that way.

Julien opens his eyes again. If he had the energy he thinks he might be annoyed - he has to stop and think about what Aaron said before he can understand what he means, pupils pinning with the effort. Only then does he nod, and lick his lips with a dry pointed tongue. "...I weigh seventy-eight pounds."

He watches as if through a veil or underwater. Quite a long time ago now a pulse took the reflex to cry out or moan in pain; if he does either it's acting, the same as laughter or sobs. "You're here."

By the time Julien speaks, Aaron has moved his hand. He is examining Julien's arm, checking for veins, and realizing that even if he finds one, it'll be difficult to tell if it's a vein or an artery. His circulatory system is just displaced enough to be worrying.

"I am," he says, and his voice sounds a little distracted -- understandably so, since he's shifting the feathers on Julien's shoulder to get an idea of if he'll be able to inject into the deltoid. He believes he can, and Julien will feel something cold and sharp-smelling smeared onto his skin. Skin that feels foreign, un-human, strange. As the alcohol dries, the gloves snap on, and Aaron prepares the syringe, clicking onto it a new, inch-and-a-half long needle that would give a child nightmares. Two fingers keep the feathers apart and the skin taut, and a moment later, with a "Hold still, now," the needle sinks into skin and muscle. It's sharp, very much so -- it won't hurt, not more than a light sting. A moment later, the needle is out again and a clean gauze is pressed to Julien's skin, and the needle disappears into a sharps container.

It'll take time for the drug to take effect. An IV injection would have been quicker, but the buprenex's effects will last longer this way.

Julien sucks in a breath. His skin is very thin, very soft, and radiates heat like he has a distressingly high fever, but is dry, nonsweating. He bleeds freely for a couple of seconds, tapering off as the hole closes again.

"When did you... when did you?" Wincing he lets his head fall back to the tiles. The peak of the keel on his breastbone is higher now, straining pale against his skin. His chest is wider, rounder. Along his sides goosebumps are becoming pimply-looking pinfeathers, just starting to break the skin.

"When did I arrive? Only a minute ago. When did I remember my number? Early yesterday."

Carefully, he pulls the gauze away, and is surprised for a moment to see that the puncture is already closed. Well, that made things easier. He climbs to his feet, strips off the gloves, and crosses to the kitchenette, pulling out a saucepan and filling it with water, setting it to boil. Out of his pocket he pulls a cutting of athelas, made in haste and slipped into a bag. It's already bruised, but that doesn't matter much. He crushes the leaves further and drops them in the water, and the smell begins to fill the room. It will only get stronger.

Aaron finds his own head cleared by it; he looks down at Julien and feels his unease lessen and his resolve strengthen. This will not be easy, oh no, but it will be done. He kneels back down next to Julien and presses two fingers to the side of his neck, glancing down at his watch and counting silently. He'll need to check Julien's breathing and heartbeat by hand throughout this -- with the change Aaron guesses is about to take place, he doesn't have a portable pulse or respiration monitor that would serve for long.

Dazed, Julien follows him with his eyes, trying to think around the sensation. He's reasonably sure he's not imagining this and if there is something else he can focus on - hard to imagine right now! that's good. He flutters his wing a few more times to try and cool himself, making lightweight things nearby skid or lift off.

The athelas takes effect quite fast. Even if Julien can't quite relax it's a burden lifted. He sighs, and better able to think immediately worries. It's slow, but as Aaron feels for his pulse Julien's neck elongates just enough to pick up on.

"It's hot," he says when Aaron's finished. Valiantly attempting humor, he licks cracked lips again, though with his dry tongue it's more reflexive than anything. "Did you ever see Alien?"

He stills for a second when he feels the skin below his fingers grow, and nearly loses his count. But he catches it again, and scratches the number down on a notepad.

"Take it easy, Kane," is Aaron's reply, citing the crewman that Julien must be painfully identifying with. "Nothing's bursting out of your chest today."

He runs through a mental checklist of all the things he can do for Julien. Putting him under is too risky; while Aaron does have anesthesiology training, he doesn't trust himself to get the dosage right, and Julien can't be monitored properly with the equipment he has here. He has administered pain medication, he has athelas enough for days, and he'll be routinely checking Julien's vital signs through the change. He still needs to take Julien's temperature and blood pressure, but other than that...

...other than that, Aaron suspects that all he can to is try to keep the poor bird comfortable.

He stands; a few moments later, he's back with water, cold water.

"Can you sit up -- or at least get onto your back?"

"Hhh. You sure? I got facehuggered good." A sizeable part of the pain is from his keel tenting out his skin. At this point it looks like he could kiss it if he bent his head forwards. Over his keel itself it is bloodless white.

The drug may be starting to take effect. He's not sure, it could be the athelas. Julien shifts the wing stretched out across the floor and turns himself to fall rather heavily onto his back, both wings falling open. Down his sides and below the point where his navel is filling in ugly, spiky pinfeathers are growing longer and blossoming into white.

"No, I can't sit up. Or - lower my legs." His knees are still tucked up to either side of his body, and his feet are still curled. Color shows in Julien's cheeks. "How do you think I ended up on the floor?"

Aaron does his level best not to think like a dead bird and almost succeeds. He also tries not to call Julien a smartass, and does rather better at that. He reaches down to his side, to the glass of water, and says, "Then here's how we're going to do this."

He takes a small towel, no bigger than a washcloth, and leaves it in the water for several seconds. Then, he takes it out, and holds it to Julien's mouth. It'll give Julien water in small amounts, in a way that won't risk spilling or choking.

"Bite down."

He sees the feathers, but does not look at them.

Julien rolls eyes that are starting to bulge from his head, and obeys. The points in the fused keratinous structure that replaced his teeth are more prominent and tinged pink with blood vessels. "Seriously?" he says once he's let go. "This is what bendy straws were invented for. My trachea's in the floor of my mouth, get something to the back and it can't go down the wrong tube."

He's terrified - is that all of why his eyes are so wide and round? - even with athelas's influence but if there's someone here to see, he desperately doesn't want to show it. That leaves trying for peevish smartassery, or asking questions. Either is possibly a distraction to seize at. God, he doesn't want this. The good thing about laying in pain was that it had been so hard to think.

"You've got a giant hole in your memory too, right? Start of the year, like everyone blacked out for days and suddenly you're in a different place."

"Really?" Aaron gently hooks fingers into Julien's mouth to take a look. "Hm. So it is." The reaction to the weird shit that is going on in Julien's mouth is so understated that it's almost comical. "That's what happens when you don't come to see me for months at a time," he chides. "I get behind, and you leave me dealing with completely unfamiliar physiology in a crisis.

"But I know what you're referring to," he says, carefully and slowly giving Julien more water. "Most of those days I can't remember at all. But I do have one brief memory -- one that came back with the rest of the missing pieces of 2013. I thought it might have been a dream, until I came here."

Julien's gape seems wider. When he closes his mouth there's a fine line from each corner, like a very genteel Glasgow grin.

"Hey, I came after I got wings, you know." Quite a while after he'd got wings. He'd actually sent a message tendering his resignation from the clinic, explaining that he had to leave Locke, and professing that he would always be Aaron's friend. Then he'd had to come back and holed up in Isabela's spare room for more than a week before he could talk to anyone. "Not my fault Tough Tony came in with what, a knife in his arm? and there was a whole run of emergencies."

This does remind him, if Aaron's here he's not there and there are probably patients he could actually be helping. Julien grimaces and presses a wing to his sore chest. Higher still. He thinks he can feel something shivering in the bone as he breathes and hastily pulls away. When is this going to stop? Where will it stop?

"Mmmf." The tips of his beak leave indents in the cloth. "I got one like that too. Not a good time. You first?"

Edited 2015-01-15 01:47 (UTC)

"All right."

He knows how frightened Julien is. Even if it didn't show in his eyes, how could Julien not be? How could anyone, with their body changing like that, not be terrified? Watching it happen is almost like looking at time-lapse photography, but instead of clouds and flowers, it's feathers creeping up a human body and a widening mouth. It is because of this fear that Aaron is as calm as he is. Perhaps later, he can afford horror or fear. But right now, Aaron Strider absolutely cannot be anything but calm. His breathing is as even and slow as his words.

"My memory involves you. We spoke at the beginning of the year. I got my memories back, and you came to see me."

It's laughable to be trying to fix on something basically normal at a time like this, but there's not a lot Julien wants more. Regularly his wings and tail tremble, his eyes pin and flash, the more fully formed of his feathers fluff out disarrayed. He stares at Aaron without blinking his outer eyelids, half frantic for all that he stops and makes his voice steady.

"Really? Weird. -I mean, I would, but okay I guess I can get the 'forgetting stuff' thing better now." He tries to smile. There's a twitching, but he's somehow not clear on how to move his lips or eyebrows. Julien brings his wing up to rub his mouth, covering most of his body on the way, and discovers what used to be his middle finger is missing - his ring and pinky fingers had long been gone. He brings the wing back down to the floor with force, whipping air about. "Ohhh... Keep talking?"

Edited 2015-01-15 20:16 (UTC)

Aaron does not see the change stopping. This, he thinks, is the final push -- when this is over, the change will be finished, and physically, Julien Sakazaki will look nothing like who he had been.

His hand closes on Julien's shoulder, firm but not tight. No more water, for now.

"Me pennim."

We spoke. He will go on in that language, slow and careful. The words should all be ones Julien knows well, but the languages of the Eldar leave a shape in the mind, even if the words are unknown.

"<You told me of happenings on the> Network <and of very large animals in> Las Vegas <and> Germany. <You told me of the> teleporter. <And I gave you something.>"

He pauses, moving fingers to Julien's neck, taking a quick reading of his pulse. It'll only take about ten seconds.

Hearing Elvish now surprises Julien. There's no more expression on his face, though it can be read as having a Mona Lisa look despite the outsized eyes glinting with tears, the wide and lipless corners of his mouth. "It... it sounds really silly wh...when you've just got- there's the English in."

His body, now, is almost done. Rounder, wider. Deeper by over a foot, and muscle is still filling in around the keel arching over him. Somewhere along the line his thighs got included in the skin around where his waist had been, making the fit of his pajama bottoms very poor. He's already quite big, and the feathers reaching full length on his body make him seem very much larger. They're pimpling and pinfeathering and blossoming up towards his keel, around where his collarbones have almost finished fusing and curving into a furcula. Under Aaron's fingers his skin is shifting and goosebumps are forming.

Julien's noticed that his neck is getting longer, and even from a changing vantage point he can see his chest. He makes a choked sound and starts to struggle, enormous wings flapping against the floor, his head lolling. "I don't want to see this! I don't - no!"

He drops the pen -- it clatters to the floor, forgotten -- and one of his hands flies to the side of Julien's face, turning it to look at him. "Hodo, hodo -- sedho," he says, catching Julien's gaze and holding it. His voice is low, it's steady, and there is command in it.

"Ni tirio," he says, eyes locked on Julien's, "Ni tirio erui--"

Look at me. Look only at me.

He uses the Elvish for two reasons: one, if Julien has to think about what is being said, that's one more distraction, one more thing to think about that isn't the change he's going through. Two, he saw its effects on Julien before, long ago. It calmed him and got his attention, which are two things Aaron means to do.

Edited 2015-01-15 22:21 (UTC)

Julien goes still, though he's panting, and stares up at him as if transfixed, his eyes wide-set and cartoonishly huge, his face grotesque. There's a slight vibration to be felt through his cheekbone. The way his skull connects to his first vertebrae has to change, and his head is being pushed further away as his neck grows faster and starts to curve. It has to become longer than a human spine. His neck thickens, making an elongated pear shape as feathers form and mature upwards.

"I don't want this," he says in a small voice, pleading in exactly the way he'd been trying not to before. Tears soak into the feathers blurring his hairline, into the holes where his ears had been.

Edited (went 'wait I should clarify' while chopping vegetables) 2015-01-15 23:25 (UTC)

Something in Aaron's heart breaks, to hear that. There is a lot of pride in the person Julien has become: pride, or a determination not to show weakness, for in many cases they are hard to distinguish. Knowing that those walls are broken speaks volumes.

It is with sorrow, and with understanding, that he says, "Ni ista. Ni si." He brushes his thumb over the side of Julien's face, gently, shrinking away not at all from the changes or the tears.

Then, he takes Julien's face with both hands, heedless of any changes happening beneath them, and leans in. The words are quiet, barely more than a whisper, but clear. "Ach cin ú-ristatha, a ci ú-pelitha." He says it with belief.

Weeping, Julien makes a noise half like a child's whine, half a wail. There just isn't a more articulate answer he can give. Far away it seems, he lets his curled feet tuck and droop, then kicks up again as they encounter the alien softness of the feathers on his underside. He closes his eyes, inner lids then outer. He has to try twice, his lower eyelid suddenly becoming larger and mobile.

Feathers, spiky and hard-shafted at first but unraveling into slick softness, insert themselves between his face and Aaron's hands. His nostrils become a fuzzy-textured, vaguely heart-shaped operculum perched atop his beak. The structure of his skull rearranges. Matured feathers smooth out the look of his face. It doesn't look like anything else is happening, and there isn't much that could, but his eyes are still closed.

Julien's eyes are huge, far larger than what shows, but his head is quite removed from that of any pigeon stumbled across now. Wider across, with proportionally smaller eyes with a more forwards set and a far larger skull. The dye he'd used stays, somehow, and some of the feathers on his head are longer than the others. That doesn't mean he looks at all the same.

He won't impede the feathers. Aaron doesn't take his hands away, but he will pick them up and put them back, stroking along the feathers, not against them, brushing tears away. He murmurs to Julien the entire time, like you would to a child: shhh, be still, I'm here, breathe. There are snatches of song in it: healing hymns in the high tongue, a dialect Julien won't know. The impressions he gets are of trees made of light and starlight on a great sea. There's something in there about a heaven-queen, too.

No one here will rush Julien to open his eyes. Let him take it at his own pace. He may never be entirely ready, but far be it from Aaron to hurry him. There is time. He will stay bent over Julien, all but cradling his head, for as long as it takes.

Edited 2015-01-16 12:58 (UTC)

A few things are left. His wings are wings, with slender hard limbs under all the feathers, not distorted human arms, yet a tighter slimmer thumb and index finger poke out near the allula. Obviously he's able to cry. Despite its shape his tongue is still covered in bumpy papillae. Some of the structure of his jaw is the sa- similar, if felt through the feathers. It would take some feeling. Feathers pad his skin out quite a lot, especially fluffed up like this. And so on.

His fingers twitch and his wings move a little across the floor, half folding but drooping against it, and stop. Sadly what brings Julien to stir, some time after things have stopped moving, is actually the way tears that didn't make it out of his eyes collect uncomfortably. His nasal passages don't drain into the back of his throat, they drain through the hole in the roof of his mouth. He may be able to cry, but he isn't built so that long periods of it are comfortable or dignified.

Julien shivers and abruptly pulls his head away, curving on a too-flexible neck to a right angle, before turning his head and opening his beak so a few spoonfuls of clear slightly thickened fluid spills out onto the floor. Then he opens his eyes, or at least the one facing up. He's not sure how to move his head.

He's a dove.

Aaron isn't sure what he was expecting. He had thought, of course, about what kind of bird Julien would be becoming, and had known that it would be white. Dove had certainly been a possibility, but there is a big difference between thinking about it as a vague and distant possibility and seeing a dove the size of a small horse looking up at him.

There's no horror in his face. Surprise, yes. Worry, definitely. But he isn't disgusted.

Aaron realizes, distantly, that he doesn't know if Julien will be able to talk anymore. He realizes right after that, with a jolt of fear, that it's also entirely possible that Julien's personality or intelligence might have been affected. That is what Aaron is most afraid of: that Julien might lose his identity to the change.

"Julien...?" he asks, tentatively. In the question is can you hear me? and can you speak? and are you Julien still?

Julien's known the species for a while. It's not something he's happy about. Even though he wouldn't enjoy turning into cooler birds either, somehow pigeon just extra lacks dignity. Neck curving he closes his beak and blows air out through his nares, clearing them messily. They're certainly bigger nostrils now. He really only has to blow his nose the once.

Aaron is staring. Julien tries to turn his head to look him straight on, but his neck muscles are completely different; they spasm and and he turns his head too fast and too far, ending up with his beak turned in the other direction, his other eye looking up. Fine.

His eyes are very blue, with no whites visible. It's the same silvery blue they've been since they changed one summer, with the same pebbled texture. They still dilate and tighten. It's just... the skin around them isn't mobile. The blue feathers arcing over them trace the shape of eyebrows without actually being able to work the same way. It's easy to read intelligence into his gaze, but they are animal eyes, bright and strange.

He reaches, as he always reaches, for the appearance of strength. There's a reputation he has for resilience. Have to keep up appearances. Really Julien feels adrift, or like he's floating a foot or so back behind his eyes. This isn't real, and he is calm.

"I'm going to guess it's bad." If his voice is deeper and strange it's because it has to travel from his chest up a much longer windpipe. Parts of his neck expand mildly when he speaks, and his mouth opens and closes not like a puppet of a bird, but in the slightly off way of a real creature.

It's only then that Aaron remembers that Julien's memories have all involved sapience and that his fears were groundless. It's a relief, to know that that's something he'll never have to see happen.

But back to the present.

"It's drastic," he says thoughtfully, licking his lips and giving a slow nod. "I'm...not sure you'll be changing any more."

It's just Julien's luck that he gets to spend his first hour as a bird high on avian-safe morphine. That's what you get when Aaron Strider cares about you.

Bird-safe morphine plus whatever effects athelas has at this point. The result somehow is this. Julien feels... almost fine, if detached, but he can still sense how upsetting this is. It just can't touch him wherever he is.

He tries to lick his own lips, mirroring. Can't. His tongue shows outside of his beak, curves to touch the point, withdraws. Shows again. It is blatantly cute, especially since his face is locked into that faintly amused intelligent look. "...Shit."

His feet pedal. They're the same, larger than human hands and with translucent scales that show red-pink with his blood. "I don't know how I'm supposed to get up. Do I..." and he starts pushing his wings down, propping his body up though his head lolls on a slack neck.

Aaron can't tell if it's cute, disturbing, or pitiable. He really can't. Those attempts to get up are worrying, though.

"Easy there," Aaron cautions, holding out a hand reflexively. "You're not going far for another couple of hours, not until what I gave you is out of your system. Don't even think about flying." One of his hands finds the back of Julien's neck, high by his head. "Push with just one of your wings. Roll yourself over. You can get on your feet from there."

"Flying?" he says indistinctly, wistfully. First good idea he's heard in a while - fly, get away from this, go now up not pinned here. Julien's wings quiver. He breathes the athelas. It can happen later. He has to be able to get up first.

If he can't bend at the waist - God, he can't bend at the waist! - that makes more sense than tenting up. Julien kicks at the air, hampered by pajama bottoms doing nothing but tangling his legs, and pushes his tail down as he uses one wing.

He's heavier. Quite a lot heavier. When he rolls over onto his chest he rocks before coming to a stop, big and loaf-shaped with his wings half open and his feet half hidden under his tail. His back is knee-high; higher, when his feathers fluff.

"Urgh." His neck is stretched out in front of him, chin on the ground. Now he tries to move it and makes weird sinuous motions with it and his head, trying to raise up and flopping. Freezing. It feels weird, he doesn't like it. Some of the feathers on his neck raise and bristle. "God, I don't know how to raise my head! Why's it so complicated?"

"Sedho, sedho," murmurs Aaron, reaching out to put a hand on Julien's head. Outwardly, he's all patience and quiet reassurance. Inside, there's an urge to laugh -- Julien is ungainly, but laughing now would be cruel -- battling a kind of sympathetic horror, a reaction to not what Julien is, but to what it must be like to experience what is happening to Julien now.

"Try again," he says quietly, slowly, making no sudden moves. He'll get his hands under Julien's chin, supporting, helping -- and there to catch him if he freezes up again and drops his head.

There's kind of a crest on the back of Julien's head, where some of his 'hair' is still longer than the surrounding feathers. It continues in a kind of short mane down the back of his neck. The blue dye evokes long hair and pointed ears, in an abstracted way. He looks like the mascot for something.

There are the bones of his lower jaw, under the soft fluff. They feel familiar at first, at least except for how they end in a beak, but there are more bones involved, particularly the wiry hyoid.

Slowly, pitching a little and leaning into Aaron's steady palms as he tries to get a handle on it, Julien lifts his head part of the way off the ground. His neck wants to curve into an S-shape, wants to notch that lower curve into the slot at the top of his titanic breast. He tries turning his head... his neck musculature is dazzlingly complex. Julien's head jerks as his neck curves left, and he can see how he's lying on the floor.

Dully, he notes, "God. I'm all muscle and feathers."

"Probably the best shape of your life," Aaron quips, tone light -- but he's watching carefully, ready to catch or steady or restrain if it looks like this is about to go badly.

Julien's wings flap feebly. He can't think of anything remotely clever, so... "You're an ass."

How does he turn to look straight ahead again... like... this? Okay. He tries harder to raise his head, letting himself assume the S-curve this time, and closing his inner eyelids against the way the room moves. "Like a cobra. O...kay. I am a cobra now." A bit at a time Julien works out how to hold his head up and keep it stable. With the way skin and feathers interact it looks like his neck is very short and thick or even nonexistant, smoothly transitioning into his enormous body. "Now how the fuck am I supposed to stand up."

It's strange just how much air is churned up by those feathers, even in a weak wingbeat. Julien really is a goddamn enormous bird.

"Getting untangled from those pants might help."

He's completely casual, acting as if there is absolutely nothing to worry about in this situation.

Julien whips his head around, wobbling, and has to raise a wing to see along his side. The elastic waistband of his pajamas is around his knees, against his body. His feet are big and the cuffs haven't quite slipped over them, so the legs are very rumpled.

"I can't wear clothes." He blinks. "I... can't wear clothes."

Slowly his head sinks, neck dramatically curving so his head seems to rest on his shoulderblades. As he lowers that wing he tries to fold it neatly against his body, but the feathers aren't aligned quite right. "...I can't do clothes?"

"Probably not," Aaron admits. Then, he thinks. "Hmm, I won't say can't, but I'd say you don't need to, and trying...well, it might look a little silly.

"Need a hand getting out of those?"

Venomously morose, he says, "It'd make me look like a pet, you mean."

Julien likes clothes. He always has. It was a point of pride that he'd never go out in a shirt without a collar or at least a V-neck, that everything he had fit well, that his colors went together. Yes, plenty of times he's worn things he doesn't mind getting dirty or outright ruining, but they've always fit well. In the past year, forced to abandon shoes and most socks, he's had things tailored and then taken over the job himself. Thanks to experiments with Isabela he's echoed back the impression that he looks amazing in skirts, too, even if it would be courting hostility to wear them in public.

But it'd be better to have nothing in his closet but oversized novelty shirts and paint-streaked Bermuda shorts than to be unable to wear clothes. No, it doesn't matter if his feathers will preserve modesty, he needs them. "That's awful."

There were worse things to be upset about in this situation, Aaron thinks, than clothes. However, worrying about clothes isn't as hard as worrying about...well, everything else.

"A compromise might not be impossible," he says. "If anyone could find one, you can."

"I'll end up pumping Liam for money," he states glumly, and kicks. He can't actually place his legs to stand when they're trapped like this, at least not without being far more coordinated than he is right now. "Fine. Help me get these off."

Aaron laughs -- it's not unkind, it's not at Julien's plight, it's at how grumpy Julien is about it.

He reaches forward and tugs at the fabric, untangling and extracting scaly red feet from it. He makes surprisingly quick work of it.

"There. Try again."

Is it a newness to the body, Aaron wonders, or the anesthesia that's responsible for the lack of coordination? He honestly can't tell.

The answer is 'yes'.

Julien is horrified, but it is always better to make people laugh than worry. Maybe it's just as well his face is constant. An avian vet might be able to read something into the way the feathers on his neck are raised. Still, the play of which feathers are raised how, the angles of his head and neck, the stance of his tail and what his inner eyelids are doing, are all rather more subtle.

"Right." He manages to get his feet planted, and has to correct for the great weight of his sternum rising. It feels like he's crouching, he can imagine himself doing it, and... his knees are still up against his chest. Calf, tarsi, toes, they all move freely, but his thighs are practically fixed.

"I can't get up," and hearing the alarm, the whine in his voice, he makes it angry. "I can't stand up!"

"Shhh. Shhh, shhh," he says, the smile dropping from his face. He reaches out to take Julien's face again, giving a point of contact, something reassuring. He talks slow. "You are standing. It just feels different. You'll get used to it."

Julien's feathers have slicked close to his skin, making him seem smaller. It's easy for fingers to slip right through and away. A defensive reflex, turning them into a deflecting kind of armor. "I don't - I'm - I'm so sick of getting used to things."

Despite himself there are tears gathering again. It looks different now, liquid collecting all along the round lower curve of each eye but not able to well as much, and seeping into the feathers near the inner and outer corners. Ignoring that he sidesteps, claws clacking loudly on the tiles, tries to pull free, and heaves his body up to nearly upright, wavering, his tail low out behind him.

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