The Colbert Family Secret
Title: The Colbert Family Secret
By: tea_diva
Word Count: 2,440
Summary: The story of how Rachel Hannah Simms-Colbert discovered that her son is a werewolf.
Rachel Hannah Simms-Colbert knew werewolves were real, and she didn’t need some six o’clock news reporter with slick hair and a nervous grin to tell her. She knew before it was common knowledge, before the world suffered through several years of true stupidity forcing her to watch with a growing sense of disgust and frustration.
This is how Rachel found out about werewolves.
She is sitting in the little room across from the den that she has taken for her office. The door is open because her husband isn’t home from work yet, the kids are wandering about, and she’s only reading, anyway.
When her eldest daughter, almost eight years old, runs up to her and shakes her arm Rachel feels a fleeting moment of irritation because the shaking is something Samantha has picked-up from Bradley, but Bradley is only three and he is not nearly as strong as his big sister.
“What is it, Samantha?” she asks, tucking a bookmark between the pages and setting her book aside.
“Mom,” Samantha says, grinning wide and bright. “Did we get a puppy?”
Rachel frowns. “No, we did not get a puppy. What would make you think that?”
Samantha scrunches her face up and shrugs. “Because there’s a puppy in the backyard.”
Rachel is up and out of her chair in a matter of seconds.
The baby is upstairs asleep in her crib, thank the Lord, but Samantha had taken Bradley out into the yard to play. Rachel knows there are several people on their street who have dogs but she’s also fully aware that their backyard is properly fenced, and none of the neighbors allow their dogs to wander. She doesn’t think Samantha would open the gate, her daughter is an especially sensible child, but mistakes happen and Rachel knows the hinges on that gate have been in a state of neglect lately. One of those house projects that she keeps on a list pinned to the board in the kitchen, which she and her husband keep forgetting about despite their best intentions.
Rachel takes a broom out of the kitchen cupboard and says, “Samantha, would you go upstairs and check on Amelia for me, sweetheart?”
Samantha narrows her eyes and juts her bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout. “But I want to play with the puppy.” When Rachel raises a scolding brow Samantha huffs and obediently turns on her heel. Her stiff march makes her unhappiness known, but at least she doesn’t stomp her feet.
With Samantha upstairs, Rachel steps out onto the porch and closes the sliding glass door behind her. “Bradley?” she calls. There is no sign of either her son or the alleged puppy anywhere in her yard.
To her right, one of the hedges rustles.
Hefting the broom, Rachel steps down onto the grass, realizing that her feet are bare the moment she feels the crisp green grass bend under her feet. There’s a moment where she thinks that if there is a dog in her yard and that dog is somehow dangerous, she should have at least put on some shoes to protect her feet. Rain boots probably would have been best, because she’s in a dress and that’s not particularly practical for wrangling any sort of animal that has sharp teeth and might be scared or confused, or feral.
“Bradley!” she calls again, because dog or not, her baby boy is not anywhere in sight.
The bush rustles again and then, just as she’s considering crouching down to see if her baby has crawled back there and gotten stuck, a tiny round little puppy spills out from between the dense leaves and yips.
Rachel had considered that when her daughter had said ‘puppy’ she was using the term in the way children sometimes do, to describe a particularly cute dog, regardless of its actual size or age. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her that the animal in her yard was actually a puppy.
She drops the broom because she is confident that, if it comes down to a fight between her and this round little ball of fur, she would win. Also, because there is no indication that the animal is sick or particularly dangerous, and she really can’t bring herself to even consider shooing the tiny ball of fur with the broom.
There is still no sign of Bradley.
She steps away from the pup, peering around at the expanse of garden for any clues. Finding her child is more important than figuring out how the animal infiltrated her yard, and where it belongs. She has already noted that the gate, and its questionable hinges, is perfectly secured.
Walking through the grass, Rachel checks inside the tool shed and in-back of it, she looks behind every plant in her garden and up into the old fig tree that she has specifically told her son not to climb.
At three years old Bradley is already walking, running, climbing and moving with coordination and grace that she knows is uncommon for children that age. Her desire for him not to climb the fig tree is less because she thinks he can’t manage, and more because she finds herself continuously expecting his advanced coordination to suddenly give-out.
The puppy shadows her steps, running ahead of her and crouching between the rake and the shovel when she opens the shed door and peers inside; rushing to beat her to the tree when she stands beneath it and looks up. They stand side-by-side, peering up into the leaves overhead, the puppy tipping its head so far back it ends up dropping into a sitting position that seems to startle it.
Every time Rachel calls her son’s name the puppy yips, like it thinks it’s some sort of game.
She finds the blue shorts Bradley had been wearing lying discarded by her azaleas. His T-shirt is half covered in dirt, buried by the tomatoes. She picks it up and stares at it. The puppy sits at her feet, grinning and panting.
Crouching down, Rachel sets the shirt aside and looks at the pup. Really looks. It is gunmetal grey with splotches of almost-white on its underbelly, but its eyes are a perfect and familiar blue.
She says, “Bradley?” and doesn’t think that she’s going crazy.
She doesn’t even feel ridiculous. It is possible that she is in shock.
The pup yips and presses its head against her hand. Rachel takes a deep breath and says, “Okay.”
Later, it occurs to her that she has handled this epiphany with total poise and equanimity. She is still grateful for the few hours she had to adjust to the idea, because it means she can maintain her calm and also sound entirely confident when her husband stands in her kitchen with saucer-wide eyes and says, “Tell me we got a puppy today.”
Somehow, her husband has come to the same realization she arrived at that afternoon. Perhaps it is the fact that by the time he comes home, Rachel has already bathed the wriggly ball of fur and tucked him beneath Bradley’s yellow and white bedspread.
She’d fed him, too, worrying all the while that maybe the cooked chicken breast and carrots and beans weren’t something the little thing should be eating. It is the one and only time she does not insist one of her children finish their vegetables.
Rachel sets the last dish into the rack to dry and wipes her hands on a dishtowel. She says, “I think our son is a werewolf,” and then watches her husband sink down into a kitchen chair.
George cycles through every one of the five stages of grief within forty-five minutes. Rachel pours two fingers of whiskey into two glasses and sits quietly with him in the den.
He never once suggests calling the social worker who first introduced them to Bradley in order to return their son like a defective purchase. He never implies that the girls might be in danger because of what their brother is. He doesn’t ask for another glass of whiskey.
One hour after walking into her kitchen, George looks up and says, “He can’t be the only one. There have to be others out there.”
Rachel shrugs because, yes, the thought had occurred to her as well, but “How do you even go about trying to find them? The adoption was closed. We can’t track down his birth parents.”
George sighs. “I just don’t want our son thinking there’s something wrong with him because he’s not like the other kids.”
Rachel sets her glass aside and stands up. She resettles in her husband’s lap and winds her fingers into his dark hair. “I’m worried Samantha might say something to her friends at school. This is obviously not common knowledge. If there are others like him out there then they’re keeping quiet, and there’s likely a good reason for it.”
“Samantha is an intelligent girl,” George says. “We’ll talk to her. She’ll understand.”
“And Amelia?”
“When she’s older, we’ll talk to her as well. It’ll be alright.”
Rachel takes out books from the library, everything she can find about wolves. She has already determined that any literature regarding werewolves is strictly fantasy, and bears little to no relation to the reality she has living at home.
Bradley spends three days stubbornly in his wolf shape. His nails skitter across the hardwood floors, he runs just about everywhere he goes, and at night he crawls into Rachel’s lap when she’s reading in the den. When he does this, Rachel strokes a hand from his head across his back, and he always falls asleep before she even finishes reading a page.
Any books regarding wolves, either on loan or that she has deemed good enough to purchase, Rachel keeps in her home office, on the shelf beside her parenting books. Sometimes she cross-references. Researching the appropriate care of a young werewolf involves weeding through a number of sources that contradict one another. More often than not, she ends up feeling more than a little overwhelmed, terrified she’s doing precisely the wrong thing, but trusting her judgment just the same, because she’s made it this far.
After a while, she stops reading and just observes.
Every month around the full moon, Bradley shifts for a minimum of three days. He doesn’t seem to have any trouble at all digesting human food, even when George starts insisting that Bradley eat his vegetables just like his sisters. Sometimes Bradley shifts and it has nothing to do with the moon at all. Possibly he is merely interested in turning her prematurely grey.
The shift from little boy to wolf-pup, and back again is a quick blur that looks entirely natural, and does not seem to cause any sort of discomfort, which is a relief. When he shifts from wolf to boy, Bradley is always naked.
The older Bradley gets, the less tied to the moon his shifts seem to be. But that hasn’t stopped him from shifting whenever the whim strikes him. Although she and George have both tried to impress upon their son the importance of secrecy and propriety when shifting, neither of them can bring themselves to be overly firm. The last thing they want is to make Bradley feel uncomfortable or ashamed of what he can do.
Bradley’s coloring in wolf-form has changed. At five years old, he is a soft dove grey, with an increasingly white patch on his muzzle and underbelly. Rachel wonders what he will look like when he is fully grown. Will he have patches of color?
“Bradley Colbert! Promise me that you will not do this at the family barbecue tomorrow,” Rachel finds herself
saying, picking up the trail of clothes her son has left on the stairs in the front hall.
“Mother,” her son’s voice echoes through her head like a warm touch, entirely earnest. “You told me never to tell lies.”
She huffs, puts her hands on her hips and then ends up blinking because there Bradley is, sitting on her shag carpet in his wolf form. Apparently, her son can communicate in that shape.
Briefly, Rachel considers asking about it but then wonders why Bradley would know any more than she does. It is the sort of thing a parent should be able to tell their child. A bizarre variation of the puberty-talk she has been rehearsing in her mind, in preparation for Samantha.
There is nothing that Rachel can tell her son about what he is, except that he needs to be careful who he trusts and that he should never tell anyone unless he is absolutely certain of them. As far as she knows, none of her children have ever shared the Colbert family secret.
Lately, however, Bradley has made a game out of appearing in wolf shape and then shifting back into the pale-haired precocious little hellion that he is. When she tells him to be more careful, his response is always, “Nobody ever notices, Mom.”
Rachel looks at her little boy, sitting with his pale fur blending into her white carpet, his blue eyes bright and keen. He’s clever. Too clever, she thinks, for his own good. He’s full of energy, and most of the children at his school have trouble keeping up with him.
She worries that there will always be that distance between Bradley and everyone else. That the only people he will feel truly comfortable with will be his family, and maybe as he grows up even that will start to change. Wolves are social, that much she has learned from her reading. They’re social, and they’re territorial, and they’re protective.
She worries that he will never find anyone else like him.
She worries that he will, and he won’t need his family anymore.
“That’s what good parents do, I think,” George says, wrapping an arm around her shoulders while he uses the other to wield a pair of tongs he is using to poke at the meat on the barbecue. “They worry.”
They see Samantha’s eyes go wide as she claps a hand over her mouth. Rachel doesn’t need to look to know their daughter has spotted the streak of grey-white fur making off with three cookies it has just stolen from the table they’ve set up to hold the food.
“No one noticed,” George whispers.
She says, “One day, someone will.”
George presses closer and gives her a small smile. “Maybe that will be the day we get to meet someone else like him.”
Rachel huffs at the optimism and then rolls her eyes. “There is no one else like our boy.”
___________________________________________________
|| THE END || >>|
Story // 'Verse
By: tea_diva
Word Count: 2,440
Summary: The story of how Rachel Hannah Simms-Colbert discovered that her son is a werewolf.
Rachel Hannah Simms-Colbert knew werewolves were real, and she didn’t need some six o’clock news reporter with slick hair and a nervous grin to tell her. She knew before it was common knowledge, before the world suffered through several years of true stupidity forcing her to watch with a growing sense of disgust and frustration.
This is how Rachel found out about werewolves.
She is sitting in the little room across from the den that she has taken for her office. The door is open because her husband isn’t home from work yet, the kids are wandering about, and she’s only reading, anyway.
When her eldest daughter, almost eight years old, runs up to her and shakes her arm Rachel feels a fleeting moment of irritation because the shaking is something Samantha has picked-up from Bradley, but Bradley is only three and he is not nearly as strong as his big sister.
“What is it, Samantha?” she asks, tucking a bookmark between the pages and setting her book aside.
“Mom,” Samantha says, grinning wide and bright. “Did we get a puppy?”
Rachel frowns. “No, we did not get a puppy. What would make you think that?”
Samantha scrunches her face up and shrugs. “Because there’s a puppy in the backyard.”
Rachel is up and out of her chair in a matter of seconds.
The baby is upstairs asleep in her crib, thank the Lord, but Samantha had taken Bradley out into the yard to play. Rachel knows there are several people on their street who have dogs but she’s also fully aware that their backyard is properly fenced, and none of the neighbors allow their dogs to wander. She doesn’t think Samantha would open the gate, her daughter is an especially sensible child, but mistakes happen and Rachel knows the hinges on that gate have been in a state of neglect lately. One of those house projects that she keeps on a list pinned to the board in the kitchen, which she and her husband keep forgetting about despite their best intentions.
Rachel takes a broom out of the kitchen cupboard and says, “Samantha, would you go upstairs and check on Amelia for me, sweetheart?”
Samantha narrows her eyes and juts her bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout. “But I want to play with the puppy.” When Rachel raises a scolding brow Samantha huffs and obediently turns on her heel. Her stiff march makes her unhappiness known, but at least she doesn’t stomp her feet.
With Samantha upstairs, Rachel steps out onto the porch and closes the sliding glass door behind her. “Bradley?” she calls. There is no sign of either her son or the alleged puppy anywhere in her yard.
To her right, one of the hedges rustles.
Hefting the broom, Rachel steps down onto the grass, realizing that her feet are bare the moment she feels the crisp green grass bend under her feet. There’s a moment where she thinks that if there is a dog in her yard and that dog is somehow dangerous, she should have at least put on some shoes to protect her feet. Rain boots probably would have been best, because she’s in a dress and that’s not particularly practical for wrangling any sort of animal that has sharp teeth and might be scared or confused, or feral.
“Bradley!” she calls again, because dog or not, her baby boy is not anywhere in sight.
The bush rustles again and then, just as she’s considering crouching down to see if her baby has crawled back there and gotten stuck, a tiny round little puppy spills out from between the dense leaves and yips.
Rachel had considered that when her daughter had said ‘puppy’ she was using the term in the way children sometimes do, to describe a particularly cute dog, regardless of its actual size or age. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her that the animal in her yard was actually a puppy.
She drops the broom because she is confident that, if it comes down to a fight between her and this round little ball of fur, she would win. Also, because there is no indication that the animal is sick or particularly dangerous, and she really can’t bring herself to even consider shooing the tiny ball of fur with the broom.
There is still no sign of Bradley.
She steps away from the pup, peering around at the expanse of garden for any clues. Finding her child is more important than figuring out how the animal infiltrated her yard, and where it belongs. She has already noted that the gate, and its questionable hinges, is perfectly secured.
Walking through the grass, Rachel checks inside the tool shed and in-back of it, she looks behind every plant in her garden and up into the old fig tree that she has specifically told her son not to climb.
At three years old Bradley is already walking, running, climbing and moving with coordination and grace that she knows is uncommon for children that age. Her desire for him not to climb the fig tree is less because she thinks he can’t manage, and more because she finds herself continuously expecting his advanced coordination to suddenly give-out.
The puppy shadows her steps, running ahead of her and crouching between the rake and the shovel when she opens the shed door and peers inside; rushing to beat her to the tree when she stands beneath it and looks up. They stand side-by-side, peering up into the leaves overhead, the puppy tipping its head so far back it ends up dropping into a sitting position that seems to startle it.
Every time Rachel calls her son’s name the puppy yips, like it thinks it’s some sort of game.
She finds the blue shorts Bradley had been wearing lying discarded by her azaleas. His T-shirt is half covered in dirt, buried by the tomatoes. She picks it up and stares at it. The puppy sits at her feet, grinning and panting.
Crouching down, Rachel sets the shirt aside and looks at the pup. Really looks. It is gunmetal grey with splotches of almost-white on its underbelly, but its eyes are a perfect and familiar blue.
She says, “Bradley?” and doesn’t think that she’s going crazy.
She doesn’t even feel ridiculous. It is possible that she is in shock.
The pup yips and presses its head against her hand. Rachel takes a deep breath and says, “Okay.”
Later, it occurs to her that she has handled this epiphany with total poise and equanimity. She is still grateful for the few hours she had to adjust to the idea, because it means she can maintain her calm and also sound entirely confident when her husband stands in her kitchen with saucer-wide eyes and says, “Tell me we got a puppy today.”
Somehow, her husband has come to the same realization she arrived at that afternoon. Perhaps it is the fact that by the time he comes home, Rachel has already bathed the wriggly ball of fur and tucked him beneath Bradley’s yellow and white bedspread.
She’d fed him, too, worrying all the while that maybe the cooked chicken breast and carrots and beans weren’t something the little thing should be eating. It is the one and only time she does not insist one of her children finish their vegetables.
Rachel sets the last dish into the rack to dry and wipes her hands on a dishtowel. She says, “I think our son is a werewolf,” and then watches her husband sink down into a kitchen chair.
George cycles through every one of the five stages of grief within forty-five minutes. Rachel pours two fingers of whiskey into two glasses and sits quietly with him in the den.
He never once suggests calling the social worker who first introduced them to Bradley in order to return their son like a defective purchase. He never implies that the girls might be in danger because of what their brother is. He doesn’t ask for another glass of whiskey.
One hour after walking into her kitchen, George looks up and says, “He can’t be the only one. There have to be others out there.”
Rachel shrugs because, yes, the thought had occurred to her as well, but “How do you even go about trying to find them? The adoption was closed. We can’t track down his birth parents.”
George sighs. “I just don’t want our son thinking there’s something wrong with him because he’s not like the other kids.”
Rachel sets her glass aside and stands up. She resettles in her husband’s lap and winds her fingers into his dark hair. “I’m worried Samantha might say something to her friends at school. This is obviously not common knowledge. If there are others like him out there then they’re keeping quiet, and there’s likely a good reason for it.”
“Samantha is an intelligent girl,” George says. “We’ll talk to her. She’ll understand.”
“And Amelia?”
“When she’s older, we’ll talk to her as well. It’ll be alright.”
Rachel takes out books from the library, everything she can find about wolves. She has already determined that any literature regarding werewolves is strictly fantasy, and bears little to no relation to the reality she has living at home.
Bradley spends three days stubbornly in his wolf shape. His nails skitter across the hardwood floors, he runs just about everywhere he goes, and at night he crawls into Rachel’s lap when she’s reading in the den. When he does this, Rachel strokes a hand from his head across his back, and he always falls asleep before she even finishes reading a page.
Any books regarding wolves, either on loan or that she has deemed good enough to purchase, Rachel keeps in her home office, on the shelf beside her parenting books. Sometimes she cross-references. Researching the appropriate care of a young werewolf involves weeding through a number of sources that contradict one another. More often than not, she ends up feeling more than a little overwhelmed, terrified she’s doing precisely the wrong thing, but trusting her judgment just the same, because she’s made it this far.
After a while, she stops reading and just observes.
Every month around the full moon, Bradley shifts for a minimum of three days. He doesn’t seem to have any trouble at all digesting human food, even when George starts insisting that Bradley eat his vegetables just like his sisters. Sometimes Bradley shifts and it has nothing to do with the moon at all. Possibly he is merely interested in turning her prematurely grey.
The shift from little boy to wolf-pup, and back again is a quick blur that looks entirely natural, and does not seem to cause any sort of discomfort, which is a relief. When he shifts from wolf to boy, Bradley is always naked.
The older Bradley gets, the less tied to the moon his shifts seem to be. But that hasn’t stopped him from shifting whenever the whim strikes him. Although she and George have both tried to impress upon their son the importance of secrecy and propriety when shifting, neither of them can bring themselves to be overly firm. The last thing they want is to make Bradley feel uncomfortable or ashamed of what he can do.
Bradley’s coloring in wolf-form has changed. At five years old, he is a soft dove grey, with an increasingly white patch on his muzzle and underbelly. Rachel wonders what he will look like when he is fully grown. Will he have patches of color?
“Bradley Colbert! Promise me that you will not do this at the family barbecue tomorrow,” Rachel finds herself
saying, picking up the trail of clothes her son has left on the stairs in the front hall.
“Mother,” her son’s voice echoes through her head like a warm touch, entirely earnest. “You told me never to tell lies.”
She huffs, puts her hands on her hips and then ends up blinking because there Bradley is, sitting on her shag carpet in his wolf form. Apparently, her son can communicate in that shape.
Briefly, Rachel considers asking about it but then wonders why Bradley would know any more than she does. It is the sort of thing a parent should be able to tell their child. A bizarre variation of the puberty-talk she has been rehearsing in her mind, in preparation for Samantha.
There is nothing that Rachel can tell her son about what he is, except that he needs to be careful who he trusts and that he should never tell anyone unless he is absolutely certain of them. As far as she knows, none of her children have ever shared the Colbert family secret.
Lately, however, Bradley has made a game out of appearing in wolf shape and then shifting back into the pale-haired precocious little hellion that he is. When she tells him to be more careful, his response is always, “Nobody ever notices, Mom.”
Rachel looks at her little boy, sitting with his pale fur blending into her white carpet, his blue eyes bright and keen. He’s clever. Too clever, she thinks, for his own good. He’s full of energy, and most of the children at his school have trouble keeping up with him.
She worries that there will always be that distance between Bradley and everyone else. That the only people he will feel truly comfortable with will be his family, and maybe as he grows up even that will start to change. Wolves are social, that much she has learned from her reading. They’re social, and they’re territorial, and they’re protective.
She worries that he will never find anyone else like him.
She worries that he will, and he won’t need his family anymore.
“That’s what good parents do, I think,” George says, wrapping an arm around her shoulders while he uses the other to wield a pair of tongs he is using to poke at the meat on the barbecue. “They worry.”
They see Samantha’s eyes go wide as she claps a hand over her mouth. Rachel doesn’t need to look to know their daughter has spotted the streak of grey-white fur making off with three cookies it has just stolen from the table they’ve set up to hold the food.
“No one noticed,” George whispers.
She says, “One day, someone will.”
George presses closer and gives her a small smile. “Maybe that will be the day we get to meet someone else like him.”
Rachel huffs at the optimism and then rolls her eyes. “There is no one else like our boy.”
___________________________________________________
|| THE END || >>|
Story // 'Verse