Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Julia is nine years old, and her name echoes across the playground.

It’s a frequent, regular sound, pitched high no matter the tone, sometimes fueled by excitement, almost always fueled by fear. Without a second thought, she soars off of the swingset and lands on the balls of her feet in soft sand before sprinting off to find the noise.

They find her before she finds them; a girl she doesn’t recognize -- older or younger, she isn’t sure -- grabs her by the hand and drags her away to the copse by the kickball diamond.

“We found a stickbug, Julia!” the girl yells, looking back and beaming with all of her teeth. At her age, Julia doesn’t quite know what terror looks like yet.

They reach a little crowd of people milling around the thinnest, youngest tree. “Look, look!” the girls says, pointing to the trunk and bouncing up and down, full of nervous energy, ready to bolt. The kids around the tree all turn and look at the newcomer -- the bug girl -- Julia.

At nine, Julia does not know what embarrassment is, either. She flexes her arms, elbows tucked in to her waist, and announces, “I’m here to see the stick insect!”

The crowd breaks apart from around the tree, like they’d been afraid that the bug would leave if they weren’t all there to stare at it before she got there. Julia loves faces, and takes note of every one there, even if she never knows their names, never sees them again. There’s the girl that ran to get her, a young, small human boy in taped-together glasses, a dusky red-skinned tiefling boy with a thick cloud of hair that almost completely hides his new horns, an aasimar kid with a missing front tooth and golden braided buns, an older blue dragonborn clutching a ratty toy guitar, and two small, identical elves, holding hands like if they let go the earth would fall apart around them.

Julia steps forward.

There’s a young, brown praying mantis on the tree trunk. Julia looks around at the other kids, and the girl catches her eye and beams. The two elven children blink slowly at her, and when one of them brings their free hand to their teeth, the other one catches it and brings it back down.

“Oh! Imris has a cup for you!” the other girl whisper-screams, like she’s afraid the noise will scare the moment away. The aasimar lights up and nods, elbowing the tiefling a little as they pull a clear cup and a notebook out of their backpack. The dragonborn shifts backwards and the human boy tilts, like it’s hard for him to see.

Julia grins back. She is nine years old, and even though stick insects are way cooler, she still loves mantids, too.

That afternoon, her dad takes her to the pet store to get a proper habitat for her new friend.

Chapter Text

Julia is twelve and her mom has dropped her off in the next town over to be with her dad for an afternoon. She is full of her dad’s tom kha gai, and rolls the coconut and lemongrass aftertaste around and under her tongue in the absence of any real conversation to be had. He would make this soup for her when she was knee high to a cricket, and right now that feels like a hundred years ago (as so many things do when she is twelve and her family is cracking apart). Her dad, who is well off and closer to his company now that he lives away from Julia and her mother, has found a home not a block from the boardwalk -- and now the two of them sit on a bench on a pier, stretching out over the grey water. The air is wet and salty around them, and the dark sky threatens a storm that will probably never follow through.

“Why’s Mom such an asshole?” Julia asks, breaking the silence like the waves lapping at the posts beneath their feet. She scuffs the toes of her converse into the wood of the pier and hides her hands under her thighs.

“Julia,” her dad says, using a tone that he’s never used with her before. It echoes wrong around his teeth.

“Dad,” she snipes back.

He lets out a heavy sigh.

“Your mom just wants what’s best for you, Jewel,” he says, finally, learning his forearms on his knees. “I know it’s hard, but-”

“If she wanted what was best for me, she’d let me live with you,” Julia interrupts violently. Her nails dig into the wood of the bench below her.

“She’s trying her best, Julia,” her dad finishes, a little helplessly. She looks sideways at him and tries to relax, crossing one leg over the other. He leans back into the bench, like if he tried hard enough he could slip through it.

“Her best fuckin’ sucks, Dad,” she says. The air is thick and heavy and the rain feels like it’s waiting for everyone to stop looking so it can start.

Her dad snorts, and then he’s laughing, and then she’s laughing, and she leans on his shoulder because he’s her dad and she can and --

“Julia,” he says suddenly. She looks up at his face and then follows his gaze down to where it rests on her thigh -- where a ladybug, no bigger than a pencil eraser, has taken up residence.

“Well hell,” Julia whispers, putting her finger next to the little lady and letting it crawl onto her. “That’s gotta be some kind of sign, right Dad?”

“Yeah,” he whispers back. His voice sounds as thick and humid as the air around them. “I bet it is, Jewel. I bet it is.”

The ladybug takes flight from the tip of Julia’s finger, and the clouds crack open and begin to mist.

Chapter Text

Julia is fourteen years old and a dragonfly has made its way into the biology classroom.

It is late August and startlingly hot outside, and someone in the basement of her mind grouses about how this is not the way she was expecting the first day at a new school to go. A couple of students have booked it straight out of the room under the guise of getting “help” -- anything for a distraction-- but most everyone has either moved to the back of the room or ducked under the big black lab tables. Her teacher, Mrs. Harper (she remembers, checking her schedule), is staring intently at the bug, like the weight of her gaze will make it realize that it’s disrupted her lesson.

It’s hard for Julia to blame the poor thing for getting stuck indoors. The light was on in the classroom, the door was open, and the frigid air-conditioned breeze was leaking out into the heat. Bugs aren’t always that smart. Sometimes they just need to escape the sun’s last-ditch 102° effort. Unfortunately, nobody really looks like they’re going to do anything useful, and Julia notices with a tiny stab of panic that Mrs. Harcourt’s fingers are twitching for the broom leaning against the wall by her desk.

“Hold - hang on, wait a minute!” Julia yells, shoving her seat backwards and heading towards the door. “I think I can, um, probably get this guy out no problem!”

Oddly, Mrs. Hargreaves’s face pinches into something sour, stopping Julia in her tracks. “You will not, Miss Waxmen,” she snaps, reaching more proactively for the broom.

“No, no really!” Julia says hurriedly, jerking towards the open door where the light switch is but stopping short again, “I’m really good with bugs, I think I can--”

“Julia?” comes a steady voice from behind her in the classroom, and most of the action in the room grinds to a halt. The dragonfly buzzes into a window.

“I -- uh. Yes?” Julia says blankly, turning around. One of only three people still in their seats is a tiefling with long dreadlocks and rather impressive horns, and he’s staring at her like she’s presented him with a slab of gold. They lock eyes and his face cracks into a huge grin.

“I knew it!” he shouts, jumping out of his seat. His voice is low and a little gravelly, and he is putting on some kind of faux-British accent that Julia could nicely describe as ‘insincere’ but wants to more accurately describe as ‘shitty’. He turns his grin to the teacher and continues, “You don’t have to worry about a thing, Mizs Harper, Julia’s the best of the best when it comes to insects.”

Julia blinks and looks a little harder at this guy with his terrible accent who was standing up for her. It had only been a couple of years since she had left this town before moving back, but she'd still been jittery all day about meeting new people, especially when the first day of classes at Queen Valley High started after Lunch. Her leg hadn’t stopped vibrating up and down the entire car ride to school, to the point that her dad had jokingly asked if she needed one of his Emergency Ativans. He then had less jokingly asked if she was going to actually be okay after she’d slammed her hand, palm up, onto the center console, waiting for him to give her one, but actually acknowledging her nervousness had ended up making the bulk of it go away.

So now, she rattles around the box of faces tucked away in her memory. Nobody comes to mind for a solid fifteen seconds before she suddenly remembers a little tiefling boy with cloudy hair, standing by a tree in the dim spring sun.

She’s still mostly staring at him when the dragonfly makes another pass around the room, looking for the outside, and someone in the back shrieks.

“Well, Miss Waxmen,” drawls the teacher, snapping Julia’s attention back to the matter at hand, “are you going to do something about this, or not?”

“Right!” she says, spinning around and hurrying towards the front of the room. When she reaches the light switch, she flips it off so that the room is lit only by the outside. Blinding sun streams in from the small windows near the ceiling and the open door, and warm outside air puffs at the wisps of hair that have escaped Julia’s bun like she’s standing next to a hairdryer. Julia crouches down to be as out of the way of the dragonfly’s trajectory as possible, and a hush falls over the classroom as everyone stares in rapt suspense at the frantic bug.

It buzzes once-twice, three times into the windows before backing up and making another small loop around the room. Julia grits her teeth--

And the dragonfly zooms out the open door, nearly grazing the top of the door jamb.

Slowly, Julia straightens up and flips the light back on. After a second of stunned adjustment to the bright fluorescents from the students without nightvision, a raucous cheer erupts from the entire class.

“Alright, alright,” grouses Mrs. Piper, rapping her knuckles on the whiteboard. Julia thinks she can see her twitching back a small smile. “I can’t believe you bunch. Sit down for attendance, finally.”

Julia takes a new seat next to the tiefling. It wasn’t where she was sitting before, but nobody seems to actually notice.

“Hey, thanks for that…” she trails off.

“Kravitz,” he states, turning his whole body to face her and holding out a hand. “Charmed! And you know I know who you are.”

She laughs and takes his hand despite the oddness of the gesture. “Right! Julia. Hey, lemme see your schedule!”

He hands over his class schedule and they pore over it, high-fiving when they discover shared English and History classes as well. She takes note of his too-wide, toothy grin, his high cheekbones, and the way his accent begins to slip as they chatter excitedly for the rest of the period.

Kravitz invites her over that weekend to play Mario Party with a few old classmates, and Julia feels like she’s breathing clearly for the first time since she set foot on the campus. That Saturday, he and his friend Lucas nearly get into a fistfight over who gets to play as Luigi, and she thinks this is going to work out just fine.