fandomhigh | BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

Malia had never been out of California before. Or Beacon County, for that matter. She'd barely been out of Beacon Hills proper, and that was mostly as a coyote hunting for food.

So this was new and exciting! Or, you know, new at least. She was going to school. One that didn't, as far as she could tell, require her to learn math. So right there it had one up over BHHS. It also didn't have Scott or Stiles, which was not a point in its favor, but in the end, she'd decided that not having to struggle through eleventh grade math beat out getting to have the few people she knew around, especially when Scott agreed he could try to teach her control over the internet.

So here she was. Her ears still felt stuffed full of cotton from the plane, and the whole airport smelled like cleaning fluid and anxiety, and she was managing to claw tiny holes in the upholstery with claws that didn't want to stay hidden away like they were supposed to, but hey. At least she was having an adventure?

[IT'S NEWBIE SHUTTLE TIME! Up early-ish because work has been dumb this week and I might be slow.]

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"Trees and lacrosse." Harry didn't really know what lacrosse was. "Sounds brilliant."

He was trying to be supportive.

“I guess. What’s it like where you’re from?”

"Depends where you're talking about," he shrugged. "England's... normal? Nothing really special there. My last school was in Scotland. That was at least pretty."

And very not normal, but he didn't know that was okay to say yet.

“Normal.” Malia nodded. “I don’t know what that is.”

For London, or anywhere else, really.

"It's pretty boring," he supplied.

Malia nodded slowly. "So . . . like . . . 'Mindy won't stop talking about her tortured soul in group' boring or like 'a day with a good kill you didn't have to fight a cougar for' boring?"

Her experiences were not universal, no.

Oh boy.

"Like 'I had to do chores all day and now I'm sitting around doing nothing' boring."

Malia frowned, looking off to the side. “Huh. I . . . vaguely remember what that’s like.”

"Only vaguely?"

He had werewolves back home. He knew one. Had he clued in at all? Ehhhh.

“I haven’t done any chores since I tried to eat my mom when I was nine.”

Would that help?

You know, it would click things into place.

"Oh," he said, suddenly at a loss. "That's a reason to not do them."

That was terrible, and he dropped his voice to ask, "Are you a...?"

Malia lowered her voice to match his. “Am I a what?”

"A-" He hesitated, because he'd look like a crazy person if he said this and was wrong, but she'd just talked about trying to eat her mom so maybe he wouldn't, actually. "-werewolf."

Malia nodded once.

“No.”

. . . Well she wasn’t calling him crazy.

"No?" Harry frowned, repeating her nod.

“I’m a werecoyote. It’s. . . actually not all that different.” She tilted her head. “Are you a werewolf?” She leaned in and sniffed. No good, all he smelled like was airplane and bird.

"No," he said, backing away a bit. He wasn't used to people sniffing him, weirdly enough. "I had a teacher who was. Kind of a family friend."

Malia sat up, nodding. “My alpha’s back in California. I don’t know any other shifters yet, though.”

"You have an alpha? I didn't know that was a thing."

It wasn't, where he was from. Except for fanfic.

“Really?” Malia made a face. “I thought that was like. Shifter pack 101.”

"I've only ever met one. I might not know everything." Or Hermione would have told him and he wasn't listening enough. "You don't know any Animaguses, do you?"

“No,” Malia said. “But I only know, like. Three people who weren’t in the psych ward with me.”

That was somehow more surprising than the werecoyote thing, including the fact that werecoyotes existed. "There was a psych ward?"

“Yeah.” Malia shrugged like this was no big deal. (She knew it was kind of a big deal.) “To help me reintegrate into human society. I was a coyote for eight years.”

BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

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