(no subject)

[relance]

Julia Lynn Bellamy was a child who had been wanted, who had been fought for. Her mother, Emily, had wanted a child her whole life, and she had pressured her husband, Philip, into wanting one as well, even though his hours at the firm were long and he was still an associate who was struggling with seventy hour work weeks. In the end, he gave in (for love and sex which were interconnected in his mind) and Julia was born on a sunny October 30th. (She'd forever regret not actually being born on Halloween.)

For the first two years of her life, they lived in the City, but when Emily wanted something more normal, they bought a house in North Terrytown, close enough that Philip could walk to the station to catch the metro North to work each day. However, he maintained an apartment in the city, and would often only come home on weekends, and sometimes not even then. He worked his ass off to make partner at an early age, and he considered that to be the most important accomplishment of his life, despite the fact that he had a beautiful wife and a baby girl at home.

Emily made due; it wasn't as if they struggled for money. The two of them had everything that they could want, including a woman who came and cleaned the house twice a week. But Emily kept getting tired, and soon, she was having a hard time getting out of bed at all. Julia was five, and she was the sort of kid who would make cereal for herself and her mother, and would come and sit with her. By the time an adult noticed that there was something wrong, the pneumonia was too far advanced. It had been nearly a month since Philip had been home, and if he had come home sooner, then perhaps there might have been something that they could have done to save her.

It was something that Julia would hold over her father for the rest of their lives.

Philip was a workaholic, but he loved his family. When he lost Emily, he lost a spark of himself, and he burrowed himself even further into his work, avoiding his daughter at almost all costs because of how much she looked like the woman he had lost, and how much she had blamed him for it. She was five, but she had slapped him when he had showed up at the hospital, and she refused to let anyone pick her up and console her when they told her that her mother wasn't coming back. No, she had decided right then that she didn't need anyone

The next several years were a succession of house keepers, baby sitters, and nannies. None of them managed to stay for very long; Julia was a difficult child and it was hard to be a parent when the actual parent would avoid the house as much as they could. She never really had people show up for plays or holidays, and she learned early on how to take money from people and order pizza. After then tenth or fifteenth time she did it, Philip just set up an account for her at the local pizza shop so she would at least try to stop stealing.

She didn't of course. Julia found if she behaved badly enough, then she would get some attention, so she started acting out in school, and the merry go round of staff changed even quicker for it. When she was twelve she started smoking and shoplifting, and after her second arrest (when she waited all night for a father who never showed up) it became known around town that Phillip Bellamy would pay for whatever Julia took, as long as they sent him a bill and didn't file charges. He thought that would make her better, but it made her worse.

Getting better at stealing so that it actually was stealing was something that Julia worked hard to do, and people thought that she had stopped doing it. Of course now she was just punishing people for it. Tricky fingers got trickier, and soon the only things she was really paying for her was her art supplies. Julia was the sort of girl who always had a nearly full sketch pad in her bag, and several paintings in various stages of being done around her house. She was a perfectionist who would toss them out when she found a flaw, and this was a trait that also carried on with her relationships with people. Going through friends was a regular thing for Julia; sometimes it was jealousy for what they had, or anger for what she didn't, but her relationships always ended quickly.

People couldn't hurt you if you hurt them first.

However, her life changed when she was thirteen and smoking in the old North Tarrytown cemetery. She was sitting on a stone, her blond hair dyed black and her eyes lined with so much liner it would make a drag queen shudder. Smoking a clove, because it was the thing to do, (and her father hated them way more than normal cigarettes) she met David who was gathering grave dirt. Deciding that he was appropriately weird, she befriended him in a way that was more like "okay, you're my friend now" in a way that was more like force than good will.

She dragged him shopping (stealing) with her, and then when he was properly outfitted, she dragged him onto the train into the city to get lost in the goth scene there. People assumed they were dating, but Julia was always quick to shut that down. No, she didn't date; dating had gotten her mother into the situation that she had been in, and there was no way in hell that was happening with her. Nope, she had a best friend, and she didn't need anyone else in her life complicating that.

Of course, her staying out all night meant that she was going through more housekeepers than ever, and all too often she would come home and find that the locks had been changed on her house without her knowing. After breaking in the first couple of times, she just turned up at the Bells' house looking pathetic, and despite the fact that they thought she was a terrible influence on their son, they fed her, and then they let her stay over when she still couldn't get in touch with someone with the keys. Eventually, when they realized that she wouldn't break their son out of the house when she was staying there, it stopped being all that much of a problem to have her stay.

They still snuck out, however, and New York was always an adventure. That was until when they were fifteen, and then it decided to hit them back. Literally. Walking back home from the train station one night, a car came out of no where and struck her full on. It was the middle of the night, the last train home, and there wasn't a single person out. Julia died, and her weirdo friend with the death fetish brought her back. Of course, she had broken her arm, and some ribs, and was in a cast when he finally woke up in her bed (she had been so scared that she thought that she had lost him that she had cried for the first time in ages, even if she'd deny it later.) Then he spilled it, and the two were best friends for life.

Of course, she was entirely too practical, and she had read a lot of books, so as soon as she was able to, Julia started a plan: she hoarded money to make certain that if someone came for them, she could get the two of them out of this. He'd saved her, and even then, she knew that'd he'd need saving eventually.

David went to college to be a therapist, while Julia went through five majors in four years, and eventually struck a deal with her father: she could be an art major if she took the pre-law path as well. Julia hated pre-law, but her father was footing her bills. He was paying for her apartment, and he was paying for what she considered her real education in the city. Perhaps she might have told him to fuck off, but David was living with her, and the last thing that she wanted to do was to screw him up as well as herself. She may be rather self destructive, but she's not David destructive.

Despite that, the two of them never dated; he was more her rock than anything else. She dated other people, and had casual flings, but they were never more than a few dates at a time. Julia didn't want to have any roots but the ones that David provided. Boyfriends couldn't stand that, and she was all too happy to show them the door with a spectacular screaming fight, sometimes at two or three in the morning. David never really fought with her, and that was something that she enjoyed; Julia needed to get it somewhere, even if the neighbors hated it.

After college, she went to law school - Columbia, at her father's insistence. Julia had decided that it was her last name, the one she shared with a major firm, that was the reason behind her getting in. For a while, perhaps, it seemed like she was going to actually make a go of it: she stopped dying her hair insane colors and stuck to just black, her clothing became less mental, and she went out less. However, on the eve of her graduation, when her father pointed it out to her, she frowned thinly in a very dangerous way. Yes, she went to her graduation, but she put off taking the bar exam.

At first it didn't seem like that big of a deal. Many law graduates took time off afterwards, some as much as a year in order to study to take the biggest exam of their lives. But two years stretched into three, and it was apparent to everyone but her father that Julia was never going to take the bar. Instead, she threw herself into art, and waiting tables when her father cut down her money. She learned to cook at small restaurants, and for the first time, she let David pay for things more than she did.

But then the men with the suits came, and she knew that they weren't FBI. They didn't have warrants, and they took her separately from David for that very reason. She was a fighter, and he wasn't, and they used that against her. These bastards were clever, because as they were using her against him, they were using him against her. Julia could die, of course, but that was something that they tested more than once. But they thought her stronger, and she lasted longer than the others that David had brought back, (that they could find anyway) so they had what they considered to be a good idea.

In their world, there was magic, and all of it was based on ritual. There were monsters there too, and each bit of magic came with a price. They had a werewolf who was dying, and unlike other worlds, being a werewolf here was something that needed to be placed inside of you with a ritual rather than anything else. New werewolves could not be made, and to lose the wolf that you had been given without passing it on was the worst thing that could happen. So the man put the wolf inside of her, even though she begged him not to. When she felt the strength pouring into her, Julia knew that when the moon came, it would be time to escape.

The old man, however, died. Passing the wolf was passing your life with it, and that was the only way to stop being a wolf. Julia has promised herself that she will never reach this point.

Feeling how the moon changed her, she faked being in a trance until they came to her room to put her into someplace "safer" for her first transformation. They didn't even know if it would work, but they wanted to make certain that she wouldn't do too much damage. Knowing that if they got her in the room, it would be over, Julia began her transformation early, killing the men and following her nose to David, breaking them out with a string of violence behind them.

Returning to New York for a single time, Julia cleaned out her bank account, and then more than one of her father's, getting a friend to give them fake papers. From there, it was hiding in the bible belt, being a blond and making sure that David didn't make too many zombies along the way. Of course, sometimes he couldn't help himself, and then it was time to run.