Juliette's breathing slowed as she pulled the taser away from his face. It seemed to have worked; his face twisted in pain and he fell to the ground. When he stopped writhing, he seemed to look back at her. She worried that he might try to hit her again. If he tried again, she would be sure to lose. She didn't have the strength to fight him again and she wouldn't be able to get away with another taser shot.

However, the man turned and left. She let out a sigh of relief and shifted back to her human form. She rotated her jaw, testing out the pain in her cheek bone from where she had been struck. ****, it still hurt like a *****.

Juliette turned looked back at the boy he was assaulting. For a brief moment, she considered just turning and leaving. After all, she didn't know whether or not the boy would be just as violent. However, she ignored the thought and approached him slowly.

"Are you alright?" She asked him cautiously.

Adder had seen tasers in use before. Seeing one now just encouraged him to keep creeping away and hope the intruding girl - he wasn't going to think rescuer, not even to immediately correct himself, she was just someone who happened to interfere and provided a useful distraction, that was all, that was all - stayed busy enough with stupid fire rage face for him to get away.

No such luck. Luck was such a nonexistent thing today.

Leaning against the wall with one shoulder, that arm pressed across his stomach, and breathing very carefully through his nose as the rest of his adrenaline faded, Adder kept one ear very firmly on fiery rage face as the girl approached. Harrumph. Did he look all right? Either way, he wasn't going to take help from some random person with a taser. Too high risk. Nope, he was just going to keep go-

That was a fire hydrant occupying the same space as his knee.

More importantly, that was the most blistered part of his lower lip occupying the same space as his teeth.

"I'm fine," he growled. Or tried to. It came out a bit garbled, and at the same time as a rather unpleasant wave of pain. He tried very hard not to reel from it, and also not to lick at the blood, now his own, on his lip. Trickling across blisters was bad enough; hitting them with his tongue would be worse.

It didn't take a nurse, or frankly someone with eyes, to figure out that the boy was lying. "I'm fine," came his garbled response. Juliette shook her head and approached him slightly more quickly. He was clearly in pain, and his mouth looked like it had been through a blender. 

"You're quite obviously not alright," she insisted and grabbed her purse off the ground, pulling out the medical supplies that she kept in case of emergency. "Let me have a look at those burns for you."

She gestured for him to come closer and sat down on a nearby step, patting the spot beside her. She took out a bottle of aloe and spread some on the tip of her finger, ready to apply it.

Nope. He wasn't going anywhere near her, especially with such a weird-plant-smelling thing that she clearly intended to touch him with. He stayed where he was, which had the double purpose of serving his stubborn refusal and keeping him upright.

At least she didn't seem to be coming near him. He'd had enough of aggressive people already today. This week. This season.

He sniffed again, carefully to avoid jarring his mouth. The weird plant smell was actually vaguely familiar. Extremely distantly, with the sort of hazy almost-forgotten quality that clung to most of his remaining childhood memories. Did he associate the smell with his parents? Perhaps at one point. Now it was all a jumbled, washed out pile of hasn't-been-touched-in-years.

He didn't go over to taser woman, but he had at least stopped working on leaving at maximum obtainable speed.

Juliette sighed and ceased her patting. Fine; he wasn't going to try and be social, so why should she? Besides, there was no way that someone could argue that she hadn't done enough. She had done more than enough. But still, there remained a small voice inside of her that made her stay.

"That's fine," she said with a slightly annoyed lilt in her voice as she stood up, "I won't rub this soothing aloe on your burns. It's fine by me. After all, I'm not the one in pain."

She looked at him directly in the eyes, hoping that her comment had at least gotten somewhere with him. If not, she wasn't in the mood to try again. She got more than enough sass from ungrateful patients at every other moment. There was no way that she was going to spend her time off trying to convince a teenager that he needed medical treatment. She screwed the cap back on the tube rather aggressively to drive the point home, causing some of the ointment to ooze onto her hands. Great, just what she needed.

Aloe? Adder's ears twitched. Was that what that smell was? He remembered the word aloe.

He glared at her attitude, though, but couldn't hold it when she stared back at him, and shifted a bit to the side. When he heard her moving again, and therefore not staring at him anymore, he glanced over.

The aloe-

He clamped down on himself. A little too literally; he pushed against his other injuries. Well... he could smell if it was contaminated with anything, couldn't he. And if she tried anything bad then her hand would probably already be near his mouth, if not in it, and he could just bite her. Yeah. He had that layer of protection.

He could handle this, and aloe would help. He crept closer.

Of course, if he saw the taser again he'd bolt on the spot, aloe be damned.

Juliette saw Adder pause and decided that she had hooked him. She sat back down and held out her hand, ready to spread some of the ointment on his burns.

She hoped that she didn't look too threatening as she did. Although, she couldn't think of anything about her that looked threatening. She was five-foot-four and wearing a sweater, for god's sake. Then, she remembered. She was still holding the taser. Juliette dropped it in her bag quickly and closed it.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to taser you," she assured him. "I just want to help."

When the woman's hand shifted on the taser, Adder very nearly gave up on the aloe and bolted, even if he had to stumble his way and fight to keep from falling over. He'd run through the pain if he had to.

But she put it away, and some of the tenseness eased from his shoulders. Okay, fine. Might as well jump in and get this over with. He eased closer, still willing to run if anything seemed off or threatening.

In the end, he was finally crouched in front of her, balanced on the balls of his feet with his fingertips resting on the ground for balance. He needed the support more than he cared to let on, especially since it relieved a lot of the pressure on his ribs and stomach.

She wanted to help, she could hurry up and help.

Cautiously, Juliette reached out her fingers and began to apply the aloe to Adder's burns. "You really shouldn't go around biting burning men," she pointed out as she worked.

She applied a thick layer, and then closed the cap. He would start to feel the soothing effects of the cream after a few seconds.

"Better?" She asked him. "Did you hurt anything else along the way?" She asked him, glancing at the way he winced when he moved.

She hoped that the aloe would make things a little bit easier between them. She wanted him to see that she had no intention to hurt him. Just the opposite, actually. She wanted to help.

Adder's lips drew away from his teeth in an automatic, pained snarl when the woman began smearing the aloe stuff on his blisters. He also very nearly shifted and bit her on the spot, but between his general pain and sheer stubborn intent to acquire the aloe stuff he managed to avoid doing either, and even kept from retreating more than leaning back a bit.

And she was right, it did start to feel a bit better, but now his mouth felt really, really weird and slimy and he wanted to spit it all out and go wash his mouth out. It was making his skin crawl and his ears twitch and he wanted it out but he didn't want the pain back and GAH.

"I bi' him becauv he wav schoking me," he growled around the weirdness and blistering, defensive and a touch petulant. "An' he punsched me." Away went the almost-eye-contact again and he drew his arms back to protect his bruised torso.

Juliette shook her head as she watched him look uncomfortable. He was still looking like she had done something to offend him. "Do you have a name?"

"I bi' him becauv he wav schoking me. An' he punsched me." He told her and covered his stomach.


"That's fair," Juliette sighed at him. "Is it alright if I take a look?" She asked him carefully.

Adder's ears flattened back. Why'd he have to tell everyone his name? It made it so much harder to vanish back into the shadows, to stay separate from all these people he didn't understand.

But she had had the aloe stuff, and his mouth didn't feel quite so painful anymore. He didn't want to, and he doubted he ever would, but he could make that trade. Reluctantly.

"Adder," he muttered, still hunched away from her. He hunched a bit more when she asked to look, but looking wasn't touching, was it? And she had made his mouth feel better. But he didn't have the back up card of being able to bite her so easily if she did anything shifty.

Why was it so hard to weigh theoretical loss of pain with theoretical risk? Theoretical gain of resources was much easier to compare. If he were getting substantial food out of this, he'd probably go for it with very little hesitation. He'd just confirm he had a route out, and then take that potential risk. He wouldn't survive without food; he'd survive with pain.

But surviving with pain was hardly pleasant, and negatively impacted everything else.

After a while, he brought up a hand to fiddle with the zipper on his vest. The pull had long since torn off, so it always took a bit of effort to slide it up or down. He didn't take the vest off very often, though, so it wasn't usually an issue.

"Thank you, Adder," Juliette gave him a reassuring smile as he unzipped his vest. "I guess I should have told you before, but I'm Juliette and I'm a nurse. I help people for a living."

She stepped a little closer to him, waiting for him to finish with his vest. Normally, she would have just suggested that he go to the hospital rather than her having to take a look at it in the middle of an alleyway, but based on his appearance, she figured that it wouldn't be the best option. Besides, the last time she had suggested a hospital to a mutant, they had absolutely lost it. Unfortunately, though, if anything was broken she wouldn't be able to see if he was in danger of puncturing a lung.

"Do you have any access to health care?" She asked him.

The woman - well, nurse- 's name flitted right past his head, to be entirely honest. Names just weren't the greatest descriptors for him. He knew what a nurse was, though, and he accepted that it kind of made sense. Nurse with a taser? Less sense, but he accepted that some rich people took steps to protect themselves on the street.

He finally got the zipper uncaught from the bottom latchy part and rolled the garment partway down his arms with a vaguely annoyed huff. The plain t-shirt underneath was distinctly cleaner where the vest usually lay, though it was definitely not clean anywhere. He hesitated again, and then drew the shirt up to reveal the start of some rather nasty fist-shaped bruising across his abdomen and very visible lower ribs, though the rib bruising looked a bit skewed. Injuries gained in his other form tended to do that when tissue moved around.

To her next question, he just shook his head, torn between staring into the distance, watching for intruders or returning fiery idiots, and keeping a stressed close eye on what she was doing. He avoided hospitals. The people near them were very high risk and very low in useful resources.

Juliette let out a huge sigh. His ribs definitely looked broken. Judging from the bruising, it looked pretty painful.

"Can you lie down on the ground here so I can get a better look?" Juliette asked him. She would need to feel along his ribs to be sure. If she was right, though, she couldn't do all that much about it. Broken ribs were among the most difficult bones to set, and she couldn't even x-ray them. She didn't want to risk nicking anything with a bone shard. Even if they weren't broken, though, there wasn't really anything you could do with bruises other than wait them out.

"If your ribs are broken, you're going to need to see a doctor of some sort."