Cast of Troublemakers:
Bryanna Call, age 4 ½
Harry Lahote, age 3 ½
Ethan Uley, age 3
Jackson Black, age 3
Rating: T, for a teensy bit of bad language
Genre: Family/Adventure/FLUFF (Fluffiest GD thing I've ever written or read.)
Prompt: a video of puppies!
Origin: Tricky Raven's Weekly Drabble Challenge, Prompt #8
Bryanna's Puppies
The front door slammed and a chorus of grunted greetings and one warm 'hello' rang out in response.
Bryanna Call was a no-nonsense little girl, but when she heard the door slam, she went haring off to tackle their newest guests, "Hawwy! Uncoo Paw!"
"Hey, there, Bry. Nice to see you, too, honey. Easy, kiddo. Let me put Harry down," Paul nudged her off his leg so he could set his and Leah's oldest pup on his feet by her side. Paul gave three year old Harry's bum a little tap to send him off to play.
"Come, Hawwy! I want to show you some-fing!" Bryanna Call, unlike her serene and laid-back parents, did everything at full speed and at the very top of her voice.
"Indoor voice, please, Bry," Bella called out … again.
"Dis is my indoor voice, Mommy. I inside! When I outside, my outside voice is much louder," she called out as she and Harry ran through the living room to the back door.
Embry patted their heads with an indulgent grin and Bella rolled her eyes as they passed, Bella calling out once more, "Don't slam the—"
Bang!
"—door," came the muffled end of her mommy's sentence as Bryanna tugged little Harry over to her secret fort.
Putting a finger to her lips, she pointed with the other hand for Harry to look inside.
Warily, Harry leaned over to look. He knew Bryanna wasn't the type of friend to play pranks like their friends Jackson and Ethan, but her secret fort was dark and she was being mysteros- mystersy- she was being weird.
Working up his nerve—he was a Lahote and his dad wasn't afraid of nothing—he peered into the half-buried fort beneath the bright yellow bush in the Calls' backyard.
Amber eyes set in a furry, golden face peered back, yipping happily at him and bouncing on the ground like he wanted to play.
"Bwee… When did you get puppy?" Harry asked enviously, his dark eyes going wide as he brushed the long, shaggy hair off his forehead.
She put her finger to her lips again, "Shh… I foun' 'im in da woods when I sneaked out back dere." She pointed to a loose part of the fence that looked like it would be easy to pull aside.
The puppy whimpered just as their friend Ethan came bounding out the back door to join them. He gasped when he saw what was hiding behind his friends.
Harry caught him up to speed quickly.
Then the puppy whimpered again.
"He sounds sad." Ethan's heart went out to the puppy. "What should we do?"
All the pack kids knew the legends and most of them were old enough to have seen their dads phase on the fly once or twice. Uncle Billy had sat them all down and explained how important it was to keep tribal legends a secret and said that one day, they might be protectors, too.
Bryanna had always wanted to be a protector, ever since Uncle Billy told them two whole months ago about being one.
Two whole months!
And she still hadn't figured out how to poof into a big doggy.
Then the puppy whined again.
The sound made her sad. She wanted to help him.
She decided she had to see into his brain to know what was wrong. This was it. She was going to do it to help her puppy.
"Back up," she told the others as she dropped her cardigan and pulled her sundress over her head.
She debated whether to step out of her My Little Pony unders, but she hated them anyway. She told her mommy how many times that she wanted the Transformers unders with Ratchet on them...? She was holding out for the Tranformers ones. These My Little Pony ones were expend- expendy- They could go poof, too.
"What are you doing?" Harry's eyes got even wider as he watched Bry clumsily tie her dress around her ankle like she'd seen Harry's mom do with hers once.
"I'm gonna poof so I can see the TV in his head." It made perfect sense to her. Her daddy and Uncle Jacob had explained how they could see each other's thoughts in the pack brain when they were poofed into big doggies together.
Harry and Ethan nodded in unison, agreeing immediately, "Okay." Bryanna was the oldest. If anybody knew stuff, it was her.
"Okay," she said, squinching her eyes closed. "I'm gonna do it. If it works, I'll bark, so you'll know. Then you poof into doggies, too."
Harry looked dubiously at Ethan, then back at Bryanna, "Um… Okay. We'll watch you to learn how."
Bryanna huffed at the doubt in his voice. She was sure she could do this.
She thought about the big grey doggy her daddy turned into. She thought about his pretty spots and hoped she would have spots like that, too.
She loved polkadots.
Imagining wagging her tail and scratching an itch behind her ear with her foot and catching frisbees in her big doggy mouth, she thought about how fuzzy and warm her fluffy doggy coat would be. She could practically feel the heat from her doggy coat.
The warm coat suddenly felt uncomfortably warm and she shuddered, stretching as if to loosen it and fan herself—
Twin gasps interrupted her daydream about her doggy self. She opened her eyes to look at Harry and Ethan.
"Bwee-anna!" Harry yelped joyfully. "You did it!"
All Ethan could do was nod and stare in awe.
Bry looked down at her feet and gasped.
She had paws! Real doggy paws! They were a bright, silvery-white color. She lifted each one experimentally.
They were real paws.
She had real paws!
Bry couldn't believe her good luck! She had did it! … er … done did it! Yay!
She yelped at the others so they would get started trying to poof into their doggies, too.
Harry, being a Lahote, was no stranger to dropping trou outdoors. His Uncle Seth potty-trained him faster than any of the other pack kids by teaching him to pee on Grandma Sue's peonies. (His Uncle Seth said that when he was a kid, his dad told him they were named that for a reason - pee-on-these. Peonies. Made sense.) He shucked out of his shorts, stepping out with one foot and looping them in a figure-eight to step with the same foot back in so both legs of the shorts were around one ankle.
That looked like it would do the trick, so Ethan followed his example.
While she was waiting for them to join her, she turned her back and stared at her little blond puppy.
She stared hard.
Nothing.
She tried again.
Her puppy stared back at her blankly, wagging his tail and tilting his head cluelessly.
She tried asking him a question, "Are you okay?" but it came out all barks.
The puppy answered her back, "Barkbarkbarkbarkbark!"
Yay!
But … his answer was all in barks, too, and—technically speaking—Bryanna didn't speak dog.
This was a problem.
She turned to ask the others for their advice and yelped in surprise, scuttling backward on nimble paws away from the dark grey and black puppies that were where Harry and Ethan should have been.
"Where did they go?" she wondered.
"What do you mean? We're right here!" Ethan's voice insisted over a cacophony of puppy barks that came from the black puppy's mouth.
"Oh! You're doggies now, too! Good! I need your help. I can't hear my puppy." She turned back to gaze at her silent blond friend, completely nonplussed by the the fact that two of her closest friends were now doggies, too.
Harry's dark grey doggy self walked in a circle on shaky legs around the quiet puppy, "Maybe he's not a people-puppy like us."
Ethan hmm'd thoughtfully.
Then Bry got a brilliant idea!
"We need Jackson," she stated firmly in the pack brain.
"But… Jackson's not a people-puppy yet, neither," Harry's doggy eyebrows scrunched up in consternation. He wasn't sure he wanted him to be. He liked doing something special that was just for him and Bryanna.
He conveniently forgot that Ethan had poofed into a doggy, too.
Bry had to concede that point, "No, but… He wivs wif Uncoo Jacob and Aunt Jess-ca and Uncoo Jacob is the one who knows things in the big doggy pack. He's their big Know-it-all. Jackson must be our Know-it-all! Wet's go get him!"
Bry led the way, dancing lightly on four feet over to the gap in the fencing and nosing it open. She held it back for all her puppies, yipping softly at the silent puppy to herd him along with the others.
Embry was watching the game with some of the guys when he suddenly shuddered. He brushed it off at first.
Weird, he thought.
A few moments later, he watched both Paul and Sam shudder inexplicably, too, the exact same way.
Jacob tilted his head, rubbing a hand over his heart, "Did you … feel that?"
Bella's intuition started prickling. She cocked an ear in the way moms do, listening for the tell-tale sound of happy shouts and banging that usually came from the backyard when the boys came over to play. With Jackson remaining at home, it would be noticeably quieter, but not … that quiet.
Hitching the baby up on her hip, she drifted to the back door, the first stirrings of dread tip-toeing up her spine as she realized there was no noise at all coming from the backyard.
Moms know that no noise means lots of trouble.
She stepped out on the porch to see what the pups were up to.
The yard was empty.
"EMBRY!" she screeched, trying not to panic.
Her husband and the other wolves came bursting out the back door seconds after her terrified shout.
"What's wrong?" Embry demanded, sniffing and checking her and the baby over carefully for injuries.
"What's- What's wrong? Look around you, Embry! There should be three toddlers in this yard!" she tried not to shout, she did, but her baby was not where she was supposed to be—tucked safely away in their fenced-in yard.
"I'm sure they're here somewhere. They're probably just hiding," he assured her. He motioned to the other wolves, "Spread out, see where the scents lead. Keep it light. It's just a game."
Fanning out, Embry, Paul, Sam, and Jacob sniffed out the path the kids had taken, pausing to puzzle over the strange scent coming from Bry's fairy fort beneath the blooming forsythia bush in the rear corner of the yard.
Jacob got down on his hands and knees and followed the scent to the loose plank in the fence, "Uh… Bells?"
"Oh, thank god, Jake. Please just tell me they're back they hiding," she closed her eyes and hugged the baby close.
"Um, I- I wish I could. They're- They're not here. They're gone," he stood behind the thick, golden foliage and pulled the loose plank aside. "The tracks and scent indicate Bry and, maybe a small dog have been coming and going back here for a while now."
Bella didn't know what to say. It wasn't unusual for Bry to disappear into her little fairy fort for hours on end, playing quietly by herself while her mother tidied up the house or played with the baby in the sandbox near the porch.
Now she wondered if Bry had ever been playing in the fort or if she'd just been using it for cover to escape.
She swallowed the shame tickling at the back her throat for being so lackadaisical about her daughter's free play time and squeaked, "Can you find them? Follow their scents?"
"No problem, babe," Embry assured her, pressing a kiss to the downy black tuft of hair on the baby's head and pulling her phone from her pocket before he kissed her as well. "Keep this on. We'll call when we track them down. They're probably within a few hundred yards of the house."
Bella fervently hoped that was true.
"This is a bit far for three toddlers to travel on their own, isn't it?" Paul asked as they ran on two legs, following the scent of their pups through the forests of La Push.
"Bry is coming up on five. Harry is almost four. Ethan isn't far behind. They can cover a lot of ground, given enough time," Embry answered, trying not to let his worry show.
Jacob's head snapped up, scenting the air around them and getting a good look at their location, "I know where they're going."
The other three looked at him expectantly.
"My house," his lips thinned in a grimace wondering if his son, Jackson, was in on this little adventure, too. His mother would shit kittens if she found out he was running around the woods with no one for company but a couple of other troublemaking pack toddlers and a dog.
They slowed as they approached the house. Using silent hand signals, they split and circled it, moving stealthily towards the deeply-shaded clearing in the back.
The back door stood wide open. Jacob could hear the delicate snores of his pregnant wife—probably passed out from exhaustion on the couch again.
But don't ever say he said that Jessica Stanley-Black snored like a logger after a night out drinkin' on payday.
He'd go to his grave without admitting that truth.
He felt a little guilty. Jackson could make a saint swear on a good day.
Poor Jess never stood a chance.
Once again, using hand signals, he waved the others back. They fell into formation, flanking him as they kept to the shadows and circled the small clearing in the Blacks' backyard.
Five small dogs milled around near the rear tree line—four small wolf cubs and a tiny Golden Retriever pup.
The four wolf cubs all had little swaths of fabric attached to their ankles.
They may have been four concerned fathers watching, but they all had the same thought at the same time, "No shit."
Whoomph!
Embry choked as he watched the fluffy, silvery-white pup with light grey spots phase out … into his precious baby girl, naked as the day she was born, with a little purple sundress wrapped around her ankle just like her Aunt Leah.
"Bryanna…?" Embry murmured wonderingly.
She hid behind the long black curtain of her messy hair, toeing the dirt with her bare foot, wondering when the yelling would start. She was sure there would be yelling. Or at least a lecture about … something.
Whoomph!
Whoomph!
Whoomph!
Harry, Ethan, and Jackson all phased out behind her in rapid succession, equally naked and unconcerned.
When Bry saw her friends, she realized she should probably put her dress back on.
It may not bother Harry, but he's a Lahote.
Indeed, Harry stood proudly naked at Bry's right flank, like any good Beta would, grinning like the cat that got the canary.
"Harry, put your shorts on. No need to make everyone jealous," Paul winked.
Harry rolled his eyes, but complied. He hated wearing pants.
"Would someone care to tell me what's going on here?" Jacob asked in his serious dad voice.
All four pups began to talk at once.
Bryanna was the first to stop and collect her thoughts. Turning around, hands on hips, she ordered, "Hush! Just… Just sit and hush!"
Three boys and one dog all plopped their muddy rear ends on the ground at the same time.
Embry wanted to be upset that his baby girl had phased, that she had led her friends all over the rez and left the yard without permission, but, in that moment, all he could feel was glowing pride.
He looked at Jacob and tilted his head toward the pups, his smile spreading lazily over his features, "Guess we know who their Alpha is."
Jacob struggled not to grin with pride at the pups, but he knew their mothers were going to have shit fits when they found out and—somehow—it would get blamed on him.
He shook his head, hands on hips, and stared at the ground, trying desperately not to grin.
This Alpha shit was for the birds. Little Bry was welcome to the job if she wanted it.
He cleared his throat and, in his best disapproving dad voice, he asked, "What's going on here?"
Bry held a hand up to silence her little pack as they all began speaking at once.
Stepping one bare chubby little bronze foot forward and trying not to fidget, she reported to her Uncle Know-it-all like a good Know-it-all should. "I finded dis puppy in da woods. He was sad and wet and all awone. I wet him sweep in my sec-wet fort and he gived me cuddles. I fed him raviowis and pamcakes, and sometimes my vegables because he's a dog and he'll eat any-fing. Then, Hawwy comed over and met my puppy and my puppy cried. Then E-fan comed over and my puppy cried some more. Big Uncoo Biwwy said you could see the TV in the other big doggies' heads in da pack brain, so I poofed into a doggy to try to see what's in his head. I just want to help him," she said sorrowfully, pouting a little for effect.
That worked on Daddy a lot of the times.
She poked the little Golden's head with a stubby finger, "But dere's nuffing in dere. He just barked at me and I don't speak dog even dough I was one when I talked to 'im. It comed out all barks." She held her hands over her mouth and moved them away like she was trying to pull out the right words. Shrugging, she held her hands up in despair. "It no work."
She tried out the pout again.
It couldn't hurt.
"So I telled Hawwy to poof into a doggy if I bark at him—before I poofed—and E-fan, too. Then they poofed into doggies, but they can't hear my puppy neither. Then we fought were missing our Know-it-all like Uncoo Jacob, so we comed here to tell Jackson because we fink he might know how Uncoo Jacob do it and he tried and poofed to help us. His red coat is so shiny…" she looked at him adoringly. "And he's so fluffy…
"Then, Jackson couldn't see the TV in my puppy's brain neither, so we didn't fink it was helping to be poofed, so we poofed back. That how it happened, Uncoo Jacob, honest."
She nodded her head as sincerely as she could, figuring nothing ventured, nothing gained—just like her mommy always says—so she worked up her biggest pout and saddest puppy eyes before she begged prettily with a flutter of lashes, "Can we keep 'im, Daddy? Pwease?"
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