Summary: Jimmy and Victor as teens in the Canadian wilderness. This is AU, and not at all how things are in canon, but I was inspired by Hugh Jackman admitting that he's pretty clumsy and has scars from stabbing himself with the claws when he was wearing them around the house to get used to them, and I found the idea of a teenage Jimmy being a bit awkward and clumsy before he grew into himself was an amusing idea, and something that would drive Victor crazy.

Rated T for blood and lots of swearing - but hey, this is Victor and Jimmy we're talking about here, after all XD

Chapter Two: Don't Run With Yer Claws Out

If Victor didn't have the fangs or the claws, he would have been considered incredibly sexy by all the ladies. He was tall, handsome and athletic, defined muscles rippling beneath his skin, visible even through his thin, tattered shirt. His features had lost all trace of childhood and were virile as all get out, and his facial hair was growing out nicely in mutton chops he did his best to keep tidy—which had meant stealing a (rusty) razor from someone in town.

Notwithstanding, he was filled out with lean muscle and moved with an almost feline grace and predatory precision that turned the heads of all who set eyes on him.

Jimmy also turned heads, except for a very different reason. Namely, the fact that though he'd shot up height-wise in the last few months, he was skinny and gangly and clumsy as a newborn foal, constantly tripping over everything that could possibly be tripped over and even things that shouldn't be, and he moved with the awkwardness of someone who did not know quite where their body was at any given moment.

Not to mention his hair was a mass of dark cowlicks that liked to fall into his face and hinder his vision, and stick up at the sides of his head, like the tufts of ear feathers on a great horned owl.

Frankly, Victor couldn't wait until he was out of that awkward teenage stage. It was damn annoying to deal with. He always seemed to be—

"Ouch! That fuckin' hurts!"

Victor glanced back at his little brother, never breaking his stride as he continued running through the forest after a deer they were chasing, to see that Jimmy, who was running with his foot-long claws out, had pumped his arms so hard that he'd accidentally raked half the flesh from one cheek so that the white of his cheek bone was visible and blood dripped down his neck even as his skin began healing over.

"Shut up, will you?!" Victor snarled at him, turning his attention back to their prey that was slowly but surely getting away from them. "If ya hadn't gone and tripped over those damned feet of yers then we wouldn' hafta be doin' all this runnin' 'cause you scared our dinner off!"

"It wasn't my fault—OUCH!"

Unable to help it, Victor once again turned his head to see what his brother had done to himself this time. Only that suddenly there was a tree where he could have sworn there hadn't been a tree before, he ended up lying on his back, listening to their prey bound off through the trees.

They'd never catch that stupid deer now.

"Goddamn it, Jimmy!" Victor growled, pushing himself to his feet to start chewing his brother out, only to find that Jimmy had both managed to pierce through his left side and punch himself in the nose with a clawed fist.

Victor just gaped for a moment.

"What?!" Jimmy snapped irritably as the flesh of his side knitted itself back together and he grew a new nose.

"How the hell do you even fuckin' do that?" Victor asked, almost as awed as exasperated. "A few minutes of runnin', and you managed to nearly scalp yourself, rip your cheek to shreds, stab yourself in the side and take off yer own nose! It just shouldn' be possibly for someone to be that fuckin' clumsy or that damn stupid to run with yer claws out!"

Jimmy bared his teeth at his older brother, trying to imitate Victor's threatening sneer, but since he lacked fangs it wasn't quite as menacing as when Victor did it.

For several moments he just growled deeply and incoherently in his throat, while Victor chuckled at his expense.

"Just shut up," Jimmy managed to grind out finally.

"When you grow out of this, I'm never gonna let you live this down," Victor grinned sharply at him. "But for now, let's just go see if we can at least catch a rabbit or somethin', since that deer got away. No thanks to you."

"Yer the one that ran into a tree!"

"Only 'cause you kept shrieking like a little girl! And if you keep insisting on prolonging this argument, we're not gonna be eatin' today!"

"Aww dammit!" Victor heard Jimmy exclaim from the other side of the clearing.

Without looking up from the bow drill he was working, Victor said, "I hope ya didn't just ruin that rabbit yer supposed to be skinnin'."

"Nah, just stabbed myself through the hand again," Jimmy called back.

Victor groaned loudly. "Again, Jimmy?! That's what, the fifteenth time today?"

"Third," Jimmy corrected, as he walked over holding the skinned animal, giving his brother a simper. "But I've finally skinned it."

"Good," Victor grunted. "Go set it on that rock over there."

"What rock?"

"The rock that's over there," Victor growled, before cursing as the spindle flipped out of bow's string. "And I was just starting to get smoke, too," he muttered in annoyance, grabbing up the spindle and twisting it back into the string before positioning the blackened end in the notch of the base wood and holding the rock against the top of the spindle with his left hand, began once more pumping the bow back and forth with his right. So far he had burnt dust, but no coal with which to start a fire.

"There ain't no rock over there," Jimmy protested, glancing around at the dense forest around the clearing and the rocky bank of the river that gurgled and burbled in a cold river of silver mirror by them, reflecting back the cerulean of the sky with its smattering of wispy tendrils of clouds that looked thin and fragile as spiderwebs.

"Yes there is. Go find it and quit botherin' me," Victor snapped irritably.

With a defeated sigh Jimmy took his rabbit and rabbit fur and began walking over to the other side of the clearing where there were indeed some rocks.

There was another bout of profanity uttered as Jimmy tripped over a wandering tree root and stumbled forward, claws somehow managing to pierce through the lean muscle of his thighs.

Victor glanced up to see his little brother hunched over and pulling his foot-long claws out of his legs. "How the hell did ya just do that?" Victor asked in exasperation.

"I don't know!" the younger mutant cried, straightening up as the wounds in his legs healed. "I just tripped, is all!"

This time not only did the spindle snap out of the string, but the wood itself actually snapped in half as well.

Snarling in annoyance Victor stood up, saying, "Alright, tell ya what. I'll deal with the rabbit. You try to get the coal for the fire, since it's you that like things roasted anyway. If it was up to me, ya know we'd just eat it raw."

"Ya know I like my meat rare, just not that rare," Jimmy told his older brother in a tone that suggested they'd been over this many times already. But when the larger mutant stalked over, he relinquished the rabbit and went over to the bow drill.

"Why don't ya just put yer claws away?" Victor pointed out, after Jimmy had reached up to brush the hair out of his face and had accidentally stabbed himself in the eye, letting out a yowl.

"'Cause it hurts," Jimmy answered, frowning. "You've got it easy with yer claws. They just unsheathe like a cat's, all painless like. My claws hafta tear through the flesh of my forearms and hands coming out, and they do the same going back in—it hurts!"

"Don't be a wimp," Victor snorted, as he set out the rabbit fur on the rock and picked up a stick from the ground, beginning to sharpen it and peel off the bark with his claws. "And besides, it seems to me that yer hurting yerself more by keepin' 'em out, when yer such a klutz and keep goddamn impalin' yerself with 'em."

"Yeah, but I'm usin' 'em!" Jimmy said stubbornly, cutting off another stick of elderberry to turn into a new spindle, since the other one Victor had snapped in half. "I don't wanna hafta slide 'em out and slide 'em back in only to slide 'em back out again!"

At that moment as he was whittling one end of the spindle with a claw, his grip somehow slipped and he ended up nearly cutting a couple of his fingers off.

"Yer fucked-up judgment," Victor said with an apathetic shrug. He took the stick he'd sharpened and stabbed it through the dead rabbit's mouth and out the other end. "Just stop bein' so damn loud and foul-mouthed about it."

Victor, ya hypocrite! Yer swearin' too!

Two more chapters after this one :)

Anyways, watcha think?