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**Title Here

By: VeronicaFoxx

For: Arrow**

Richard sat on the hard bench, stuffed into the small, cramped cell with almost a dozen other shifters, staring at his fingers where they dangled between his knees. He had managed to keep himself from being forced through a full change, but the flesh of his hands was scaled, yellow, his fingernails turned to avian claws. When he brushed them through his hair, he was certain he felt a few feathers, and he hadn't managed to get his eyes back to normal since the protest. It made him feel... weak. One of the things that those who protested against his kind claimed was that they had no control of themselves, were no better than animals, and one thing he had prided himself on was being able to handle the kind of stress that would normally force a shifter to change. He was an EMT, for crying out loud. There were few days where he didn't find himself staring someone's death in the face and trying to fight it off. He'd seen things that still occasionally haunted his nightmares, but he'd faced them head on and in fully human form. He always kept control.

Maybe it was something to do with the conflicted emotions that were still lurking at the back of his mind. He didn't like hate. It was a stupid thing, a combination of fear and lack of understanding, and he had wholeheartedly believed that if they could just show themselves for who they really were, then people would stop hating them. He had thought that if people could just understand and accept them, then the hate would go away. Until yesterday, when he'd been pinned to the dirt while trying to save the life of a dying kid. Whom they also pinned and handcuffed, despite the profuse arterial spurt that was in obvious need of medical attention. Even Richard's uniform shirt hadn't saved him.

It hadn't saved those on his crew who had come along either, to be fair. Then again, he was the only one on the crew who was still in lockup. About two hours after everyone had been shuttled off to jail, the shift manager had shown up to bail everyone out. Everyone except for him, the only shifter on the crew. He hadn't even gotten a chance to talk to Dale, to ask why, to get sympathy or an explanation, and it made him... furious in a way that he'd never experienced before. It made him understand the shifters that advocated for violence and uprising, at least a little. It seemed like that might just be the only thing those people understood. But that wasn't in him. And that, too, made him feel weak.

He didn't have the will to hurt someone else except in an extreme circumstance, self defense or defense of someone else who needed it. It was in his nature to help people, not to hurt them. He couldn't condone violence as a political tool, and he refused to participate in it, but he was starting to understand it.

"Gallian?" a voice called, the sneer audible.

Richard's head snapped up, eyes focusing on the man beyond the bars, the uniform that he wore, the badge that stood proudly on his chest. "Protect and Serve," it said, the logo emblazoned under a stylized eagle. He wondered just who they had been protecting and serving yesterday, because it hadn't been the people who needed it.

"That's me," he answered after several long seconds, standing and moving towards the metal barrier that separated them.

"You're free to go. Someone posted bail. Court date is on the twelfth."

He blinked, watching as the officer fitted a key into the lock and slid the door open. He considered not going through, not leaving, refusing to abandon his kindred who would remain caged for no lawful reason, but... That would serve no purpose, in the end. Solidarity, sure, but he couldn't do anything from in here. And there was a little coal in his heart that had been stoked into flame in the last twelve or more hours. He was going to do something, something more than providing care from a safe distance, or even from what had obviously been an unsafe distance. He had refrained from getting involved more than that out of... fear, he had to admit, but there was a feeling growing in him that ate at the fear, devoured it, was purging it from his being. He was done with fear.

He stepped forward, casting a last look at those who remained in the cell, then followed the officer back towards the front of the station. There he saw a face that he had honestly never expected. She looked a lot better without the road rash and battering, healed up, and she offered him a grin as he came into view.

"Hey, Rich! C'mon, let's get the hell outta here. I just spent two hours with these..." She paused, looking the officer standing beside her up and down before smirking. "Paper pushers. I don't have enough change for the parking meter, so we better get going before they decide to throw me in the slam for being five minutes over."

He remained silent, offered a nod, and racked his brain for the woman's name. It had been a chance encounter but no more memorable than any of the accident scenes, and it had been something relatively uncommon... They passed through the station, packed with far more uniformed employees than it normally saw in a month, almost all of them giving them both the evil eye, and then they were out into the morning sunshine. She flipped down the clip-on shades to her glasses and jerked her head to one side, so he followed her around to the side of the station where the public parking was. She had a new bike, and that was what suddenly triggered his memory.

"Shantelle, right?"

"Hey, you remember!" She grinned at him, running a hand through her spiked, strawberry blonde hair. "Would've busted all y'all out if I had the cash, and they'd let me, but yours was the only name I knew. Saw you on the news, and... well, y'know, life debts and all that. So, what's the plan?"

"Plan? I... What do you mean?"

She grinned and shook her head, the little rat tail pony at the nape of her neck flopping against the collar of her leather jacket, then gestured for him to follow and moved to mount the bike. He started to get on behind her, but he saw that her new model came equipped with an attached sidecar. She made an extravagant gesture, so he went around and climbed in, his knees up near his chin and the thin safety belt tight across his waist. The open-faced helmet might have been an issue, but the sidecar had a small windshield, so he just ducked down as best he could as the motorcycle roared to life. He wanted to talk, to ask why she'd come for him, what she'd meant about a plan, but that wasn't very possible over the sound of the engine. Thankfully, she didn't go far. A mile and a half or so from the police station, they pulled into the parking lot of a coffee shop with some outdoor seating, and she beckoned him over to a table.

"Plan, buddy, you gotta have a plan," she restated. "Even in a decentralized protest, there has to be some people who know what the hell they're doing, or you just end up with a mob. Do you guys not have any kind of leadership?"

"There were organizers," he offered, trailing off. She twirled her hand for him to continue. "I only know of a few people; they'd contact everyone, tell us what was expected, if we should have any kind of solidarity in how we were dressed, what kind of police response we could count on. I was never really involved very much."

"Okay, well, let's get in touch!" she paused as a waitress approached and ordered a chai tea with a splash of vanilla. Richard just asked for water, and Shantelle continued. "You can't let something like this pass. We need another one, tomorrow if possible, but within a few days at most, and it needs to be bigger. As big as it can be, as many people as possible. When they hit you like this, you can't let it stop you. You have to show up flying your freak flag high and proud, and keep on taking it until they figure out that they can't beat you down."

The shifter blinked at her. He didn't tend to judge by appearances, but he took a moment to do just that. She was older, above fifty at least, though it was hard to judge with her skin turned to leather by weathering. Obviously, she could tell what she was doing because she flipped up the clip-on shades and smirked at him.

"Babe, I'm from the South, and gay rights ain't been around all that long. Plus places like Georgia are pretty fucking slow to catch up with the times. You think the first Pride marches down there were any fun? It started out just like this. Just like this. And it worked for us. We kept marching, kept showing up, kept getting beat and hosed and sprayed and whatever they threw at us, but..."

She paused to shake her head, giving a soft chuckle. "Y'know, the other day I read a story about some kid in Texas who as getting bullied for being a fag, and y'know what happened? The football team, the football team, told the bullies to fuck off and started walking the kid home every day, holding hands with him. Not something that would ever have happened when I was a kid, but it shows how things can change, y'know? It's not gonna be the people who were out there yesterday, or last week, or last month who change. It's the kids who come after them, and the ones after that. They look at what their parents and grandparents did to people who were a little different, and they decide that they don't want that to happen to them, because there's a lot of people who are different out there.

"Hell, not too long ago, you'd get thrown in a looney bin for all kinds of shit that just needs a little medication or therapy these days. There's plenty of people walking around today, living their lives, who would have been burned at the stake a few hundred years ago, or maybe even less than that. Being who you are, who you were born as, who you should be if fuckers would stop trying to tell you to be something different or that you're less because of it... It's dying, slowly, but that doesn't mean we can just sit back and watch. I still go to Pride every year, and I still get spit on sometimes, every now and then have some dude who thinks he's bad and wants to brawl. It's less every year, and it'll eventually stop happening altogether, but that's only because I keep showing up. There might eventually come a day where no one gives a damn that you're a dyke or a shifter or trans or fuck all, but it'll only ever be because people like us kept showing up."

Richard was speechless. He supposed that everyone in this kind of situation considered their particular fight unique, that no one who wasn't part of the particular movement could really understand, but history really did prove that wrong. Somehow, it hadn't really occurred to him, despite the fact that his human coworkers had joined him at some of the protests. He had known, on an intellectual level, that there were people who stood with shifters, seen them even, but he hadn't really had an emotional connection to that fact until now. He had thought it sympathy, and maybe some of it was, but there were those who were truly empathetic as well.

Their tea and water arrived, and he stared at his glass for a few long moments before lifting his gaze to meet hers. "They took my phone. They didn't give it back."

"Yeah, that's pretty classic these days. Everyone keeps their lives on their phone." She reached inside her jacket and extracted a smartphone. "I'm not much different, as much as I bitch about it, but at least I'm not stuck on Facebook all day long." She keyed in the unlock code and shoved it across the table to him. "If you know any numbers, call. Or if you need to use some site, then go ahead. If you guys are this out of whack to start with, then we need to have a serious talk with whatever leadership does exist, 'cause y'all need help."

There wasn't really much more to say about that, so he took the opportunity to get out a few messages and check for postings. From what he could gather, those in a leadership position who had been arrested at the protest were still being held in custody, but there were others encouraging people to keep their heads up and talking about trying to put something else together for the next month. But somewhere else. Not here, not where it had happened, not where the violence had occurred. Thinking back, there had only been four or five protests in his state to begin with, but he'd kept up on the news. He didn't think that anywhere with a violent reaction got a second protest in the same place.

Shantelle was right, though. If they let the fear force them back into hiding, they'd always have to hide. They'd never be able to publicly express their true selves.

So he sent a few more messages until he finally got an address, then he passed the phone back. She grinned at him. It was an hour's drive, towards the outskirts of the city where it melded into the suburbs, but they pulled into a driveway that was already packed with cars. When he knocked, the door cracked open barely an inch after a long pause, and he found a shifter peering at him through it with a slit-pupiled eye. He realized that he must have reverted back to fully human form some time since they'd left the station, so he concentrated to change his own eyes, and the person on the other side let out a long sigh of relief. The door closed, and he heard the sound of chains and such being taken off, then it opened fully.

He could see into the living room where several shifters sat peering towards them, and was about to introduce himself when Shantelle pushed past him. She had... an impressive presence for someone who was a good six inches shorter than him, he had to admit.

"Let's get this party started, bitches!" she declared. "No offense. So, y'all the ones in charge of this thing?"

There were looks of startlement, alarm, and fear passed between the seven who sat there. Richard chuckled and stepped inside. He considered for a moment that the term "biker bitch" might have been invented just for the purpose of describing this woman. She set her hands on her hips and looked between them.

"God, they got y'all whipped already? C'mon, do you stand for something or not? Or are you gonna let them keep standing on you? What's on the menu? What's the plan? When's the next protest or rally or whatever? I bet they don't pull that shit again when you've got a bunch of granny dykes and grandpa fags alongside ya. I'd suggest kids, even, but that's probably a bad idea with how the last thing went. We have to force them to back off, but we don't wanna put people in unnecessary danger. And we can't stop, so what's next?"

They stared at her, then turned their attention to Richard. He could only shrug and gesture back to the leather-clad lesbian. "She got me out of jail?"

"And that's another thing we need to organize. Bail funds. They love putting people in the pokey, but they can only keep them so long, legally. So, lawyers, too. I still know a few from back in the day, and I know people with contacts. We can get this rolling properly if we can get things organized on the back end and keep up the pressure."

"So, what kind of shifter are you?" one of them, a female wolf, finally asked.

"The kind that shifts hearts and minds, if you'll let me help. I'm just a plain old human, to answer your question, but I know what you're going through. And hey, maybe I'll take a few walks on the wild side while we're at this. I may be an old dog, but I can still learn new tricks."

She winked at the wolfess, who looked far less offended than Richard might expect with the canine puns. And then they started talking.

Richard managed to put a call in to his boss, received an apology that wasn't really an apology, and decided to hang up before he could be told not to come in for his next shift. They'd have to do that to his face, with him staring them in the eye. He managed to get hold of Melody through one of the organizers, and she arrived with food and coffee for everyone around two. He was surprised to find that she had several other people with her, members of his crew. He was equally surprised when he found himself being deferred to by them. And when the organizers inquired as to what could be expected in terms of medical support for the now-imminent second protest, it was to him that the question was directed.

It felt... good. It felt right. He was doing something. He wasn't just hedging his bets, sitting on the sidelines, waiting for someone else to take the risk for him. Even at the event yesterday, he had been only barely involved. That had changed now. He had changed now. And he was glad of it. It gave him something to hold onto other than hate. It gave him hope.

The End

Tags: human, shifter, shapeshifter, emotional, no sex, nosex, clean, plot progression

Summary: Richard finds himself being bailed out of jail after the protest by a familiar face. And he finds that they happen to have some good advice to help the Shifter Rights movement gain more traction and keep up momentum.