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Brian stumbled back, his stubby legs scrambling to recover from Terry's shove. He glanced up, scared and angry, to see Terry looming over him, his jerk friends flanking him to either side. Well, maybe looming was an exaggeration - Terry wasn't that much taller in reality, but in a situation like this, it was enough to make a difference.

"Well? You gonna give it up now, ya little punk?"

"S-screw you!" Brian managed to stammer out, anger momentarily winning out over fear. "I'm not giving you anything?"

"Oh, so what, you're a fighter now, ya poofy little brat?" Terry leaned back, laughing as he flashed his sharp, white canine teeth. "You really think you can stand up to me? With your stupid fluffy face and your stupid puffy tail? Yer just some pathetic crossbreed mutt, and you think you can stand up to someone with purebred wolven heritage like me? Hah!"

Terry reached out to flick his round, fluffy, and admittedly not particularly wolf-like ears, which swiveled and puffed out in a display of anger. "I mean, seriously, what was your mom, anyway? Some sort of sniveling little rodent? Way back when, she was probably one of those stubby little tubelike things that ate bugs out of rotting logs or something, living its miserable little life as it waited for a real, proper beast like one of my ancestors to chomp it up and put it out of its pathetic misery. Heh, or maybe she was a ground squirrel burrowing away in the dirt and mud and muck. Or heck, maybe it's both, given the looks of you."

Brian gritted his teeth. It was one thing for Terry to put him down, which he did every day and which Brian was more than used to, but his mom... his nice, kind mom who always wrote a note with a cute little drawing on it and tucked it away in his lunch sack, the same one that the jerk was trying to take from him... somehow, that was too much.

"You better take that back, Terrence." Brian grinned a little as he saw Terry's face screw up in annoyance - everyone knew how much he hated being called his real name. His jerk-wolf friends glanced between the two of them, grinning their stupid little heads off, knowing something was going to happen - probably Brian getting pasted into the turf, but at least for them it was some cruel sort of excitement.

"Like hell I will, you little shit. Your mom's gotta be a pathetic, fluffy, chubby, stumpy little bitch, just like you, and if you think I'm gonna let you off the hook now, you're even dumber than you look."

Brian stood up as tall as he could, letting his adrenaline tense his muscles and fluff up his fur, and while it made him look maybe slightly bigger and more intimidating, he knew it also ringed his head with a diffuse halo of frizzed-out, dirt-colored fur, a poor comparison to the silver-flecked grey of Terry and his friends. Brian didn't really know if the display made him look intimidating rather than the puffy, unmasculine cuteness that he so desperately wanted to escape, but judging from Terry's guffawing reaction he didn't think it was working.

"Wow, you really are a little puffball, aren't you? And here you are, wanting to play with the big boys. Teel you what - I just can't hit anything that cute, so why don't you just hand over your little lunch there, and you can get back to playing hopscotch or having tea or doing whatever a girly little punk like you gets up to."

"No." Brian glared right at Terry, then set his lunch sack down next to him, and balled his stubby fingers into the most convincing fists he could, holding them out in front of him. "Not today. Today you walk away with nothing, or you walk away hurting."

"All right, punk. I gave you a fuckin' chance to walk away, but if you want a good, solid beating, then that's what you're gonna get." Terry took off his jacket and handed it to one of his friends, gesturing for them to step aside. "The only thing you're gonna be eating today is a healthy helping of grass and dirt. Hell, given whatever grungy rodents are in your family tree, I bet you'll probably enjoy it."

He advanced on Brian, his own paws out, blunt black claws flashing threateningly before they disappeared into a pair of angry fists. For a moment, Brian felt faint, panic washing over his chest. He didn't want a beating. He didn't want to lose, not to a jerk like Terry. This was a fight, though, that his fists couldn't win. Brian grimaced, racking his mind, hearing Terry's taunts ring out in his ears: weak, fluffy, stupid fuzzy head, stupid fuzzy...

Terry, advancing on Brian, took a moment to realize that Brian was actually smiling back at him, a confident, primal sort of grin that Terry had never seen the kid have before. It surprised him enough to make him hesitate, not for long, but just long enough to stop him from properly reacting to the flicker of movement that began suddenly behind the kid's body.

Somehow, Brian's body had enough instinctual muscle memory to make his tail work in the way that he intended, or at least enough to send his tail swinging in a wild, pendulous arc that ended with a fair amount of its heft smacking bodily into Terry's ankle. It buckled in response to the impact, enough to make Terry's foot tilt off to the side at a weird angle, and stumble back a step as he tried to regain his balance. Brian swung his hips back around, moving his tail around with them, whipping it around behind him and back over to the other side, where it smacked into Terry's ankle with equal force and sent him sprawling onto his back in the middle of the grass. Terry growled, flailing his arms as he tried to get up, before his angry cry was cut off by the third swing of the tail smacking hard across his muzzle. His growl quickly shifted to a shocked, hurt whimper, his eyes wildly glancing between the suddenly confident Brian and the fair-weather friends that were already pointing and laughing at his swift humiliation, before another tail blow crashed down between his ears and left his head spinning, his vision wavering as for a moment several versions of Brian seemed to hover over him.

"You know, you're right," Brian said, looking down at the stunned face of his tormentor, hardly believing it himself but more than willing to take advantage of his sudden, unlikely victory. "My mom's some sort of crossbreed, and I don't know exactly what all the breeds are she and I are made up of. It's not just some tube rat, though. More like a beaver, or kangaroo, or heck, maybe even an alligator or something. Whatever it is, my tail isn't just a bunch of fluff, and sure, maybe it looks girly and poofy and cute, but it isn't some useless wagging thing like yours. It's a part of me, just like my fluffy ears and stocky body, and it doesn't like it when you piss it off."

Terry looked back up at him, his face an odd mixture of impotent rage and, somehow, a bit of actual fear. "You little shit! You just wait 'til I get back up, I'm gonna beat you so hard your own little mutt kids are gonna feel it-" He shut up abruptly, though, as the tail swung back down heavily against his chest, knocking the wind back out through his muzzle in a gasping rush.

"No, you're not. The only way I let you up is if you swear to shove off and leave me alone."

Terry growled, but softer this time, glancing around at his friends. "Hey, you jerkbags! You maybe want to give me a hand here?"

The one on the right, who Brian thought was named Frankie or something, shook his head. "Hell naw, man. You got your own dumb ass into this mess. I mean, heh, you just got your ass righteously beat by stumpy little beaver-wolf over here. If'n it were me down there, I'd just suck it up and give in before you humiliate yerself even further. It ain't like your rep's exactly goin' off unscathed here."

Brian looked around to see what the boy had meant, and noticed that a small crowd of kids were standing in a rough semicircle a little ways back, watching the one-sided battle. Terry noticed them too, and his face fell - getting knocked the fuck down, and by a supposedly floofy weakling like Brian to boot, wouldn't exactly do a whole lot for his powers of intimidation.

"I can't fucking believe this," Terry muttered, while Brian stood above him, not quite sure what to do. He'd won, but what was supposed to happen now? He just stood there, waiting for Terry to do something, until a short canine boy wearing a pair of glasses with thick plastic rims walked over and put a hand on his shoulder, followed by a handful of other boys, the sort usually stereotyped as weaklings and misfits. "Hey, Bri, nice job," the boy said, gesturing to Terry's prone form. "If you're okay with it, we, ah... can we take over?"

"Uh, sure," Brian nodded, taking a step back and leaving the boy next to Terry. The boy wasted no time, putting a sneaker-clad foot solidly into Terry's ribs. "This is for breaking my last pair of glasses, you dick!" the boy yelled, a shrill, not particularly masculine declaration, but more than dominant enough with Terry on the ground. The other boys joined in, flailing angrily at Terry with every ounce of rage and strength their little limbs could muster, and got in a good minute of bruising revenge before a teacher showed up and hauled the whole pack of them off to the assistant principal's office, and Terry to the nurse's station with his erstwhile friends chuckling along behind.

Brian, sitting on the bench outside the office and waiting uncomfortably to be called in, knew what the consequences would be. His nice, kind mother would probably be disappointed in him, and his father would probably vacillate between agreeing with her and trying to defend standing up for himself. Still, seeing his still-intact lunch sack clutched to his chest, and knowing what it meant that it was still there, it did seem like one of his proudest moments so far.