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Character Information:
Name: James Ian "Jamie" Heller
Age: 27
History: To understand Jamie Heller's history, one must begin in 1933, with the birth of his grandmother. Lita Malie Napela was born in Hawaii in 1933, into the thriving Hawaiian Mormon community that remains to this day -- Hawaii contains the second oldest operating Mormon temple in the US, and has the largest population of Mormons in a state not bordering Utah. Her family moved to the mainland after Pearl Harbor and remained there until WW2 was over, about four years. The headaches and strange dreams she began suffering just after the move were attributed to stress, and she was so used to them by the time she moved back that no one thought anything of it. Except for this four year gap, Lita grew up on the island, meeting Brandon Wilson the year after her family moved back, in 1946 when she was thirteen and Brandon was twenty. He was a missionary from Utah, and they befriended each other during his mission. They kept in touch, and when Lita was nineteen, she moved to Utah to marry him.
They had five children: Ammon, Sariah, Mosiah, Rachel, and Brenna. Lita always described having a sense of where her children were and how they were doing. She also had a sense that her youngest daughter, Brenna, was very different. Her children sort of fell into two factions: Brenna, Ammon, and Sariah were on one side as more like their mother, and Mosiah and Rachel were on the other side as harsher people, like their father. But Brenna was apart from the pack even more than that. Whenever she had a dream about Brenna, there was fire somewhere in it. When her middle child and youngest son, Mosiah, went missing at age twenty while he and Brenna were away at a school, she knew in her heart that he was dead even before anyone reported him missing. "I just stopped feeling him anywhere," she would say later. She was never sure how else to describe it.
Brenna knew she was different, too. Not just for being the youngest, not just for her hyperactivity (she would be diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood) or her creative nature (she loved to play music), but for something else. She went off to a school at age fifteen where she met Eli, a boy four years older than her. Almost immediately they became boyfriend and girlfriend, even though Brenna was still nominally a member of the Mormon church and Eli was Jewish and not even human, but an earth elemental. Something happened that she won't talk about to this day, but her brother went missing permanently and the selective mutism she'd struggled with for the last few years suddenly eased significantly. When Brenna graduated school, instead of going home she immediately moved into an apartment with Eli just after she'd turned eighteen.
The difference that had set her apart her whole life was revealed when, a few months later, she burned down the apartment building accidentally. No one was seriously hurt in the fire, but Eli told Brenna the suspicion he'd always had that she had just confirmed: she was a fire elemental. The next day, Brenna went to a synagogue to begin conversion to Judaism. The Mormon church stubbornly refused to accept magical people as children of God, while Judaism believed elementals to be angels sent to assist in man's stewardship of the earth. Eli and Brenna married on New Year's Eve when she was eighteen, in a fully Jewish ceremony that the bride's father and one of her sisters refused to attend. Their first daughter, Finn Cora, was born thirteen months later, in January of 1979 when Brenna was nineteen.
They had four more children: Makaio "Kai" Brandon, Ezra Lehi, James "Jamie" Ian, and Ezekiel "Zeke" Bram. Finn was an earth elemental, while Kai, Ezra, and Zeke were all fires, but Jamie seemed to be neither, something that occurs in about 5% of births with two elemental parents. What he was instead was...quiet.
By the time Jamie was two, with Zeke not born yet, it was clear to Brenna that something was wrong. He was behind in language, and didn't understand sentences as complex as he should. If she handed him milk he would start blowing everyone kisses and waving goodnight, because he knew it was naptime, so he was obviously fine with intelligence. But if she said "It's naptime, Jamie" he would seem to not hear or understand her. Also, she would sometimes have to say his name five or six times before he looked up. On the other hand, if she just said "nap" he would usually understand, and he reacted to loud noises. Brenna was making a living with music while Eli became a filmmaker. Kai was very shy and quiet in public, but seemingly trying to make up for it at home, and Finn and Ezra were just as loud as possible every moment. For Jamie, though, it was clear that he started to get stressed out with more than one source of sound, or even one loud one. The louder his family got, the more stressed he got.
Any one of these things alone, Brenna would have written off as "all kids are different" and let him be, but everything combined and especially his language delay seemed to point to something wrong. She didn't want to make the mistake her parents had made, of ignoring that something was wrong with her and letting it get worse and worse until her teens. She brought up her concerns to her husband, who had also noticed soem strange things but hadn't really connected all the dots yet. He sat down with Jamie and used his abilities as an earth elemental to search for anything that was wrong. He found that everything was where it ought to be, physically, especially after checking Ezra for comparison, but that something was slightly weird about his brain. Obviously, a tentative diagnosis of "brain weirdness" freaked Brenna out, so she took him to a doctor immediately.
He failed the traditional hearing test, but when placed in a quiet room with his mother, he consistently responded to his name even without visual cues, and he did a little better on a non-language-based hearing test. The doctor recommended that Brenna and Eli take a sign language class, along with their daughter (the boys were judged too young to sit through a class yet) and start using sign, to see if that worked better for Jamie. He picked it up quickly and used it much more readily and easily than words. Suspecting what the problem was now (an auditory processing disorder is very hard to diagnose, especially in a toddler), the doctor had Jamie placed into hearing therapies around the same time Brenna got pregnant with her fifth child, just after Jamie had turned three.
He'd caught up linguistically by the time he entered first grade, although he still liked to use sign and was given some of his harder lessons in sign language for the first couple of grades. He was also given a hearing aid when he entered school, which helped. But even still, something wasn't quite right. He was still quiet and withdrawn, and crawled into bed with his parents more often than any of his brothers, even the younger one. By age 9, Brenna was worried again, this time about his nightmares, and was considering supernatural causes. Sometimes he even seemed to have waking nightmares, and when he was a baby he sometimes seemed to see things that weren't there, clinging to her leg while crying at apparently nothing, although she found it hard to really call that a symptom, given his disorder and the propensity of babies and toddlers to cry at nothing. Thinking of her mother, she began to wonder if Lita might have had the Sight, and whether it might have skipped a generation to be passed to Jamie. None of her siblings had it that she knew of, but one of them had always been sort of off and was now dead, so that was a possibility, and it was also possible she just didn't know about it.
Still, Brenna figured that as long as it wasn't really something one could really test for (there are tests, but most of them are only conclusive if you pass, as there are a lot of ways to fail that don't equal "you don't have the Sight"), she might as well investigate it in a nonthreatening way. She happened to know a woman who was the mother of one of Zeke's friends, and so she approached her after school one day, when they were both picking their sons up. They sent all the boys to go play in the playground and sat on a bench nearby to watch them.
"You saw my other son, Jamie? With the eyes?" Jamie's blue eyes were striking at that age, and wouldn't darken until puberty. "He's over there in the corner, digging in the sand."
Lavinia nodded. "I saw the hearing aid, is he deaf?"
"No, no, sounds just get mixed up sometimes. Auditory processing disorder. He does use sign, though."
"Ohh, okay. The hearing aid helps by making things clearer, I assume."
"That's what it seems to be. Anyway, that's not why I asked you over here."
"I didn't think so, no."
"...Didn't think so in a Sight way, or a social way?"
Lavinia smiled. "A little of both."
"Okay, well...we think he might have the Sight. Or, I do. Eli's not that convinced. I think he has the Sight."
"That's...big, Brenna."
"I know. Please feel free to say no, I mean it, I know this is a big ask, but...do you think you could..."
"Talk to him?"
"...Yeah."
"What makes you think so?"
"Well...it's a lot of little things."
"It's always little things. I'm not saying no or doubting your instincts, I know you're a great mom, Brenna. Hell, the way you corral four boys and a teenage girl you could teach us all a few things. I have my hands full with just one. I just want to know what he's saying or doing, so if I do talk to him I know what I'm looking at."
"Right. Okay. Well, he crawls into our bed with nightmares...probably twice a week. Even Zeke doesn't do that anymore. I mean, Zeke is a fire like me and a little daredevil, Jamie's the quiet one of the family, so I know I might be comparing apples and oranges. But his dreams are never, like, kid nightmares, when he tells us about them and we understand. I mean, we've been speaking it most of his life but it's hard to interpret sign in the dark, half asleep, rapidfire, by a child, and when he's freaking out like that he doesn't talk. But anyway, his nightmares are about, like, people, and they're the kind of things that really happen to people. All his dreams seem to be about things that really happen to people. One time he described a high school graduation. I mean, I'm not saying he couldn't have seen one on TV and described that, but he's definitely never seen a man rape and murder his wife, you can't even show that in an R-rated movie even if he had somehow seen one, at least not in enough detail that you'd know what you were looking at without already understanding. And he's had that dream more than once. There's been a couple of times where I was pretty sure he hadn't been asleep but he came to me crying anyway. Even as a baby, sometimes I'd catch him crying at nothing, I mean, I know babies do that but I don't know, it was a thing. And he just seems intuitive. Not in the way like a telepath, where he knows what we're thinking, but I've had him tell me to be careful of something and then either I am and I narrowly miss the thing or I don't and wish I had been."
"Okay, so...seemingly accurate but unverifiable dreams. Nightmares and dreams he shouldn't have the basis to be able to have. Possible waking visions. Really strong intuition. That's all?"
"That's not enough?"
"No, it is, I'm just asking."
"Yeah, that's all."
"Okay. Also, it's really not a big ask. I'd be happy to talk to him. I'm just saying a nine-year-old with the Sight is big. It's just..." Lavinia looked over at Jamie and shook her head a little, voice a little quieter. "Terrifying. For him, I mean. It's terrifying at that age, even if you do know what's happening."
"Yeah," Brenna agreed, looking over at Jamie. Ezra had come over and was now directing him in the building of a castle. "Yeah, he just seems really terrified. He's...fearful. Almost all the time. He doesn't like to be away from me, see how he keeps looking over at us? He's checking to make sure I'm here. He freaks out when I have to go on business trips."
"Yeah, I see it. Well, just from what you've told me, it seems possible that he does. It's also possible that it's something else, maybe something that contributes to the hearing disorder. I mean, the Sight likes to mess with your brain, but not usually in that way."
"Does it mess with your brain?" Brenna asked, curious.
"Oh god yes. You name it. Migraines, nosebleeds, vomiting, fainting, fucked up balance...that's just, like, the five most common things that I get with a vision."
"Wow. Well, um...he doesn't seem to have any of that."
"That doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have it, he's just very, very lucky if he does. There's also a possibility that it'll surface as he gets older."
"Oh! Speaking of older. I also wanted to tell you about my mom. I think she had the Sight and it might have skipped a generation since I came out fire. My parents were human..."
Brenna went on to describe her mother's symptoms to Lavinia, who agreed that Lita sounded like a powerful Seer, though unidentified and untrained. Finally, Lavinia suggested that that Sunday (the Hellers were still fairly devout Jews, including eating kosher and keeping a Saturday sabbath), she bring her son over for a playdate with Zeke, and while the boys played she could talk to Jamie.
Brenna sat in the room while the two of them colored and talked, and watched Jamie light the hell up. They were obviously connecting very closely, and Lavinia kept glancing at Brenna and nodding when Jamie wasn't looking. Soon the coloring books were abandoned, and Lavinia was teaching an excited Jamie to read tarot cards, which he took to like a duck to water. Lavinia let Jamie keep those cards, explaning to Brenna that it's easiest for a natural Seer to learn with cards that have already been broken in and passed down to you from another Seer. She gave Brenna the titles of a few books to find and give to Jamie, some for kids and some not so much, but Jamie was bright enough to read all of them.
For the next year, she unofficially taught Jamie about the Sight and helped him learn how to use and control it, coming over every Sunday for Zeke and Theodore to play while she worked with Jamie in the next room. Then Brenna would leave the brood at home with Eli, Lavinia would leave Theodore with his nanny, and Brenna would take her out to dinner as unofficial payment for the lessons. The two women developed a close friendship of their own, a relationship much like an older and younger sister. Brenna had often wondered what it would be like not to be the baby of the family, and Lavinia was eleven years younger than Brenna even though they each had a son the same age. They'd both had their first child at nineteen, but Brenna's oldest was considerably older than Lavinia's only.
One weekend, however, Jamie was withdrawn, hiding in his bedroom with his earplugs in and refusing to come out when Lavinia came, shouting through the door at her to go away. The two women shrugged and went to dinner as normal. When Brenna got home, Jamie told her "I hope you said goodbye and told her you loved her."
"Of course I did, sweetie. I always do."
"Good. She's not coming back."
Brenna tried hard to write this off as the imaginings of a child, but knowing what she knew about Jamie, now ten, it wasn't easy. After that, Brenna couldn't even be surprised when, on Wednesday, she heard that Lavinia had passed away. She'd been in a room with Theodore and a friend after Theodore had gotten out of school, and she'd passed out with a vision from which she never woke up. It turned out all the damage the Sight did to her was not cosmetic or just an annoyance; she had an aneurysm that had been building for most of her life, and finally burst when she was twenty-six. Jamie had had a vision of the event from the point of view of Lavinia's friend, which was why he rejected her company. She was also newly pregnant at the time.
She considered not bringing him, but eventually Brenna and Jamie attended the funeral held for Lavinia and "her new angel." The funeral was held with the assumption that the baby belonged to her husband, a man decades older than she was, but Jamie contradicted this, pointing to a man in the corner. "It was his. They were doing it since she was Finn's age. That's the man I Saw when I Saw her die." Brenna watched the man closely for a moment and realized he seemed a lot more devastated than seemed to be merited by just losing a friend, but that it made sense for watching your lover and the mother of your child die. She contemplated Theodore's parentage, but decided he looked too obviously like his father to be anyone else's.
Brenna waited an appropriate amount of time to let Jamie mourn, then found a professional to see him for lessons twice a week. She also put Jamie into hearing therapy again, half an hour a week, on the professional's advice, because on the off chance his disorder was caused by his Sight, strengthening it would also worsen the hearing disorder. She was still glad that she'd started Jamie's learning with Lavinia, certain that he wouldn't have had the confidence to learn from someone more forbidding in an unfamiliar office, and that the friendly, young, kind woman who was a friend of the family was the best possible person to make his abilities less scary and show him that using them could be okay -- Brenna could see that she struggled, but she admirably never showed Jamie the toll the Sight took on her until her death. Nevertheless, Jamie progressed much more quickly and ably with a professional teacher, and this woman continued working with Jamie until he was thirteen. At this point, she told Brenna that Jamie had all the tools he would need to control his Sight as he grew up and grew into his power, and that he was already very adept for a boy of his age. Jamie went back to check in and brush up until he was eighteen, but he'd been taught very well and rarely had problems with his Sight.
At least, problems that could be solved by a teacher. Jamie was still Seeing bad things as much or more than good things, and his ability to choose what he Saw was and still is limited. He took to hiding in his room with his earplugs in and locking the door, unable to be prised out for love or money. He was fifteen when September 11 happened, and the psychic shock he got in August was enough to keep him out of the first two days of sophomore year. Not all people with the Sight are necessarily attuned to important events, so despite some people with the Sight getting visions, they weren't organized enough to connect any dots, and no one person had a clear enough vision to get anyone important to listen to them, on top of general public disbelief in Sight. There were rumors of people who'd had visions of 9/11 disappearing, like being disappeared by the government, but since Jamie was underage and had just slept it off instead of trying to tell anyone what he Saw, he escaped any suspicion. Still, all this only worsened his moodiness, and honestly, his parents couldn't bring themselves to blame him. They just tried to make sure he was social sometimes and went to synagogue with the family, but otherwise left him to his rebellion.
Jamie went to college, where he majored in sociology and became a social worker upon his graduation in 2008. By 2010, he was pretty thoroughly burned out. He was using his Sight to trade away bad cases before he'd started on them and to know which cases did and didn't need attention, so he had one of the most well-managed workloads in his division. He was also very strict about leaving work at work -- he worked from 9 to 6 every week and a half day on Saturdays, and that was it. Even still, he Saw a lot more bad things than good, and the entire office just held too many bad memories. The death of his grandmother, from whom he'd gotten his Sight, cemented his resolve, and he gave the social services office two weeks to distribute his cases before he was gone.
Unsure what to do and more or less decided to stop trying to affect the world, because half the time his attempts to avert his visions coming true ended up causing them, Jamie sat down with his dad at one Saturday dinner and expressed his uncertainty. After tossing a lot of ideas around, Eli invited Jamie to come to set and see if set design interested him -- Jamie had done an emphasis in visual art in college, and had Seen more gore than most people have seen, a useful tool for a horror director to have in his arsenal. He started out receiving minimum wage to look at the gory bits of scenes in movies and say "yes, this looks right" or "no, fix this part." He took a course in theater makeup and started actually helping with makeup, prosethetics, and set dressing. He's still doing this, earning enough money to support himself most months while he goes through film school. His eventual career goal is to become an art director.
Personality: A good word for Jamie is "self-contained." He's quiet and introverted and sees himself as an observer. That's the role the universe gave him, so it's a role he's content to occupy. It's pretty clear to him that he was chosen by whatever consciousness may exist, given that he comes from an entire family of a different magical creature, although there's some evidence his grandmother was also a powerful Seer who went untrained.
Physical details: Jamie will always, unless he's actively in the process of switching them or asleep and needs his alarm to wake him up, be wearing either a hearing aid or earplugs. He usually sleeps with earplugs in, but if he knows he won't get up when he needs to be without an alarm, he'll leave them out. He doesn't sleep as well with no earplugs. Jamie has an auditory processing disorder. One of the treatments for this is "sound field amplification," which in this context is a hearing aid -- making the sounds louder helps him distinguish them (although this wouldn't work if he hadn't undergone a fair few bouts of audio therapy, which he did). When he just doesn't want to deal with it, because trying to hear can be exhausting, he'll just put his earplugs in and give his brain a rest for awhile. Earplugs don't completely eliminate sound, but they block harder-to-distinguish high frequencies and dull everything else down to an ignorable level. Obviously Jamie is fully verbal, but he knows sign language (as does his whole family) and will use it when he needs to. Words tend to take a few seconds to form and come out of his mouth, longer the more stressed he is, so he'll just sign to communicate more quickly.
Abilities:
Name: James Ian "Jamie" Heller
Age: 27
History: To understand Jamie Heller's history, one must begin in 1933, with the birth of his grandmother. Lita Malie Napela was born in Hawaii in 1933, into the thriving Hawaiian Mormon community that remains to this day -- Hawaii contains the second oldest operating Mormon temple in the US, and has the largest population of Mormons in a state not bordering Utah. Her family moved to the mainland after Pearl Harbor and remained there until WW2 was over, about four years. The headaches and strange dreams she began suffering just after the move were attributed to stress, and she was so used to them by the time she moved back that no one thought anything of it. Except for this four year gap, Lita grew up on the island, meeting Brandon Wilson the year after her family moved back, in 1946 when she was thirteen and Brandon was twenty. He was a missionary from Utah, and they befriended each other during his mission. They kept in touch, and when Lita was nineteen, she moved to Utah to marry him.
They had five children: Ammon, Sariah, Mosiah, Rachel, and Brenna. Lita always described having a sense of where her children were and how they were doing. She also had a sense that her youngest daughter, Brenna, was very different. Her children sort of fell into two factions: Brenna, Ammon, and Sariah were on one side as more like their mother, and Mosiah and Rachel were on the other side as harsher people, like their father. But Brenna was apart from the pack even more than that. Whenever she had a dream about Brenna, there was fire somewhere in it. When her middle child and youngest son, Mosiah, went missing at age twenty while he and Brenna were away at a school, she knew in her heart that he was dead even before anyone reported him missing. "I just stopped feeling him anywhere," she would say later. She was never sure how else to describe it.
Brenna knew she was different, too. Not just for being the youngest, not just for her hyperactivity (she would be diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood) or her creative nature (she loved to play music), but for something else. She went off to a school at age fifteen where she met Eli, a boy four years older than her. Almost immediately they became boyfriend and girlfriend, even though Brenna was still nominally a member of the Mormon church and Eli was Jewish and not even human, but an earth elemental. Something happened that she won't talk about to this day, but her brother went missing permanently and the selective mutism she'd struggled with for the last few years suddenly eased significantly. When Brenna graduated school, instead of going home she immediately moved into an apartment with Eli just after she'd turned eighteen.
The difference that had set her apart her whole life was revealed when, a few months later, she burned down the apartment building accidentally. No one was seriously hurt in the fire, but Eli told Brenna the suspicion he'd always had that she had just confirmed: she was a fire elemental. The next day, Brenna went to a synagogue to begin conversion to Judaism. The Mormon church stubbornly refused to accept magical people as children of God, while Judaism believed elementals to be angels sent to assist in man's stewardship of the earth. Eli and Brenna married on New Year's Eve when she was eighteen, in a fully Jewish ceremony that the bride's father and one of her sisters refused to attend. Their first daughter, Finn Cora, was born thirteen months later, in January of 1979 when Brenna was nineteen.
They had four more children: Makaio "Kai" Brandon, Ezra Lehi, James "Jamie" Ian, and Ezekiel "Zeke" Bram. Finn was an earth elemental, while Kai, Ezra, and Zeke were all fires, but Jamie seemed to be neither, something that occurs in about 5% of births with two elemental parents. What he was instead was...quiet.
By the time Jamie was two, with Zeke not born yet, it was clear to Brenna that something was wrong. He was behind in language, and didn't understand sentences as complex as he should. If she handed him milk he would start blowing everyone kisses and waving goodnight, because he knew it was naptime, so he was obviously fine with intelligence. But if she said "It's naptime, Jamie" he would seem to not hear or understand her. Also, she would sometimes have to say his name five or six times before he looked up. On the other hand, if she just said "nap" he would usually understand, and he reacted to loud noises. Brenna was making a living with music while Eli became a filmmaker. Kai was very shy and quiet in public, but seemingly trying to make up for it at home, and Finn and Ezra were just as loud as possible every moment. For Jamie, though, it was clear that he started to get stressed out with more than one source of sound, or even one loud one. The louder his family got, the more stressed he got.
Any one of these things alone, Brenna would have written off as "all kids are different" and let him be, but everything combined and especially his language delay seemed to point to something wrong. She didn't want to make the mistake her parents had made, of ignoring that something was wrong with her and letting it get worse and worse until her teens. She brought up her concerns to her husband, who had also noticed soem strange things but hadn't really connected all the dots yet. He sat down with Jamie and used his abilities as an earth elemental to search for anything that was wrong. He found that everything was where it ought to be, physically, especially after checking Ezra for comparison, but that something was slightly weird about his brain. Obviously, a tentative diagnosis of "brain weirdness" freaked Brenna out, so she took him to a doctor immediately.
He failed the traditional hearing test, but when placed in a quiet room with his mother, he consistently responded to his name even without visual cues, and he did a little better on a non-language-based hearing test. The doctor recommended that Brenna and Eli take a sign language class, along with their daughter (the boys were judged too young to sit through a class yet) and start using sign, to see if that worked better for Jamie. He picked it up quickly and used it much more readily and easily than words. Suspecting what the problem was now (an auditory processing disorder is very hard to diagnose, especially in a toddler), the doctor had Jamie placed into hearing therapies around the same time Brenna got pregnant with her fifth child, just after Jamie had turned three.
He'd caught up linguistically by the time he entered first grade, although he still liked to use sign and was given some of his harder lessons in sign language for the first couple of grades. He was also given a hearing aid when he entered school, which helped. But even still, something wasn't quite right. He was still quiet and withdrawn, and crawled into bed with his parents more often than any of his brothers, even the younger one. By age 9, Brenna was worried again, this time about his nightmares, and was considering supernatural causes. Sometimes he even seemed to have waking nightmares, and when he was a baby he sometimes seemed to see things that weren't there, clinging to her leg while crying at apparently nothing, although she found it hard to really call that a symptom, given his disorder and the propensity of babies and toddlers to cry at nothing. Thinking of her mother, she began to wonder if Lita might have had the Sight, and whether it might have skipped a generation to be passed to Jamie. None of her siblings had it that she knew of, but one of them had always been sort of off and was now dead, so that was a possibility, and it was also possible she just didn't know about it.
Still, Brenna figured that as long as it wasn't really something one could really test for (there are tests, but most of them are only conclusive if you pass, as there are a lot of ways to fail that don't equal "you don't have the Sight"), she might as well investigate it in a nonthreatening way. She happened to know a woman who was the mother of one of Zeke's friends, and so she approached her after school one day, when they were both picking their sons up. They sent all the boys to go play in the playground and sat on a bench nearby to watch them.
"You saw my other son, Jamie? With the eyes?" Jamie's blue eyes were striking at that age, and wouldn't darken until puberty. "He's over there in the corner, digging in the sand."
Lavinia nodded. "I saw the hearing aid, is he deaf?"
"No, no, sounds just get mixed up sometimes. Auditory processing disorder. He does use sign, though."
"Ohh, okay. The hearing aid helps by making things clearer, I assume."
"That's what it seems to be. Anyway, that's not why I asked you over here."
"I didn't think so, no."
"...Didn't think so in a Sight way, or a social way?"
Lavinia smiled. "A little of both."
"Okay, well...we think he might have the Sight. Or, I do. Eli's not that convinced. I think he has the Sight."
"That's...big, Brenna."
"I know. Please feel free to say no, I mean it, I know this is a big ask, but...do you think you could..."
"Talk to him?"
"...Yeah."
"What makes you think so?"
"Well...it's a lot of little things."
"It's always little things. I'm not saying no or doubting your instincts, I know you're a great mom, Brenna. Hell, the way you corral four boys and a teenage girl you could teach us all a few things. I have my hands full with just one. I just want to know what he's saying or doing, so if I do talk to him I know what I'm looking at."
"Right. Okay. Well, he crawls into our bed with nightmares...probably twice a week. Even Zeke doesn't do that anymore. I mean, Zeke is a fire like me and a little daredevil, Jamie's the quiet one of the family, so I know I might be comparing apples and oranges. But his dreams are never, like, kid nightmares, when he tells us about them and we understand. I mean, we've been speaking it most of his life but it's hard to interpret sign in the dark, half asleep, rapidfire, by a child, and when he's freaking out like that he doesn't talk. But anyway, his nightmares are about, like, people, and they're the kind of things that really happen to people. All his dreams seem to be about things that really happen to people. One time he described a high school graduation. I mean, I'm not saying he couldn't have seen one on TV and described that, but he's definitely never seen a man rape and murder his wife, you can't even show that in an R-rated movie even if he had somehow seen one, at least not in enough detail that you'd know what you were looking at without already understanding. And he's had that dream more than once. There's been a couple of times where I was pretty sure he hadn't been asleep but he came to me crying anyway. Even as a baby, sometimes I'd catch him crying at nothing, I mean, I know babies do that but I don't know, it was a thing. And he just seems intuitive. Not in the way like a telepath, where he knows what we're thinking, but I've had him tell me to be careful of something and then either I am and I narrowly miss the thing or I don't and wish I had been."
"Okay, so...seemingly accurate but unverifiable dreams. Nightmares and dreams he shouldn't have the basis to be able to have. Possible waking visions. Really strong intuition. That's all?"
"That's not enough?"
"No, it is, I'm just asking."
"Yeah, that's all."
"Okay. Also, it's really not a big ask. I'd be happy to talk to him. I'm just saying a nine-year-old with the Sight is big. It's just..." Lavinia looked over at Jamie and shook her head a little, voice a little quieter. "Terrifying. For him, I mean. It's terrifying at that age, even if you do know what's happening."
"Yeah," Brenna agreed, looking over at Jamie. Ezra had come over and was now directing him in the building of a castle. "Yeah, he just seems really terrified. He's...fearful. Almost all the time. He doesn't like to be away from me, see how he keeps looking over at us? He's checking to make sure I'm here. He freaks out when I have to go on business trips."
"Yeah, I see it. Well, just from what you've told me, it seems possible that he does. It's also possible that it's something else, maybe something that contributes to the hearing disorder. I mean, the Sight likes to mess with your brain, but not usually in that way."
"Does it mess with your brain?" Brenna asked, curious.
"Oh god yes. You name it. Migraines, nosebleeds, vomiting, fainting, fucked up balance...that's just, like, the five most common things that I get with a vision."
"Wow. Well, um...he doesn't seem to have any of that."
"That doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have it, he's just very, very lucky if he does. There's also a possibility that it'll surface as he gets older."
"Oh! Speaking of older. I also wanted to tell you about my mom. I think she had the Sight and it might have skipped a generation since I came out fire. My parents were human..."
Brenna went on to describe her mother's symptoms to Lavinia, who agreed that Lita sounded like a powerful Seer, though unidentified and untrained. Finally, Lavinia suggested that that Sunday (the Hellers were still fairly devout Jews, including eating kosher and keeping a Saturday sabbath), she bring her son over for a playdate with Zeke, and while the boys played she could talk to Jamie.
Brenna sat in the room while the two of them colored and talked, and watched Jamie light the hell up. They were obviously connecting very closely, and Lavinia kept glancing at Brenna and nodding when Jamie wasn't looking. Soon the coloring books were abandoned, and Lavinia was teaching an excited Jamie to read tarot cards, which he took to like a duck to water. Lavinia let Jamie keep those cards, explaning to Brenna that it's easiest for a natural Seer to learn with cards that have already been broken in and passed down to you from another Seer. She gave Brenna the titles of a few books to find and give to Jamie, some for kids and some not so much, but Jamie was bright enough to read all of them.
For the next year, she unofficially taught Jamie about the Sight and helped him learn how to use and control it, coming over every Sunday for Zeke and Theodore to play while she worked with Jamie in the next room. Then Brenna would leave the brood at home with Eli, Lavinia would leave Theodore with his nanny, and Brenna would take her out to dinner as unofficial payment for the lessons. The two women developed a close friendship of their own, a relationship much like an older and younger sister. Brenna had often wondered what it would be like not to be the baby of the family, and Lavinia was eleven years younger than Brenna even though they each had a son the same age. They'd both had their first child at nineteen, but Brenna's oldest was considerably older than Lavinia's only.
One weekend, however, Jamie was withdrawn, hiding in his bedroom with his earplugs in and refusing to come out when Lavinia came, shouting through the door at her to go away. The two women shrugged and went to dinner as normal. When Brenna got home, Jamie told her "I hope you said goodbye and told her you loved her."
"Of course I did, sweetie. I always do."
"Good. She's not coming back."
Brenna tried hard to write this off as the imaginings of a child, but knowing what she knew about Jamie, now ten, it wasn't easy. After that, Brenna couldn't even be surprised when, on Wednesday, she heard that Lavinia had passed away. She'd been in a room with Theodore and a friend after Theodore had gotten out of school, and she'd passed out with a vision from which she never woke up. It turned out all the damage the Sight did to her was not cosmetic or just an annoyance; she had an aneurysm that had been building for most of her life, and finally burst when she was twenty-six. Jamie had had a vision of the event from the point of view of Lavinia's friend, which was why he rejected her company. She was also newly pregnant at the time.
She considered not bringing him, but eventually Brenna and Jamie attended the funeral held for Lavinia and "her new angel." The funeral was held with the assumption that the baby belonged to her husband, a man decades older than she was, but Jamie contradicted this, pointing to a man in the corner. "It was his. They were doing it since she was Finn's age. That's the man I Saw when I Saw her die." Brenna watched the man closely for a moment and realized he seemed a lot more devastated than seemed to be merited by just losing a friend, but that it made sense for watching your lover and the mother of your child die. She contemplated Theodore's parentage, but decided he looked too obviously like his father to be anyone else's.
Brenna waited an appropriate amount of time to let Jamie mourn, then found a professional to see him for lessons twice a week. She also put Jamie into hearing therapy again, half an hour a week, on the professional's advice, because on the off chance his disorder was caused by his Sight, strengthening it would also worsen the hearing disorder. She was still glad that she'd started Jamie's learning with Lavinia, certain that he wouldn't have had the confidence to learn from someone more forbidding in an unfamiliar office, and that the friendly, young, kind woman who was a friend of the family was the best possible person to make his abilities less scary and show him that using them could be okay -- Brenna could see that she struggled, but she admirably never showed Jamie the toll the Sight took on her until her death. Nevertheless, Jamie progressed much more quickly and ably with a professional teacher, and this woman continued working with Jamie until he was thirteen. At this point, she told Brenna that Jamie had all the tools he would need to control his Sight as he grew up and grew into his power, and that he was already very adept for a boy of his age. Jamie went back to check in and brush up until he was eighteen, but he'd been taught very well and rarely had problems with his Sight.
At least, problems that could be solved by a teacher. Jamie was still Seeing bad things as much or more than good things, and his ability to choose what he Saw was and still is limited. He took to hiding in his room with his earplugs in and locking the door, unable to be prised out for love or money. He was fifteen when September 11 happened, and the psychic shock he got in August was enough to keep him out of the first two days of sophomore year. Not all people with the Sight are necessarily attuned to important events, so despite some people with the Sight getting visions, they weren't organized enough to connect any dots, and no one person had a clear enough vision to get anyone important to listen to them, on top of general public disbelief in Sight. There were rumors of people who'd had visions of 9/11 disappearing, like being disappeared by the government, but since Jamie was underage and had just slept it off instead of trying to tell anyone what he Saw, he escaped any suspicion. Still, all this only worsened his moodiness, and honestly, his parents couldn't bring themselves to blame him. They just tried to make sure he was social sometimes and went to synagogue with the family, but otherwise left him to his rebellion.
Jamie went to college, where he majored in sociology and became a social worker upon his graduation in 2008. By 2010, he was pretty thoroughly burned out. He was using his Sight to trade away bad cases before he'd started on them and to know which cases did and didn't need attention, so he had one of the most well-managed workloads in his division. He was also very strict about leaving work at work -- he worked from 9 to 6 every week and a half day on Saturdays, and that was it. Even still, he Saw a lot more bad things than good, and the entire office just held too many bad memories. The death of his grandmother, from whom he'd gotten his Sight, cemented his resolve, and he gave the social services office two weeks to distribute his cases before he was gone.
Unsure what to do and more or less decided to stop trying to affect the world, because half the time his attempts to avert his visions coming true ended up causing them, Jamie sat down with his dad at one Saturday dinner and expressed his uncertainty. After tossing a lot of ideas around, Eli invited Jamie to come to set and see if set design interested him -- Jamie had done an emphasis in visual art in college, and had Seen more gore than most people have seen, a useful tool for a horror director to have in his arsenal. He started out receiving minimum wage to look at the gory bits of scenes in movies and say "yes, this looks right" or "no, fix this part." He took a course in theater makeup and started actually helping with makeup, prosethetics, and set dressing. He's still doing this, earning enough money to support himself most months while he goes through film school. His eventual career goal is to become an art director.
Personality: A good word for Jamie is "self-contained." He's quiet and introverted and sees himself as an observer. That's the role the universe gave him, so it's a role he's content to occupy. It's pretty clear to him that he was chosen by whatever consciousness may exist, given that he comes from an entire family of a different magical creature, although there's some evidence his grandmother was also a powerful Seer who went untrained.
Physical details: Jamie will always, unless he's actively in the process of switching them or asleep and needs his alarm to wake him up, be wearing either a hearing aid or earplugs. He usually sleeps with earplugs in, but if he knows he won't get up when he needs to be without an alarm, he'll leave them out. He doesn't sleep as well with no earplugs. Jamie has an auditory processing disorder. One of the treatments for this is "sound field amplification," which in this context is a hearing aid -- making the sounds louder helps him distinguish them (although this wouldn't work if he hadn't undergone a fair few bouts of audio therapy, which he did). When he just doesn't want to deal with it, because trying to hear can be exhausting, he'll just put his earplugs in and give his brain a rest for awhile. Earplugs don't completely eliminate sound, but they block harder-to-distinguish high frequencies and dull everything else down to an ignorable level. Obviously Jamie is fully verbal, but he knows sign language (as does his whole family) and will use it when he needs to. Words tend to take a few seconds to form and come out of his mouth, longer the more stressed he is, so he'll just sign to communicate more quickly.
Abilities:
