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inlocusmads · 5 months

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I really hope Blades 2 (in case there's no set up for #3) lets us choose our own ending, be it continue adventuring, settle down, etc. let me explain:

(Spoiler alert for Blades Book 1 and 2, Guinevere, Across the Void, Distant Shores, Endless Summer, Bloodbound, Perfect Match and some light spoilers for TC&TF, TPA, RCD, HSS:CA, AME, The Elementalists and Kindred. Phew.)

A lot of the times choices hammers down like this inescapable endings of Weddings as a Final Resolution which suffice to say isn't bad inherently, but is used to conclude in books that don't really call for it (such as the really underwhelming LI confession in TPA, a book largely unfocused on romance; Maggie's wedding conclusion in Kindred and MC's own speculations over whether or not they'll say yes to their LI proposing; the weird Ms Match ending when it was really supposed to be about MC and Jack/Jacqueline looking past their rivalry and be able to work together).

Marriage, wedding and kids work in books that have some kind of long-term set-up and payoff such as in TRR, TFS and to an extent, two-part and three-part books. In books with lesser chapters and not a lot of lore-building (TC&TF and TRR both outweigh Blades in terms of lore that we're aware of), it would be just.. strange, in my opinion to have a mandatory Wedding As A Final Resolution ending as a last-minute hail mary option because other endings the writers could've thought of, weren't feasible.

It is preassumptive of me to speculate about the ending with little to no information given, but I have been pretty sceptical of the way PB writes their endings. Often times, they just throw 16+ chapters of worldbuilding and characterisation out the window and scramble up to conclude it in the most plausible way they can - sitcom-style with all the friends gathered for one last adventure or have weddings, babies and a romantic ending 90% of the time. This is in itself, decent enough for a book about romance, but for books like Blades where the main character isn't a blank slate and has some discerning powers that sets them apart from the other characters, a half-put together happily ever after doesn't seem to do them a service at all.

Books like Distant Shores relies largely on a halphazardly put cliffhanger with MC meeting a figure from the past, while raising the LI's baby (I'm not sure how it is with Charlie's and Oliver's routes, but I do remember vaguely that the F!MC could have a baby with Edward) with this weird set-up for a book 2 that never came and simultaneously leaving readers in speculation as that was the conclusion they had to work with, when MC literally had time-travelling powers from the compass and a better ending could be written off, without having to turn MC as an audience surrogate character overnight.

Even Crimes 2's conclusion had Trystan telling MC they love them, when a lot of time could have been dedicated to exploring and expanding on Trystan's character, instead of them just being this traumatised child and writing up some obvious parallels to MC rather than treat them as a character on their own. Everything seemingly goes back to normal, the bullet from the Chekhov's gun never really hits them and it becomes somewhat of a joke to critique the Thornes as this murderous clan as opposed to a real family with fucked-up issues. It cheapens the whole storyline. It's the last-minute resort to sort of write a conclusion and what better than to rely on the age-old picket-fence cottage scenario, even when the situation doesn't call for it?

In my opinion, only a handful of books had the right ending given to them and by 'right', I mean consistent with the other 90% of the book. Such as Queen B ending with the most normal thing that happened in the university - a graduation. ACoR featured the MC reuniting with her family after all that she's fought for and carve out her own path from then forwards. Even Open Heart, which butchered everything else about its story, gave MC the choice of staying in Edenbrook or moving on - which is honestly the only good thing about the books. Endings that acknowledge the MC's role in things besides being a pair of eyes for the reader to navigate, give them personalities and make it fit with the chapters before it are rather few in number since the advent of single-LI stories wherein a majority of the focus was on MC and LI's relationship than the plot, so it was just this cheap reason that made PB overly rely on Weddings As The Final Resolution trope even when it didn't call for it.

I am.. sceptical to say the least, about the way Blades is set up to end. It is clearly one of the only stories in the recent past that has 6 love interest paths to choose from (Valax and Aerin included) and has provided a lot of well-rounded storytelling enough for us to be invested in the LI's backstories, the skills they brought to the table and the dynamics with MC. However, the MC themselves is slowly morphing into the audience surrogate character from before. Back in Book 1, albeit them only showing flaws and vulnerabilities (thanks to the Kade plot), the MC was a real person, as capable as the LIs and their niche set of skills and their personalities.

By Book 2, the plot which is supposed to focus on MC, ends up accumulating a large mass of characters, giving MC the hero's treatment without actually giving them chances to be humanised, for the lack of a better word.

We only get to see them comfort characters, adopt cute animals and share some sparse moments with them, be indestructible in the face of death and that's it. While MC is the beating heart of the story, take them away in Book 2 and it spares a lot of time for the LIs to not have to chickenfight Valax and hop between realms aimlessly and.. that's it. What happened to MC's sincere motivation to rescue their brother in Book 1? What happened to how they overcame the fish-out-of-the-water situations, all in a fight for family?

Book 2 doesn't really have any callbacks to that. Kade, who was MC's primary motivation to meet Mal, Imtura, Nia, Tyril and Aerin, is sidelined heavily. MC becomes the sort of therapy aunt, when they've been deeply traumatised themselves.

To slap that with a 'romance solves everything!' ending would be an actual slap in the face to MC, who'd gone to hell and back just to come back home. If the answer were really that simple, why didn't MC settle down instead? Why should they continue questing?

Weddings as a resolution can be executed well if the payoffs are done. For eg, in Guinevere, a book largely centered around MC's marriage to Arthur/Artura and her growing feelings for Lancelot, as the myth goes, a wedding cements MC's choice as final. No matter how much Arthur/Artura can fight their best friend (with Merlin in the background being the puppeteer), it is ultimately MC's choice and it feels definitive to end with it.

But Blades doesn't force a romance now, does it? It doesn't force you to choose between 2 things. A grandeur wedding may or may not be in the cards, right? So clearly WAAR as an ending is just a really bad take, right?

Fair, but what about stories that have meh endings if you don't choose a romance option at all?

As in, without the element of romance, there is no definitive conclusion and it's very chaotically written?

Honestly a fraction of books can fall into that category, if they don't tell the players to choose a mandatory love interest.

Perfect Match is one such story with multiple romance routes, wherein you can deny diamond options. The ending follows the saving of the president, stopping Eros from taking over and having this weird 'calm after the storm' ending where Nadia and MC ruminate about being superheroes and eh, it kind of spiralled from a serious commentary on AI and everything to just really campy sci-fi by the end of it. The non-romance route has this welcomed found family set-up but doesn't really do much.

Personally I felt it was just a whiplash from doing Secret Service work to retiring to a domestic life, which the initial set up for the book didn't really call for it. MC's role in things slowly dimmed down to being a pair of eyes for the audience and largely in association with their friends and romantic relationships. Taking a romance route with Hayden, Damien, Sloane, Alana and others offers the Wedding As A Resolution as a solution, wherein the chosen LI confesses to MC and that's -- the ending when there's literally so much potential, so many themes being introduced in the book.

The found family trope also didn't sit well with me, considering it had just been like, two books since we met the characters and a lot of them were sidelined to bring focus to the moneymaking LIs. Even platonic routes went down the drain and there was nothing keeping the friend group together besides their mutual connections, shared trauma-bonding and the only people to have ever known the Truth.

(An example where this isn't compromised is TC&TF's ending where Kenna can stay single and instead of having a wedding in the end, she has a 'victory celebration'. The conclusions don't change or lose their meaning if you play a romantic route; Kenna gets her happy ending as a leader and peace returns to Stormholt.)

However it can't be said for books like The Unexpected Heiress which asks you to pick and suitor and charges you 30 DIAMONDS to MARRY your chosen LI and if you didn't choose it, MC leaves England to go back home, likely and THAT'S the conclusion. (If you did choose the premium option, the scene doesn't differ much, except you get to travel with your LI- I guess, it could be like a honeymoon kind of situation).

The It Lives (books 1 and 2 on the app) series is probably the only fantasy-adjacent series where romance takes a passenger seat and focuses more on MC and their journey. ILB's ending in all its ambiguity still does a decent job of wrapping up the series with no bias towards romance routes compared to books about romance with many choices and paths to take!

Even Across the Void forces MC into a last-minute romance to conclude the book somehow. Red Carpet Diaries shoe-horned in a Wedding As A Resolution plot much like how America's Most Eligible does too. PB doesn't really explore a lot with fantasy and sci-fi in its entirety, rather tackles it with modern times - sort of like a magical realism story, say in the widely talked about supernatural-series Bloodbound (which also forces a romance route + a wedding/moving-into-together ending by Book 3).

This isn't to say it cheapens the ending, rather it says there's no meaningful ending if you don't pick a romance route. The case is prevalent for a lot of multi-LI stories. The single routes kind of.. just end with a celebration of the hurdles overcome and a look into the future - a constant staple for literally every PB book out there. It becomes oversaturated to the point where the narration ends up forcing you to pick a goddamn route, like in HSS: CA even when the situation really doesn't call for it (I don't even remember what happens in the end of the trilogy) and in LoA where you end up having to choose between Aislinn and Gabe and the ending is the romance that follows.

Blades's role:

Now I really hope that isn't the case with Blades. Lots of things are still unknown about MC's history besides some Orc and Elven lore here and there and maybe it is kept that way to make some sort of big reveal at the end. Maybe it's a Bloodbound situation where MC is a descendant and that makes her the Chosen One. Maybe it's an Endless Summer situation with the whole, well, if you know you know. Maybe Raine is in fact the descendant of the Mother of Grey, maybe the Mother of Grey's the balance between the Light & Shadow realms from eating into each other - there are tons of possibilities.

But it shouldn't be at the cost of PB using their old patterns to write up a chalky romance ending. While It Lives and ES are exemplars at treating platonic routes with equal importance as romantic routes - well, as equal as it gets, really and not forcing the audience to make a decision, Perfect Match still exists as one where the ending is just.. "yeah.. so yeah that happened, man that's a fever dream" and with PB's recurrent problem in newer books with wrapping up a storyline and writing an ending (often resorting to a grand wedding even in Surrender, when the LI and MC have barely KNOWN each other! Even in the Princess Swap, one of the MCs gets proposed to, to have this illusion of some ending - I know it is technically a 'single LI' book but they could have waited, jeez)

Still, it makes me a lot more sceptical on how PB would handle the non-romance route, or more importantly how they can discern romance from MC's personal journey and their own powers. It is different from It Lives, Bloodbound and Endless Summer despite them all having some versions of the Chosen One trope. It features a MC who's determined to save their loved ones and figure out things along the way, but is sadly subjected to being a passenger in their own story. It's been 16 chapters in Book 2. By 16 chapters in Book 1, we'd seen MC 'break down' and race against time to save their brother out of desperation. (There's this disconnect I feel with the whole Watcher plotline and the realmwalker thing, but that's a different story).

I for one would be just so disappointed if they worked on 2 (or 3) books just to have MC say, "I found my perfect life with you, you're my home, LI." and call that a fitting ending.

***

Honestly these were just a lot of jumbled thoughts and I had to get it out of my system somehow, so no hard feelings! I'm just sort of tired of PB constantly demeaning their platonic routes and kind of putting 0 effort into it in the recent years. They are indeed heading towards a whole different direction w their single li books but still, I've been holding out some hope for Blades and I just hope it isn't squashed.

#mads rants about romance because she has the aro-ace pass/jk #choices book club #blades of light and shadow

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themarginalthinker · 11 months

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I came across you saying Charlie has a Minnesota accent. Had to look it up and I'm crying.

What accents do the other nossies have.

Also pls do fenster hanging with Jen doodle. Have you ever considered a size chart aswell?

lmaoooo yep, Charlie is born-and-bred Minnesotan, eh? Though not quite that strong, and she plays it up for the joke sometimes.

The others all have a mismatch of accents from all over.

-Alfred has perhaps the most ambiguous, having learned over two hundred years both how to cover his accent, and then it just slips away with so much time spent away from its land of origin, England. He tends more towards what I've heard referred to as 'Queen's English' when he's relaxed and with people he trusts and can speak freely with.

-Blue has a very flat accent, coming from the lower midwest, Indiana and Illinois, western Ohio. Sometimes he'll use vernacular that's a bit more 'countrified', like 'yall' or a double 'ain't' in a sentence, but has learned from Alfred how to mask it.

-Tweak is....all over the place. Whatever he's picked up from all the people he's met over the years - if you spend enough time around him, he'll eventually start parroting phrases and words from you. He knows a bit of Spanish, French, and Italian, though it's mostly conversational and slang. If you dig, though, and listen closely enough when he's speaking without trying to make himself sound a certain way, he tends to default to something vaguely Northeastern, possibly in the New England area.

-Zephyr tends to have a something a little closer to Canadian, but on the other side of the country than Charlie. Think Pacific Northwest, Cascadia for Zeph, though it's fairly muted. Her voice is also pretty raspy, and she has a pretty flat-affect, even when she's more emotional. Overall, pretty run-of-the-mill voice out of all the cast. She likes to blend in.

-Jen has perhaps one of the strongest accents in the cast of the Warren, hailing from the boondocks of Deep Appalachia itself. He always sounds like he's talking around a cigarette - which, to be fair, most of the time he is lol. When he gets angry, the accent really comes out, and he'll weave a word tapestry of some of the most obscure, unintelligible cussing you've ever heard this side of the Atlantic.

-Fenster ... I haven't decided whether I want him to be from Wales or Southern Ireland, so his accent would likely be from a region there, but that gives you a rough idea of where to start. The more I consider him, the more I lean towards Welsh. As for how he talks, he's a pretty easy-going person, who, much like Alfred, can mask his accent when he wants, but will do so much less frequently.

-Bobbin is a little tricker to pin down, despite her actual accent being fairly easy to pin-point of them all. She sounds like she's from the heart of the midwest at the turn of the 20th century, being Embraced (I believe? Correct me if I'm wrong, Berd) in the middle of the 20s. Chicago, St. Louis, all those big, swinging cities. The only issue with actually hearing it in her voice, however...is that the Embrace did some nasty things to her vocal chords, and she sounds, for lack of a nicer way to put it, like someone tearing sheet metal, like nails on a chalkboard.

So, that's about everyone in the main group with a notable accent!

As for drawing Jen and Fen, oh I definitely will have to, as well as the others. (I may or may not play favorites with my four main cast lol...) The problem is that I'm currently on vacation with my family and have left my tablet at home :T So, next week! I have also considered doing a character line-up as well! Perhaps when we get a little further into the story and they have been established as characters. Thank you!!! <3

#answered asks #this warren #vtm #vampire the masquerade #character study ish

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goodlesson · 1 year

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peyt’s top 10 albums released in 2022

this list was genuinely SO hard to put together!! i feel like every artist i love dropped new music this year thanks to all the studio time they had during the first couple years of the pandemic. sorry to all the great albums that didn’t make the cut - it’s not you, it’s me. 🫠

these are absolutely NOT in order because that would be an impossible task. and now, without further ado, i’ll put my rambling below:

1. give me the future + dreams of the past by bastille

i’m sure no one is surprised to see this one on my list. if you ARE surprised then idk what to tell you. this album was so surprising and different in the best way, especially after how meh i felt about doom days when it was released. thank you for the futuristic grooves mr. dan bastille!!!

top 3: stay awake?, revolution, hope for the future

2. s.i.d.e.s. by alice merton

alice was hands down the best discovery i made this year (thank you again mr. dan bastille). and just in time for her sophomore album!! it’s hard to pinpoint what really makes this album a standout for me. it honestly has it all: great vocals, honest lyrics, catchy hooks. plus alice is just so humble and so cool. how can you not like her?

top 3: future, mania, same team

3. crash by charli xcx

when crash came out, my friend was insistent i listen to it because it was “the best pop album since future nostalgia.” honestly? she was right. this is easily charli’s magnum opus. it’s so good.

top 3: good ones, constant repeat, yuck

4. 5sos5 by 5 seconds of summer

as soon as they released me myself & i as a single i knew this album was going to be It. truly their best work. one of the best parts of listening to 5sos over the years has been hearing their sound mature and this album feels like the culmination of that maturation.

top 3: me myself & i, bad omens, carousel

5. five seconds flat by lizzy mcalpine

every single song on this record feels like a hammer straight to the chest. lizzy’s lyrics are some of the best stuff i’ve heard in ages. this has to be not just one of the best albums on my list but objectively one of the best albums of the year period.

top 3: erase me, doomsday, all my ghosts

6. conditions of a punk by half•alive

they dropped half of this album back in february as give me your shoulders pt. i and at the time i was fully ready to stick that on my “best of” list - then the rest of the album came out just this month. no one is doing it like half alive. no one. they are so singularly themselves in their sound, their lyrics, and their live performances/visuals. i can’t believe they’re not being hailed as geniuses by music critics everywhere.

top 3: hot tea, nobody, make of it

7. the loneliest time by carly rae jepsen

queen carly hath returned!! once again she has crafted the perfect pop record. listen - i know i’m aromantic but this woman’s music just makes me want to be in love sooooooo bad.

top 3: beach house, anxious, talking to yourself

8. faith in the future by louis tomlinson

the main takeaway from this album is that louis really was the heart and soul of 1d’s songwriting in the later years. his sound on this record is so reminiscent of midnight memories in the best way. this is what i was hoping his debut would sound like - and while walls didn’t quite make the mark, this record most definitely did.

top 3: holding on to heartache, common people, lucky again

9. apocalypse whenever by bad suns

this record is light and fun and i love it. no thoughts just bops. while i do miss bad suns’ language & perspective era grittiness, i dig their newer sound just as much.

top 3: life was easier when i only cared about me, when the world was mine, peachy

10. cleanse by joywave

a perfect transition from possession at the start of the pandemic to now. i knew this record would be great when they dropped the every window is a mirror EP last year and “after coffee” took over my life. and i was right!!

top 3: after coffee, cyn city 2000, buy american

other solid albums that ~just~ missed out on my list:

girl of my dreams by fletcher

stick season by noah kahan

emails i can’t send by sabrina carpenter

midnights by taylor swift

sonder by dermot kennedy

what a most excellent year for music! thanks, 2022!

#peyton speaks

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goblinlovesmusicals · 2 years

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Goblin's Cats oc guide!

I've revamped and changed sm abt my ocs that I figured I should do this lol.

Moriah the Artist cat:

Three words: Creative, Somber, Hopeful.

Bio: Moriah has the ability to predict the future through her paintings. Painting for fun has been pushed away a bit so that she can predict things for the tribe. She wishes to be free and able to paint whatever she wants, but she's somewhat forced to be serious about her role.

Family: Mate of Tantomile. Eventual mother of Malachite and Philomena.

Lizadora the Senior Protector:

Three words: Motherly, Powerful, Courageous

Bio: A very big and very strong queen. She has a large list of values and will not hesitate to defend them or the people she loves. She tells stories to the kittens and they'll often crowd around her looking for a tale.

Family: Mate of MaliTart, Mother of Magnolia and Charlie. Sister of GrizaBella, their parents were called MikTom and Kathleen.

Waltze the Mob Boss cat:

Three words: Jovial, Selfless, Virtuous.

Bio: A fancy cat hailing from Germany, with his long luscious hair and pretty bowtie. His owners have a suit shop, and he operates out of It. He takes in those that nobody else will, mainly dogs, and is quite generous with his riches. As long as you're kind to him, he won't send his "sons" after you.

Family: Adoptive dad of about 20 stray dogs. Mayyybe the boyfriend of Koffi 👀 (@storyweaverofgondor).

Bumblebutts the Beekeeper cat:

Three words: Goofy, Cheery, Proud.

Bio: Just a sweet little queen taking care of her bees. She claims to speak bee and has never been stung by one. She is very prideful of her work and loves to chat with the queen bees.

Family: Twin of Butterbow. Mate of Chi-Isma and Flamebo (@storyweaverofgondor ocs), and eventual mother of Decora, Bumfuzzle, and Flicker.

Butterbow the Lobster Boat cat:

Three words: Vain, Passionate, Serious.

Bio: Butterbow is a very stern queen, taking her role as "Captain" of her owners' lobster boat. She takes extreme pride in what she does, and doesn't take it lightly at all. She does however have one insecurity: she had an accident which led to a terrible scar on her head, and she covers it up with a raincoat.

Family: Twin of Bumblebutts.

Khenti the Messenger cat:

Three words: Efficient, Charming, Intense.

Bio: The official messenger of the Jellicle tribe. She travels far and wide to send letters and important diplomatic documents. She hails from Egypt, and came to London for adventure, finding a tribe and love in the process.

Family: Mate of Charlie and TimTam.

Jinx the Cheshire cat:

Three words: Violent, Troubled, Firm.

Bio: As daughter of Macavity and princess of The Hidden Paws, Jinx is under immense pressure. She was called unlucky by her birth parents and abandoned as a result, and she was found by Macavity and declared his heir. She is known to lash out, and many fires have been linked to her.

Family: Adopted daughter of Macavity and Cheddar, adopted sister of Chicken Wing. Girlfriend of GrumBuskin. Eventual mother of Agatha and Fergus.

Magnolia the garden cat:

Three words: Sensitive, Kind, Intelligent.

Bio: Maggie loves flowers, absolutely adores them. Her and Bumblebutts are good friends, and they'll chat with bees together. She's always up to talk about flowers, and will give them away for every occasion.

Family: Daughter of Lizadora and MaliTart, sister of Charlie.

Tox the Mad Scientist:

Three words: Vile, Inquisitive, Cruel.

Bio: The epitome of cruelty. She views almost every cat as just a pawn or a test subject. Though she does have a tiny bit of fondness for her partner, Eris (an oc of @baconandbuscuits ), and her two children, Hollyhock (@baconandbuscuits again), Hemlock. She will not hesitate to drop them if something happens, as her all time goal is to defeat Macavity, despite working under him. She has a somewhat complicated relationship with her test subject, Barkus (yet again @baconandbuscuits ), who is also the father of Hemlock...

Family: Mate of Eris, Mother of Hollyhock and Hemlock.

Iridescence the Gift cat:

Three words: Generous, Thoughtful, Kindhearted.

Bio: A positivity spreading queen who believes love can be shown through gifts. Leaves mice on every humans doorstep and treats for all her friends. She just wants everyone to be happy, even if that means she gets hurt trying to find specific gifts...

Family: Has a crush on Goose.

Noxebris the Blues cat:

Three words: Soulful, Bold, Insecure

Bio: A sleek and soulful cat who digs the Blues. He's often in his brothers' shadows but he doesn't mind, he does his own thing. He had some level of insecurity because his style of music isn't very Jellicle-like. He's the reborn version of GrizaBella's long passed mentor.

Family: Son of GrizaBella and Old Deuteronomy, brother of Macavity and Tugger. Pining for Despoina and Mona.

Charlie the Dumpster cat:

Three words: Calm, Streetwise, Durable.

Bio: Charlie is a master at hiding. He has a deep fear of humans and would much rather slum it up in garbage than be a pet.

Family: Son of Lizadora and MaliTart, brother of Magnolia. Mate of Khenti and TimTam.

TimTam the Bakery cat:

Three words: Lazy, Indulgent, Content.

Bio: Just a little plump cat that loves blankets and treats. Will give out day old pastries to the strays, always saving a few for himself. Idolizes Bustopher Jones.

Family: Mate of Khenti and Charlie.

Cheddar the Henchcat:

Three words: Eager, Smitten, Capable.

Bio: Cheddar is the henchcat closest to Macavity. He's his assistant, chef, masseuse, executioner, husband, and much more. He doesn't hesitate to do whatever Macavity asks of him, and will get violent if need be.

Family: Mate of Macavity, adoptive father of Jinx and Chicken Wing.

Hemlock the Apprentice:

Three words: Bright, Aspiring, Meek.

Bio: Hemlock is nearly the exact opposite of Tox. Where she is cruel and hard, he is fair and shy.

Family: Son of Tox and Barkus, adopted son of Eris, brother of Hollyhock.

Buckaroo the Meowdy cat:

Three words: Honest, Flirtatious, Hard-working.

Bio: Just a genuine guy. Happy to help and very proud of his farm life. He was raised by horses and tends to trot and gallop. I'd compare him to Thomas from the Aristocats.

Family: Two horses called Marigold and Jesse are his adoptive parents. He has an on and off thing with Dragonsnapper.

Dragonsnapper the Larrikin cat:

Three words: Rowdy, Judgemental, Rough.

Bio: Snappy abandoned his show cat life, shaved his fur to be one big spiky mowhawk, and got a little Jean vest. Now he's trying to become the next Rockstar of the Jellicles. He idolizes Tugger somewhat, though he mainly sees him as out of date.

Family: Has an on and off thing with Buckaroo.

Gizpallid the Therapy cat:

Three words: Attentive, Deppressed, Workaholic.

Bio: Giz is disabled, his legs are paralyzed and he's in a little cat wheelchair. He feels inadequate because he can't dance like Jellicles should, though he hides it. He focuses on helping others through their issues and trying to ignore it.

Family: Mate of Socrates.

Goose the Avian cat:

Three words: Clairvoyant, Insightful, Wistful.

Bio: Goose is a special Tom, having the ability to read minds...of birds, and of birds only. It gets hard when someone else is eating a bird and he feels guilty. He wishes he could become a bird, so he can be with folks he understands.

Family: Has a crush on Iridescence.

MaliTart the Hex cat:

Three words: Grumpy, Mysterious, Wise.

Bio: Mali is just tired. They were experimented on for most of their life because of their magic, and they've become bitter from it all. They've found some happiness with their family, but they just want to rest now.

Family: Mate of Lizadora, parent of Charlie and Magnolia.

Doe:

Three words: Hospitable, Soft, Nurturing.

Bio: A southern belle with all the sweetness and hospitality. A very soft and fluffy queen, allergies are why her family dumped her. She’s still not used to the hardness of the streets, and she doesn’t think she ever will be.

Family: Mate of Axelle, adoptive mother of Palomine and Persnickety.

Palomine:

Three words: Friendly, Courageous, Uplifting.

Bio: Him and his twin were unwanted kittens, so they’ve been on the streets since birth. He’s the more outgoing of him and his brother, and is usually the one that ‘Snickety hides behind. He has high hopes that one day they’ll find a home, and he’ll be able to make new friends.

Family: Brother of Persnickety, adoptive son of Axelle and Doe.

Persnickety:

Three words: Anxious, Calculated, Shy.

Bio: The quietest and the most careful of the bunch. He prefers to run or hide rather than fight, which can lead to him getting lost. He really needs stability in life.

Family: Brother of Palomine, adoptive son of Axelle and Doe.

Axelle:

Three words: Bitter, Proficient, Receptive.

Bio: Her true owner passed away, and her owners family didn’t want her, so she was tossed outside. She tends to have a pretty negative outlook on things as a result, but that doesn’t stop her from trying hard and persevering. She’s the leader of the group basically, and really wants to get her family somewhere safe.

Family: Mate of Doe, adoptive mother of Palomine and Persnickety.

Despoina the Opera Queen:

Three words: Demure, Dulcet, Romantic

Bio: The shy and lesser known sister of Munkustrap. She had nobody to play with whenever he'd go off to train with Old D, and mainly ended up hiding as a kitten. Being alone so much let her practice her voice with no distractions, and her vocal cords developed very well, earning her title of The Opera Queen. Noxebris and her were very close as kittens and they both have feelings for each other, but their individual insecurities keep them from it.

Family: Daughter of a stray queen called Silvette (Deut knew none of his legitimate heirs were qualified to rule so he chose her son), Twin of Munkustrap. She, Mona, and Noxebris are pining for each other.

Chicken Wing the Deli Kitten:

Three words: Mischievous, Innocent, Bright

Bio: Their humans own a deli near Macavity's lair, and they wandered into it by accident. Seeing a new opportunity for a child, Cheddar immediately took them in and convinced Mac to keep them. They're Macavity's secondary heir, but they're too young to know exactly what that entails yet...

Family: Adopted child of Macavity and Cheddar, lil sibling of Jinx.

Qwerty the Office Cat:

Three words: Awkward, Straightforward, Astute.

Bio: Qwerty lives with his very nerdy owner that lives above their office. He never really leaving the office and never really chats with other cats, just watching the workers and looking at the superhero movies that his owner plays. One day, his owner left the window open and Qwerty wandered outside to get a piece of paper that the wind blew out, and he ended up catching the eye of some Jellicles. Said Jellicles helped him retrieve the paper and they all ended up chatting for hours, telling him old Jellicle tales. They invited him to the yard, able to tell this strange tom is for sure a Jellicle, and now Qwerty is looking for more ways to sneak out of the office...and maybe find this hot "Rumpus Cat" that they told him about...

Family: Doesn't have anythung but a dehabilitating crush on The Rumpus Cat.

Mona the Mime Queen:

Three words: Silent, Eerie, Dramatic

Bio: Born during a ball, under the light of the Jellicle Moon, Mona is truly a sight to behold. She looks like Buenos Aires Mistoffolees. She doesn't speak with her voice, but uses sign and interpretive dances to speak. She unnerves many cats, and may have a connection to the Everlasting Cat.

Family: Secretly pining for Noxebris and Despoina.

Wilder the Demi-god cat:

Three words: Omnipotent, Wild, Prankish.

Bio: Once upon a time the Everlasting Cat decided that she wanted a child, so she found a tom who was one of her most loyal followers and they made a kitten. Said kitten would go on to be a God version of a troublesome teenager- His Mother named him Wilder because he can always get more wild. He ditched his status as the Prince of The Heaviside layer to go have fun with all the mortals. He kept the semi immortality tho, he liked that part- these days he breaks hearts and messes with the locals, befriending one eerie boy 👀

Family: The Everlasting Cat is his Mama and his Dad was some normal cat who passed away a while ago.

Ruby the Pollicle Cat:

Three words: Fierce, Loyal, Determined.

Bio: A little ways from the Jellicle Junkyard, there is another junkyard, only this one hold Pollicles. Most of the Pollicles are owned by the junkyard master, but a fair bit of them are just strays that took sanctuary among the garbage. Ruby’s Mother had just had a litter of puppies, and she happened to find a little kitten who’d been thrown away, she then raised Ruby as her own and as if she was a dog. Ruby is a tortoiseshell American Curl cat, she solely believes that she should have been born an actual dog. She knows very well thats she’s a cat, but she ignores it in favor of proving herself over and over again as a dog. She’s very fierce and protective of her junkyard, and can easily handle herself among her pack.

Family: She has been somewhat adopted by Waltze (another of my ocs), alongside a bunch of other dogs her age.

#cats the musical #cats the musical ocs #i am #not tagging everyone im sorry #Goblin's ocs

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m5ria · 11 months

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Chapter 18: The Book

Charlie's POV:

After a long day of dealing with hotel stuff, I collapsed exhausted on my bed.

Even with its new success, I haven’t made any meaningful progress in redeeming any of the residents, even though sinners keep coming to take advantage of the hotel’s hospitality.

This doesn’t mean I’m ungrateful for everything I’ve accomplished. I am so hopeful and confident I’m on the right path, even with all these new obstacles coming my way. After all, this whole journey is worth it if it means a serious change for the better for my people.

Yet, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m in a constant loop, stagnating.

I hear my bedroom’s door being opened and I raise my head to see Vaggie coming in.

“Hey, babe,” she walks to me and sits by my side. “I brought you something.”

I glance at her hand in which she spins a candy apple.

“Aww!!” I stand and hug her. “You didn’t have to!”

“I’ve figured you deserved it after such a dreadful day,” she smiles, giving me the apple.

I take a bite and then offer her as well. It tastes incredibly sweet.

“Thanks,” I lean my head on her shoulder. I feel hers resting on top of mine.

We stay like this for a few quiet seconds, enjoying each other’s presence, until Vaggie speaks up: “Charlie, do you … Do you have any news from your father?”

I bite my lip, slightly frustrated.

“No…” I stand straight. The apple in my hands whirls like an optical illusion. I sigh and resume: “I’ve been trying to reach him… Reach them. You know my mom’s usually busy with her job, but lately … I dunno. There are all these rumors that he’s been missing.”

“Lucifer missing? Tough luck,” Vaggie snorts. Then, as if she remembered she was talking to me, she quickly adds: “I mean … it’s a good thing they’re rumors, right?”

“That’s the thing. They might not be only rumors …” I voice the possible truth. “I haven’t heard a word from them since the battle! It’s like my father suddenly disappeared. I mean, it’s a good thing he’s not sending anyone to attack the hotel anymore, but I am worried, you know?”

“Charlie,” Vaggie cups my cheek. “He’s the King of Hell. I am sure that whatever he’s doing, he’s alright. I might be even more worried about us.”

“Us? Why?”

“We have triumphed. We have humiliated the King of Hell. I don’t mean to be insensible, but there’s a really good chance that he’s secretly plotting the next attack.”

“Vaggie! I know when my father is upset! But this is not the case. I mean, he’s probably pretty furious with me, but he wouldn’t disappear for no reason, without a word.”

I let myself fall on my back, staring at the ceiling. Now, all I worry about is why the hell has my father disappeared. It’s not like him. Even when he was disappointed in me, or mad at me, he still was there, trying to remind me why I’d failed. My mother would come between us and calm the waters, but now I know everything is different. I don’t feel him constantly watching me anymore. I don’t know if I should be glad or worried.

“I’m sorry,” Vaggie falls next to me. “I know he’s your father, but don’t forget he’s the king as well. I genuinely don’t think he’s in any danger. Well,” she smirks, starting to tickle me, “besides the obvious threat his daughter clearly poses!”

“Vaggie!” I try to stop her, but only laughter comes from my mouth. She takes it as an encouragement and gets on top of me, still tormenting me.

“All hail for the Princess of Hell!” she whispers in some unknown royal’s voice. “She shall be the one who saves us all! She shall be the new Queen of Hell!”

“Vaggie! You’re not making any sense!” I giggle, breathless.

“And I,” she leans down and kisses my neck, “shall be her dutiful mistress.”

She trails a path of kisses up my throat, on my jaw, and my cheeks. My body trembles with anticipation until her breath hovers over my lips. I suddenly am very still.

She smells like the sweet apple she ate.

“Charlie Magne,” her lips touch mine.

☽

Diana's POV:

For the next few days, I’ve been practicing my speed reading and teleportation. Even if Alastor said I should master the reading first, I thought it might be useful for me to do them both, alternating. Maybe the association would help me understand both of them.

I needed to restart Divine Comedy again, as I forgot some meaningful details. I wanted to have some peace, but there seemed to be no place in the hotel where there were no other demons other than my bedroom.

On the first two days, I struggled to read the way I’m supposed to. After a while, I kept giving up and tried teleporting the way Alastor suggested. But, when I thought of one point to appear without imagining my world of bubbles, it was like I wanted to send lasers from my eyes. I stared at the same point for several minutes before giving up again.

In the next two days, I made little to no progress. I kept giving up and walking in circles frustrated, only to try again and again and fail again and again. My bedroom’s walls seemed to narrow around me like a cage. I avoided dinners, always saying I’m not feeling well, and then sneaking into the kitchen to steal some food. I began to seriously question my sanity.

So, today, I’ve decided I don’t give a fuck about the Vees. I need to get the fuck out of here.

I try to turn myself invisible and walk toward my forest, but I can’t control my invisibility. So, I teleport myself the way I used to, always checking for any possible threats. In about 20 minutes, I arrive at my favorite place in all of Hell.

I climb up the tree and resume reading where I left off. Only my mind isn’t at all focused. All the frustration I felt in the past four days presses on and I am more and more impatient.

He forgot to tell me how exactly I should read. He just stood there puffing and ridiculing me!

Focus!

This is all a big game for him. I stress over and over and he only gets to delight in all of this!

Arghh!

The simple thought of Alastor makes me throw the book away.

Only that the book is precious to me. I see it in slow motion flying in an arc and I jump from the tree, knowing I’m not gonna make it in time to catch it.

I still try to run to the spot where it’s about to hit the ground. Maybe, if I jump like a soccer gatekeeper, I’ll make it?

But, before I do anything else, my surroundings change like two pictures in a video and I suddenly feel like throwing up. Two seconds later, something hits me hard in the head and, when I look up, I see the book bouncing from my head.

I lounge to it and fall on my back, the book in my arms. I breathe hard and look at the red sky, before turning to one side and puking.

“What the fuck?” I wipe my mouth.

I stand up, the book safely in my arms, and look at the path from that tree to me. There’s a line where there’s lying grass, where I landed. And then there’s a big gap from there to where I stand. Meaning...

“Oh, my God!” I shout. “I... Did it? I DID IT!”

I start jumping and dancing in a ridiculous dance. The book is secured at my chest and, with new energy and enthusiasm, I climb up the same tree and try again.

☽

Day and night in Hell are different with only a slight change of light. I don’t notice when it’s time for dinner. Only when a faraway crow startles me so much that I fall from the tree, do I realize how late it is.

“Ouch...” I massage my butt and stand up. Looking at the direction of the hotel, I focus. But nothing happens.

Beginner’s luck? I hear Alastor’s laugh in my head.

Shut up!

I start walking and then running. Maybe that's what triggers it. But still nothing.

Focus on what you’ve done so far!

I read a lot of the book. More than I should have. What did I learn from it?

Don’t think too much about the words. Don’t... Overthink.

That’s it, isn’t it? Overthinking. The reason why I stay up all night thinking of numerous ways I failed myself and everyone else around me. The reason why I can’t be as brave, as powerful, or as confident as I want to be.

Don’t overthink overthinking!

I empty my head, imagine it as a plain gray wall, and then focus on a point in front of me. I let the rest of the world fade as the backgrounds change again. This time, though, I am on my feet. And feel a little bit less nasty.

I grin like a child and try again and again. I travel short distances, but I’m still faster than I would have been on my feet. I can’t exceed the time it took me with my old way of teleporting yet. I was teleporting longer distances.

Don’t worry. There's the next day too!

I reach the hotel, still teleporting. In my enthusiasm, I forget to be discreet about my powers and end up materializing in the dining room, in front of everyone.

Only the ones that know about my teleporting power (Alastor, Charlie (somehow), and Angel) look at me normally. The rest of them, though, react in different funny ways. Ren spills his soup, Husk spits his beer, Nifty jumps scared and Vaggie curses in Spanish “Maldito inferno!”.

“Language!” I warn her all smiley, taking my seat at the table, next to Angel.

Angel chuckles despite himself being still mad at me and Nifty with Husk recover quickly enough to join him too.

“Oh, my Satan! So, you’ll start showing up just like Alastor from now on?” Vaggie asks with a mix of desperation and exasperation.

“Sorry, Vaggie,” I giggle a little too. “I couldn’t help myself.”

I glance at Alastor despite myself with cheery eyes. His eyes dance with laughter and... Could it be? Pride?

No. Not yet.

Despite Vaggie’s frowns, dinner goes the way it usually does. I am overjoyed to eat something cooked at last. Charlie seems to be relieved that I’m feeling better. Angel constantly pisses off Vaggie or Husk.

When we finish, I grab my book and retreat to the couch in the welcoming area. It seems everyone is away, even Husk, so I am lucky enough to enjoy the silence.

Well … at least for five minutes …

I look up at the Radio Demon who eyes the book in my hands pompously.

“Still training, my dear?”

“Just enjoying a great book,” my eyes turn to the book.

“Would you mind if I join you?” he asks me.

I glance at him surprised. He leans over me curiously as if my next answer will reveal some precious truth about the universe. My first thought is to start overthinking of ways he’s going to use this time against me. Yet, if I’ve learned something today, that is to take some breaks from overthinking.

“Sure,” I make him space. He sits down and summons a book. I try to read the title, but he’s on my left, and the cover is not visible.

“What are you reading?” my curiosity gets the best of me.

“Right now?” he looks at the cover (for showing off, I gather). “The art of war”.

“Fitting, I suppose."

“The same can be said about yours too,” he smiles knowingly.

For the rest of the evening, we read quietly. Alastor’s mic started at some point emanating sweet jazz music and I couldn’t help but smile. After all, he said music helped with reading.

However, after a couple of hours, the music started to get in my way of staying awake to read. I don’t remember when, how, or if I dropped the book, but I know I fell asleep.

Next Chapter

Previous Chapter

Masterlist

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thecybird · 1 year

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#IFTTT #YouTube

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whatilistenedtoatwork · 2 years

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From August 29th to September 2nd, 2022

29-08-22

BOB DYLAN “Infidels”; CALEXICO “Hot Rail”; HAPPY MONDAYS “Bummed”; BILLY BRAGG “Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy”; BEYOND THE FRINGE “Live At The Fortune Theatre”; FATBOY SLIM “On The Floor At The Boutique”; JACKIE OATES “Jackie Oates”; CAN “Tago Mago”; YO-YO “You Better Ask Somebody”; QUEEN LATIFAH “All Hail The Queen”; THE STONE ROSES “Turns Into Stone”; AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB “The Restless Stranger”

30-08-22

THE CLASH “London Calling”; BEIRUT “Gulag Orkestar”; BILLY BRAGG “Brewing Up With Billy Bragg”; PAUL LEARY “The History Of Dogs”; CHARLIE CHAPLIN “Chaplin Chant”; NEW ORDER “Power, Corruption & Lies”; DUKE ELLINGTON “The OKeh Ellington”; KATE & ANNA McGARRIGLE “Dancer With Bruised Knees”; MADNESS “The Dangermen Sessions: Vol. 1”; EARL SWEATSHIRT “Doris”

31-08-22

THE FRANK & WALTERS “A Renewed Interest In Happiness”; SPARKS “Propaganda”; DOLLY PARTON “The Fairest Of Them All”; ELIZA CARTHY “Red Rice”; FUGAZI “In On The Kill Taker”; ALICE COOPER “Welcome To My Nightmare”; THE TEARDROP EXPLODES “Wilder”; MARILLION “Fugazi”; DICK DALE & HIS DEL-TONES “Rock Out With Dick Dale & His Del-Tones Live At Ciro’s”; AFRO CELT SOUND SYSTEM “Volume 3: Further In Time”

01-09-22

LOUIS JORDAN AND HIS TYMPANY 5 “Let The Good Times Roll: Anthology, 1938-1953”; THE BEATLES “Help!”; BILLY CONNOLLY “Raw Meat For The Balcony”; GUIDED BY VOICES “Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia”; DE DANANN “A Jacket Of Batteries”; THE ALBION BAND “Rise Up Like The Sun”; ELLA FITZGERALD “The Cole Porter Songbook, Volumes 1 & 2”; SUZANNE VEGA “Solitude Standing”; R.E.M. “Monster”; IGGY POP “The Idiot”

02-09-22

PINK FLOYD “Meddle”; VARIOUS ARTISTS “Mojo Presents… Songs The Beatles Taught Us”; COMMON “Be”; BURNING SPEAR “Burning Spear”; BUTTHOLE SURFERS “Hairway To Steven”; DAVE SWARBICK with MARTIN CARTHY & DIZ DISLEY “Rags, Reels & Airs”; AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB “Mercury”; SUPER FURRY ANIMALS “Guerilla”; JULIE RUIN “Julie Ruin”; THE DARKNESS “Permission To Land”

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kiruuuuu · 5 years

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Thank you so much @bdiduk2003, both for your compliments and the request :) I’m always happy to see your name pop up 💞 Even though I shifted the focus a little, I hope you enjoy this piece in which:

Mute’s Halloween outfit overstays its welcome and Smoke demonstrates what a good dad he is. (Rating M, some sexual elements + heaps of fluff, ~3.5k words) - Thanks a lot also to @i-dnt-know-either for allowing me to reference your wonderful Halloween fic!! 💙💙💙 It’s not required but highly recommended to read it first.

“I really should’ve gotten you some heels”, Smoke drawls, still lazily palming the not uninterested dick right next to his face.

“Want me to moan an octave higher, too? Because I’m not sure I actually can. Might sound like a cat dying.” Mute continues to struggle with getting that blasted dress over his head, wondering how he managed the previous evening. Not having been hungover must’ve helped. It’s early morning now, darkness lurking outside the windows still. They’ve only gotten about three hours of sleep in total, and those not even as a whole but scattered in between frotting and petting and more making out. Smoke had mentioned picking up Charlie after breakfast, and so they decided in favour of staying up the entire night before crashing completely as opposed to waking up like zombies. As a result, Mute’s crotch is sore and so are his nipples and all the bruises on his neck from Smoke acting like a vampire, and still his boyfriend is insatiable.

“Babe, you could yodel for all I care, I’d still fuck you.”

“Is that a challenge?” Finally, Mute manages to pull the playboy bunny outfit back on – Smoke requested a reprise of last night and if it helps tire him out, Mute is more than willing to dress up once more. Even so, his partner is more interested in playing with his half-hard cock peeking out between the lace instead of marvelling at how good he looks. Mute has to admit, the piece of clothing does flatter his physique.

“That depends entirely on whether you can actually yodel or not. Do we have any fishnets?”

Mute rolls his eyes but spreads his legs when questing fingers nudge them apart, already preparing for round number… he’s not even sure, actually, lost count somewhere along the way. “Are you sure you can go again? Or will this end in half an hour of aimless humping?”

The only reply he gets is a bright smile and a finger pushed inside, at which point he stops caring and gets into position to guide the tip of his cock into Smoke’s mouth, partly for the actual stimulation and mostly to shut him up. A tired, hungover Smoke is a Smoke full of bad ideas, and maybe this way he can prevent at least some of them slipping out.

A ringing stops both of them in their tracks. They exchange a meaningful glance.

Unimpressed, the sound continues.

“You should probably get that”, Mute sighs and withdraws all body parts from inside other body parts so Smoke’s hands are free to accept the call. Whoever thinks it appropriate to disturb anyone at this hour, the morning after Halloween, should be shot.

“Is she alright?”, Smoke suddenly blurts out, voice full of worry, and Mute’s stomach drops instantly, all annoyance forgotten and replaced with mild panic. This sounds serious and he doesn’t breathe until Smoke slumps in relief. “Okay. Then what else – really? Where? Gotcha. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Mute likes absolutely nothing of what he’s just heard. “Charlie?”, he guesses and earns a nod.

“She, uh, got picked up by a sergeant, Driscoll. Sounds like local police.”

Pardon him? “She what.”

“Something about trespassing – I don’t know, and I don’t care. All I know is that we’re picking her up now.” Smoke is already halfway out the door, pulling on jeans and disregarding his lack of underwear. “Come on!”

“I actually know that guy”, Mute provides helpfully and rises as well, begins gathering clothes. “If she really has broken some laws, he’ll let it slide. He likes me.”

“You’re a godsend, babe. Now get rid of that costume and let’s go.”

Sure, no problem. All Mute has to do is take it off again and replace it with reasonable human clothes. No biggie. Piece of cake. After all, he wants to look presentable when facing any kind of law enforcement, and wants to set a good example for Charlie, and doesn’t want to appear like a cheap hooker Smoke dragged along. Easy.

Easy peasy.

“James.” The slight panic in his voice has his lover shift his attention back to him. “The fucking thing is stuck. I can’t get it off.”

They stare at each other across the messy bedroom.

“You can wear your coat?”, comes the weak suggestion and while it’s a good one, Mute shakes his head.

“Gave it to Manu the other day. She hasn’t returned it yet.”

“Put on jeans?”

“The bloody lace won’t fit.”

Another silence. Smoke is radiating impatience and Mute vaguely understands, he’s also worried about Charlie having gotten into trouble, about her hanging out with the wrong crowd and having made choices she might regret later. He knows how important she is to Smoke. Is aware of how important she is to him.

A minute later, he’s sitting in the car next to Smoke, boxer briefs peeking out from under the scandalously short dress and struggling with a hoodie he grabbed on his way out, all the while having to listen to Smoke trying to sugarcoat the situation: “Look, if you hide the top, you can pretend you just forgot to put trousers on or that you’re going as, uh -”

“The zip’s broken”, Mute sighs in defeat and demonstrates that the zip is, indeed, broken. So no hiding any part of the dress, except for the back. Wonderful. Great. Just what he needed. “Just forget about it. She’s seen you in worse.”

“She’s seen me in socks with sandals, true, but she’s not seen you in a dress like this. In a come-stained dress. I’m not making this any better, am I?”

“You might wanna stop talking, yes.” From what he knows, Charlie went out with friends to a Halloween party and was meant to sleep over at one of their places – Smoke seemed familiar with the name, so it’s surprising they ended up at the police station. Charlie is picky and, while drawn to troublemakers, she sticks with the sensible ones. The ones who know how to blow up the chemistry lab and yet refrain from doing so. She really takes after her dad in a lot of ways.

It’s not until they’ve actually stepped inside the building that Mute considers what they must look like: him in a very short dress, sneakers without socks, a sliver of bright orange boxers visible under voluminous lace with suspicious stains, a ratty red hoodie finishing the whole ensemble, and then Smoke looking like a homeless person, with the two of them undoubtedly smelling like one as well. At least they washed their hands. Well, Mute did. He doesn’t actually remember whether -

And then he notices the three teens gaping at them in shock. One of them is Charlie, the other two are siblings Mute has met once or twice before, the girl having attended the same elementary school as Smoke’s daughter and the boy only being one year older. And all of them are dumbstruck.

At least they seem to be alright, that’s something. Sighing, Mute turns to the perplexed-looking police officer apparently in charge of the three kids and greets him with a nod. Maybe if he pretends everything is normal, he won’t have to justify himself. “Sergeant.”

Recognition flashes on the man’s face. “Wait – I know you! What was your name again?”

“Mark Chandar. Pleasure seeing you again, Mr Driscoll.”

“Of course! What a coincidence.” They shake hands, the other man now beaming. Mute knows him from his days in Cambridge, was close friends with his daughter and hopefully left a lasting good impression on her dad. “Apologies for not recognising you right away, the, uh, ears threw me off.”

Fuck. He’s still wearing them? Well, taking them off now would only draw more attention to it – except that the teens’ eyes have unanimously shifted upwards to stare at his long bunny ears.

“What are you up to these days, Mark?”

He didn’t come here for friendly conversation, in any case. “Losing bets”, he replies defeatedly and watches as Charlie’s aghast expression tilts over into unbridled mirth.

To his relief, Smoke draws their attention back to the matter at hand: “I’m Charlotte’s father. So what happened?”

“Oh, yes. We received a call from a local farmer about teenagers trespassing in one of his fields and lighting a small bonfire. When we arrived, we only encountered these three next to said field. As it was very early in the morning and quite far away from… anything, really, we brought them back here and contacted you.”

Smoke furrows his brows in displeasure and Mute mirrors him – setting fire to things isn’t one of Charlie’s hobbies and neither is trespassing. She’s a model student where her marks are concerned, even if her classroom behaviour sometimes leaves things to be desired, but overall her rebellious phase has involved dyeing her hair, listening to wild music, cooking all the spicy food Smoke can’t stomach and drinking a few mixed beers here and there. It could be a lot worse.

“It wasn’t us”, Charlie chimes in, now serious again. “Gavin was driving us home and he wanted to keep the party going somewhere random, we even tried telling him that it was a bad idea but he wouldn’t listen. We didn’t climb the fence with them and waited by the road, but they must’ve bailed without us.”

“So you had nothing to do with the fire and didn’t even trespass?”, Smoke clarifies, to which his daughter and the other two teens simply nod. The two siblings seem to intimidated to lie, and this version fits more with what Mute expected, so he turns back to Driscoll.

“In that case you can let them off with a warning, right?”

The sergeant fixes the three with a grave look clearly meant to deter them from any future trouble, but he nods. “Yes, I suppose I can. Maybe you should choose your friends more carefully. Can you drive the other two home as well?”

“Sure.”

And just so his reputation isn’t permanently tarnished, Mute makes some more polite conversation while Smoke herds the teens outside into the car. Their relief is palpable, none of them acquainted with ending up at a police station, and therefore they’re grateful to be rescued. Driscoll threatened to call the siblings’ parents regardless, so they might face some more stern words, but Charlie is her usual relaxed self now.

Well, she should be. She’s chewing on her lip, however, and avoiding Smoke’s gaze in the rear-vision mirror.

“Was this seriously your Halloween costume this year, Mark?”, she blurts out as soon as he’s joined them in the car.

He responds with a weary sigh. “I should know better than to keep betting against your dad by now.”

“Who’s that?”, the girl sitting next to Charlie wants to know quietly.

“Mark? He’s my second dad.” And Mute would be lying if he claimed his heart didn’t skip a beat at that. They took some time warming up to each other, but when she invited him on a concert and he let her have a few sips of his beer, their friendship was sealed. He has trouble viewing her as a daughter since they’re barely ten years apart, but whatever it is that binds them together, they’ve reached mutual respect and understanding. “And apparently trying to get on next month’s Playboy cover. Mark, this is Roisin and this is Niall.”

“I told you we should’ve insisted on costumes”, Roisin continues in a stage whisper, “imagine Gavin in that. Or, even better, Mike. Oh my God, Mike in heels.”

“Why does everyone keep going on about heels?”, Mute wonders out loud and prompts an embarrassed giggle from Charlie’s friend, but Smoke isn’t laughing. All he does is drive through the English countryside, eyes on the road, mouth shut. He’s listening, though. And Mute gets the feeling he’s missing something.

Behind him, the three teens joke around some more, with Niall getting more and more boisterous as time passes and Roisin giggling endlessly – he’s not sure why they’re friends, but Charlie seems to like them, so he leaves them to it. They recount their own party from the previous night and gossip until Smoke stops the vehicle, pointing with his chin.

“Thanks, Mr Porter!”, Roisin hurries to say, with her brother echoing her less enthusiastically, and then both of them hug Charlie before jumping out and racing up the stairs. Probably hoping their parents are neither awake nor have received a phone call from Driscoll yet.

On the back seat, Charlie is back to chewing on her lip.

“Did you set anything on fire that wasn’t meant to be?”, Smoke asks, turning around to examine his daughter closely. And wait.

She just shakes her head, apparently expecting the questioning. “No. Of course not. I was careful, I built a proper pit for it and all.”

Wait. Mute looks back and forth between them.

“Did you remove all traces afterwards?”

“Yes, dad. Please. I’m not an idiot.”

“Why did you go into the field in the first place?”

It’s the first time Charlie actually looks embarrassed. “To stargaze. But then Niall said I couldn’t actually make a fire without a lighter, so I had to prove him wrong.”

“And it was only you three involved?”

“Yeah. We asked to be dropped off there. It was just us.”

“Anything else you have to say?”

She nods, sounding earnest. “Sorry for worrying you. And thanks for picking us up.” When Smoke remains quiet, she adds: “Thanks for getting us off the hook, Mark.”

He continues to be flabbergasted by the exchange – Charlie is not in the habit of lying, but looking back, he begins to understand: she doesn’t lie to Smoke. Everyone outside is fair game. He supposes this is what they call paternal instinct – he would’ve believed her everything. “No problem, Charl. I love making a complete fool of myself in front of casual acquaintances.”

This seems to break the ice, and the two Porters let out a laugh along with a breath they’ve been holding. “You look fantastic”, Charlie lies smoothly. “But why are you still wearing it?”

“That reminds me, we don’t have anything for breakfast”, Smoke announces brightly, inconspiciously changing the topic. “We should go shopping.”

And Mute just groans.

On the way through the parking lot, Charlie is back to being her bubbly self now that she knows Smoke isn’t mad at her, laughing unselfconsciously at most jokes and giving a rundown of her Halloween while Smoke feeds her bits and pieces of their own. Mute mentions Blitz’ collar and Charlie is both intrigued and scandalised, and when the topic shifts to Jäger’s cat ears, her eyes light up in a very familiar way. Seems like Mute already knows what he’ll get her for Christmas. They pass by a few leftovers from the past night, a handful of costumed drunken blokes swaying in place and holding a contest for the loudest burp.

Just as they’re walking past them, the wannabe-Jack-Sparrow who indubitably glanced at Mute’s attire yells for everybody to hear: “Ewww, a homo!”

Without missing a beat – and before anyone can even react –, Charlie replies loudly: “Ewww, heteros!”

Mute swallows a grin. He can’t encourage her because Smoke has been trying to teach his daughter the non-confrontational approach in a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ way, and all her dad does is walk a little faster now, gently pulling her with him. It’s not that they couldn’t beat these guys to a pulp. It’s not that Smoke wouldn’t normally make a huge display or ridicule arseholes like this. This is purely about didactics.

“The fuck did you call us, brat?”, roars severely underweight Batman whose fake abs hang on his thin frame sadly.

“I’m sorry you missed out on so much necessary education”, Charlie shoots back, cheeks reddening in anger, and then Smoke guides her through the sliding doors into the Tesco’s. “Wow, those idiots are dumb. They don’t even know what hetero means, that’s ridiculous, they thought it was an insult or something, how can you -”

“Charlie.” Smoke stops, regarding her calmly and waiting until she deflates.

“I know, dad. Pick my battles. But I get so bloody annoyed at guys like them. Bloody Niall is almost as bad, you didn’t see his face when I introduced Mark. Tosser.” Smoke is still looking at her, a fond smile on his lips which only grows when she rolls her eyes and stomps off. “Walk away, I know. Not worth my time and efforts, I won’t change their minds anyway, no need to force a confrontation, blah blah. I know.”

Mute’s heart continues melting when Smoke just laughs and captures his daughter in a hug to press a kiss to the top of her head. “Now all you gotta do is translate your knowledge into actions, sweetie. And Niall is someone whose opinion you can influence – you’re friends with him after all. Those lads outside? Worthless. They won’t listen.”

“I guess.” She doesn’t seem appeased but at least she’s not stewing anymore. While they scour the aisles for the unhealthiest breakfast they can find (Smoke insisted on a full English), she turns to Mute, curious. “Did you have to deal with crap like that a lot?”

“I won’t lie, outfits like this increase the frequency drastically.” She snorts yet seems to understand it’s a topic on which he’d rather not elaborate – in time, she’s become adept at reading him and leaving him alone if he’s slightly uncomfortable. It’s just one of the many reasons why he likes her so much.

If he’s honest, he’s on Charlie’s side, but fully understands where Smoke is coming from: she’s a teenager and while she’s capable of defending herself, a bunch of drunken men is too much for her to take on. Despite her tough attitude, she hasn’t developed a skin thick enough to not let hateful comments get to her either, and Smoke would rather she get angry than be riddled with self-doubts.

Regardless. If it was for Mute, he’d at the very least have given them a show for free. Just out of spite. Spite is a great motivator.

“You go get the eggs, we’ll fetch some toast”, Smoke suddenly decides and directs Charlie to the back of the store while dragging Mute with him to the front, ignoring his weak protests.

“We have more than enough toast”, Mute gets out just before he’s dragged past the bread aisle and pressed against the glass front, warm lips capturing his and a tongue pushing its way inside his mouth immediately. He’s always ready to make out with his boyfriend, no matter how little sleep they’ve gotten, no matter whether his dress is riding up and clearly exposing Smoke groping his arse, no matter whether anyone can see them, but this comes a little unexpected.

Then he understands. Anyone can see them. And so he starts kissing back with the appropriate enthusiasm.

Both of them are grinning when they separate, and maybe they’re overdoing it a little with Mute slapping Smoke’s arse so loudly it actually echoes and Smoke blowing the stupefied blokes outside a kiss, but neither of them care.

“You’re the most hypocritical dad I know”, Mute mutters as they hurry back to reduce suspicion, “and somehow she still turned out fine.”

“And you are the second best dad I know.”

“After yourself?” Smoke wordlessly beams at him. “Of course after yourself. Why did I even ask.”

By the time they’re leaving, the drunkards have disappeared and Charlie seems to have forgotten all about them anyway, bragging about how she managed to win a bet against Niall about how many marshmallows they could fit in their mouths. As Smoke is returning their cart and leaves them to put their groceries in the car, Mute can’t help but reference the earlier topic: “Be prepared if you actually want to confront him about his views, Charl. He might not take it well.”

“Oh I kinda expect him to go mental. But that’s okay. I’ll just date his sister.” And a wink conveys that this is meant to be a secret between the two of them, for now.

Mute just shakes his head. He could’ve met Charlie on her own, without ever knowing who she is, and he would’ve guessed her to be related to Smoke in some way. Like father, like daughter.

Not that he’s complaining. In fact, he’s looking forward to making breakfast with his two favourite people in the world. He’d just… prefer to get changed beforehand.

#rainbow six siege #smoke #mute #smoke/mute #charlie #fanfic #oneshot #request #look you can't give me a smoke/mute request and not expect me to run with it #this got a lot longer than I anticipated #charlie is my queen all hail charlie

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flecker-illustrates · 3 years

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I didn't plan for them to look like they're hanging out, but i'm so glad it turned out that way! They should have had more time together, I WILL die on this hill

Nothing but simping and admiration for this duo on my part

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ragingbookdragon · 3 years

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Have A Crap-Ton Of Songs That Scream Hal Jordan At Some Point Or Another

· “Across the Multiverse” by Full Tilt

· “After the Rain” by Nickelback

· “All My Friends” by Dermot Kennedy

· “Alone In the Dark” by Will Cookson

· “Angels on My Side” by Rick Astley

· “Aurora” by Full Tilt

· “Aurora” by K-391 & Rory

· “Beer for My Horses” by Toby Keith

· “Best I Ever Had” by Gavin DeGraw

· “Boxes” by The Goo Goo Dolls

· “A Boy Becomes a Man” by Elitsa Alexandrova

· “Brother” by Kodaline

· “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas & The Papas

· “Call Me Tonight” by Ava Max

· “Colder Weather” by Zac Brown Band

· “concert for aliens” by Machine Gun Kelly

· “Cry” by Gryffin & John Martin

· “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins

· “Don’t Cry For Me” by Alok, Martin Jensen, & Jason Derulo

· “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by Santa Esmeralda

· “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey

· “Drive By” by Train

· “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)” by Train

· “Elevate” by DJ Khalil

· “An Evening I Will Not Forget” by Dermot Kennedy

· “Eyes on Me” by Desi Valentine

· “Eyes Shut” by Years & Years

· “Fearless” by The Goo Goo Dolls

· “Fire” by Gavin DeGraw

· “The Fleets Arrive” by Sam Hulick

· “Flight of the Silverbird” by Two Steps From Hell

· “Fly Away” by TheFatRat ft. Anjulie

· “Forgive Me Friend” by Smith & Thell

· “Fuqboi” by Hey Violet

· “Get Off My Back” by Bryan Adams

· “(Ghost) Riders In the Sky” by The Outlaws

· “Glitter” by Patrick Droney

· “Go For Broke” by Machine Gun Kelly ft. James Arthur

· “Got It in You” by BANNERS

· “Gotta Be Somebody” by Nickelback

· “Granted” by Josh Groban

· “Gravity” by John Mayer

· “GREAT NIGHT” by NEEDTOBREATHE ft. Shovels & Rope)

· “Hail Mary” by Haley & Michaels

· “Halfway Gone” by Lifehouse

· “Hall of Fame” by The Script

· “Hallelujah” by Brother Leo

· “Hallelujah” by Tori Kelly

· “The Hammer’s Coming Down” by Nickelback

· “HARD LOVE” by NEEDTOBREATHE

· “He Lives In You” by Lebo M

· “Head Above Water” by Avril Lavigne

· “Heading Home” by Alan Walker & Ruben

· “Heart of Courage” by Two Steps From Hell

· “Heart Of The Darkness” by Tommee Profitt ft. San Tinnesz)

· “Heartache Tonight” by Eagles

· “Highwayman” by The Highwaymen

· “Hold On Loosely” by 38 Special

· “Hot Blood” by KALEO

· “Hotel California” by Eagles

· “i still talk to jesus” by LANY

· “I Think I’m OKAY” by Machine Gun Kelly ft. YUNGBLUD & Travis Barker

· “If I Die Young” by Michael Henry & Justin Robinett

· “If I Had Eyes” by Jack Johnson

· “if this is the last time” by LANY

· “It’s In The Way That You Use It” by Eric Clapton

· “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi

· “James Dean” by Eagles

· “Let Me Fly” by Mike + The Machines

· “Let Your Heart Hold Fast” by Fort Atlantic

· “Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot” by Sting

· “Life In the Fast Lane” by Eagles

· “Little Boy” by Barns Courtney

· “Lived a Lie” by You Me At Six

· “Livin’ on the Edge” by Aerosmith

· “Lonesome Loser” by Little River Band

· “Malibu Nights” by LANY

· “Man or a Monster” by Sam Tinnesz ft. Zayde Wolf

· “Marvin Gaye” by Charlie Puth ft. Meghan Trainor

· “Miracle” by Shinedown

· “Momentary” by Hands Like Houses

· “MONEY & FAME” by NEEDTOBREATHE

· “Myself” by Bazzi

· “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature” by The Guess Who

· “No Tears” by James Blunt

· “OK” by Robin Schulz ft. James Blunt

· “Ol’ 55” by Eagles

· “One Less Day (Dying Young)” by Rob Thomas

· “One Night in Bangkok” by Murray Head

· “One of These Nights” by Eagles

· “Outgrown” by Dermot Kennedy

· “Palm Reader” by DREAMERS ft. Big Boi & UPSAHL

· “The Parting Glass” by Face Vocal Band

· “Polarize” by twenty one pilots

· “Preach” by John Legend

· “queen of broken hearts” by blackbear

· “Radar Love” by Golden Earring

· “Running Low” by SYML

· “Running On Empty” by Jackson Browne

· “Sharp Edges” by LINKIN PARK

· “Shoot to Thrill” by AC/DC

· “Someday” by Hal Jordan

· “Something’s Gotta Give” by All Time Low

· “Song on Fire” by Nickelback

· “Sorry” by Sleeping With Sirens

· “Spectre Induction” by Jack Wall & EA Games Soundtrack

· “Standing Outside the Fire” by Garth Brooks

· “Twilight Zone” by Golden Earring

· “Two of Us” by Louis Tomlinson

· “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” by Meat Loaf

· “Walk Like a Man” by The Four Seasons

· “Whatever It Takes” by Imagine Dragons

· “Where I Find God” by Larry Fleet

· “Where It Stays” by Charlotte OC

· “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” by Hamilton Broadway Cast

· “The Wild Boys” by Duran Duran

· “1 Last Cigarette” by The Band CAMINO

· “500 Miles” by The Hooters

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 3 years

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Eccentricity [Chapter 14: Love Keeps The Monsters From Our Door] [Series Finale]

A/N: Thank you for your encouragement, enthusiasm, laughter, rants, screeches of anguish, and unapologetic thirsting for “sexy undead Italian man” Joseph Francis Mazzello. I hope you love this conclusion more than Baby Swan loves pineapple pizza. 💜

Series Summary: Potentially a better love story than Twilight?

Chapter Title Is A Lyric From: “Til I Die” by Parsonsfield. (The #1 song I associate with this fic!)

Chapter Warnings: Language.

Word Count: 7.7k.

Other Chapters (And All My Writing) Available: HERE

Taglist: @queen-turtle-boiii @bramblesforbreakfast @maggieroseevans @culturefiendtrashqueen @imnotvibingveryguccimrstark @escabell @im-an-adult-ish @queenlover05 @someforeigntragedy @imtheinvisiblequeen @seven-seas-of-ham-on-rhyee @deacyblues @tensecondvacation @brianssixpence @some-major-ishues @haileymorelikestupid @youngpastafanmug @simonedk @rhapsodyrecs

Mercy

We have to stay in the Vladivostok palace until her transformation is complete, and I hate it.

The floors are cold and sterile and every clang of noise ricochets off them like a bullet. The earth outside is stripped bare and hibernal. There is no green to interrupt the bleakness of the sky, the cruel absence of color: no spruces or hemlocks or bigleaf maples, no evergreen forests, no verdant fields, only a grey that bleeds from the sky in sheets of hail and driving rain. This land is a stranger. So many of the faces, too, are strangers, although they try. Honora sits with me—her large dark eyes, like mirrors of mine, polished and wet with aching pity—and braids my hair. Morana invites me to bake homemade bread with her. Austin tries to make me smile. Cato visits me as much as he can, because he feels responsible; or maybe he would do it anyway, maybe lessening suffering is as instinctual to him as bloodshed is to so many of our kind. And when Cato is with me, I do feel a little better, like my story might belong to somebody else, like it’s a name I can’t quite remember, like it’s a transitory moment of déjà vu I can catch glimpses of but never touch. And yet, still, I send him away.

I don’t want to be with Cato. It’s painful for him to be around me, I can see that. It’s painful for Rami, and for Ben, and for Joe, and for Lucy and Scarlett. It’s even painful for the Irish Wolfhounds that Cato found locked up for safekeeping in Larkin’s study; they skulk around the palace vigilantly but leave great swaths of uninterrupted space around me like open water. So I conjure up a mask of brave, hopeful acceptance and wear it everywhere I go.

Joe says very little, never leaves the girl he calls Baby Swan’s side, dabs her scorching skin with washcloths soaked in ice water and murmurs in sympathy when she screams through the unconsciousness, from beneath the ocean of fire we all know so well. He nods off sometimes, snatching minutes of sleep like fireflies in a jar, before jolting awake to make sure her heart is still beating. When Ben isn’t checking on them, he’s with Cato, helping to draw up plans for the future, reminiscing about the past with slick eyes and clinking midnight glasses of whiskey. Scarlett sprawls across the desk in what was once Larkin’s study and spends hours on the phone with Archer as she gazes up at the ceiling, telling him how to care for the farm animals and the garden, reassuring him that we’ll be home soon, whispering things to him that I try not to hear; and I know she wouldn’t want me to anyway. Lucy weeps delicate, ceaseless tears as she perches on the staircase landing and Rami entombs her in his arms, never having to ask what she needs from him. And I wander meaninglessly through the echoing, unfamiliar hallways like a moon without a planet.

I know what they all think about me, perhaps even Rami, for I keep it buried as deep as all skeletons should be: that I’m irrevocably kind, effortlessly forgiving. That I’m as incapable of bitterness as I am of aging. But they’re wrong. It’s a choice, and it always has been, ever since a late-November dusk in 1864 when madness eclipsed mercy. Every day I choose whether to surrender to the beckoning, malignant hatred that lurks in the back of my bedroom closet, in the dusty and ill-lit loft of the barn roped with cobwebs, in the twilight tree line of the western hemlocks crawling with shadows that whisper through fanged teeth. Every day I decide whether to become a monster. And it has never been harder to remember why I don’t.

My future is unimaginable. The nights are endless. I feel black, razored seeds of what I am horrified must be bitterness burrowing beneath my skin and taking root there. I am consumed by infected, fruitless questions that I can’t silence: Why Gwilym? Why Arthur? Why Eliza and Charlotte? Why is it always fire?

The first words that Gwilym ever spoke to me, as I unraveled from unconsciousness under a grove of sycamore trees with smoke still clinging to my unscarred skin, rattle around in my skull like windchimes beneath thunderous skies. His voice was colored with an accent I couldn’t place, and yet it sounded like home: You’re in a dark place right now. But you don’t have to stay there.

That might have been true once. That might have been true in the ruinous autumn of 1864. But now I can’t find my way out.

Seventy-three hours after our arrival in this barren corner of the world, Charlie Swan’s daughter wakes up as a vampire. Her heart is perfectly still, her skin faultless, her senses sharp, her mind as impenetrable as ever; at least, that’s what Lucy says when she finds me. And Lucy tugs at my hand, wearing her first smile in days, insisting that I have to come meet the newest member of our coven, to welcome her. I don’t know how to tell Lucy that I’m afraid I don’t have it in me to love this girl, that I don’t have it in me to love anyone but ghosts. And yet—compliantly, yieldingly, expecting nothing but disappointment in the monster I have become—I follow her.

The door is already open to the Swan girl’s room; chattering, beaming vampires flood in and out like the tides. I step inside. And I see the way that Joe looks at her, the way that Ben does; and all those seeds that I had feared might be bitterness blossom into nothing but open air.

It’s Not A Fucking Wedding (A.K.A. 13.5 Months Later)

The ocean is a universe. Its arms are not ever-expanding, spiraling galaxies of suns and planets and nebulae and black holes, this is true; its belly is not a vacuum of inhospitable oblivion, its bones are not invisible strings of gravity, its language is not a silence older than starlight, older than eternity. But the ocean is a universe nonetheless, its borders tucked neatly around the seven continents, slumbering there until the next hurricane or tsunami or ice age comes conquering; and inevitably equilibrium is restored—like defibrillator paddles to a heart, like naloxone to an addict’s blood—and our two worlds can coexist side by side once again.

The ocean’s arms are sighing waves, bubbling and brisk, grasping and retreating in the same breath. Its belly is swollen with life from immense blue whales down to swarming clouds of single-celled, sun-hungry phytoplankton. Its language is ancient whispers; not parched and blistering and brittle sounds like the desert’s but cool, serene, supple, engulfing. And I can hear them all, if I listen closely enough. I can hear the sentient whistling of orcas, the breaking of waves against rocks, the scrabbling of sand crabs beneath the earth, the gruff distant barks of sea lions, the rustling of evergreen pine needles in the breeze. And I understand now why it was always so easy for vampires to be introspective, to lapse into thoughtful, unhurried silences. I could imagine spending decades just sitting here with my knees tucked to my chest and my hair whipping in the brackish wind, watching the seasons roll by like a wheel.

Joe was coming back from the gravel parking lot. I turned to watch him: red U Chicago hoodie, messy dark auburn-ish hair, a pizza box clasped in his hands. The GrubHub delivery driver was returning to his car with the toothiest of grins.

“Buon appetito!” Joe announced, dramatically presenting me with the pizza box. It had become our post-finals tradition each semester: pizza at La Push beach, half-pepperoni, half-pineapple.

“Grazie, sexy undead Italian man. Your accent is getting so good!”

“I know, right?! I’m on a twelve-day Duolingo streak. I can’t let that little green owl dude down.”

“I’m impressed, I’ll admit it. I gotta brush up on my Welsh. Why’s the GrubHub driver so cheery?”

“I tipped him $500.”

I smiled, opening the box and lifting out a semi-warm slice of pineapple pizza. Elastic strands of mozzarella cheese stretched like rubber bands until they snapped. “Aww, really?”

Joe plopped down onto the cool, damp sand beside me. “No. I lied. We’re actually having a torrid love affair.”

I laughed, shaking my head. “How could you possibly have time for all that?” Between school, business ventures, family activities, and me, Joe was very rarely unoccupied. And he preferred it that way.

“I’m so glad you asked. I’m very speedy, if you recall. And that’s just one of the exclusive services I offer. I am a man of many talents. I make people’s wildest dreams come true. Who am I to deny the GrubHub delivery man the wonderland that is my spindly, annoying body?”

“You are the fastest,” I said, winking.

“Oh shut up! I mean, uh, uhhh, silenzio!” He pointed his slice of pepperoni pizza at me reproachfully. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not the fastest at everything.”

“Whatever you say, mob guy.”

He lunged for me, pinned me down in the crumbling sand, both of us laughing wildly as the crusts of our pizza slices bounded off and were snatched up by diving, screeching seagulls. He growled with mock savagery, braced his hips against mine, kissed his way from the corner of my jaw to my lips. That oh-so-familiar commanding, craving ache for him came roaring to the surface; and now there was no bittersweet edge to it, no inescapable backdrop of lambent numbers ticking down from five or ten or fifteen years to zero. Now there was only the calm, unurgent promise of forever.

“Joe—!”

“You have besmirched my honor, Baby Swan. I am left with no recourse but to refresh your clearly flawed memory and prove you wrong.”

“Public indecency? That’s illegal, sir.”

“Okay, you gotta stop stealing my catchphrases. It’s extremely difficult for me to come up with new ones. I’m almost a hundred years old, you know.”

“Alright, I guess you’re not bad in bed for a basically-centenarian.”

He smiled down at me, his dark eyes alight, the wind tearing through his hair, one palm resting on my forehead, uncharacteristically quiet.

“What?” I asked, worried.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just really glad we’re a thing.”

“You better be. You’re kind of stuck with me now. You’ve stolen my virtue, you’ve made me fall in love with your entire demented family, you’ve forced your torturous immortality upon me. I’m not going anywhere. Unless you ever stop funding my pineapple pizza addiction, of course.”

Joe chuckled as he climbed off me and took my hand in his, pulling me upright. “It’s absolutely ridiculous, by the way. Your insistence on being a sort-of vegetarian. It’s embarrassing. You’re the wimpiest vampire ever. You’re a disgrace to the coven.”

“I eat animals!” I objected.

“Yeah, when you have to.” And Joe was right: I steered clear of flesh outside of the two or three times a week when I hunted. For environmental sustainability reasons, I mostly consumed deer or rabbits; although the very occasional shark was my guilty pleasure. Joe gnawed on his second slice of pizza and peered out into the overcast, dusky horizon, wiping crumbs from his stubbled chin with the back of his hand. “We only have one more of these left,” he said at last, a little sadly. “One more finals season at Calawah University. One more celebratory dinner at La Push.”

“We’ll just have to get used to a new view. Pizza by the Chicago River, maybe.”

Joe looked over at me, thoughtful again, smiling. He had received his acceptance letter to the University of Chicago three weeks ago. I got mine eight days later. “It won’t be hard for you to leave Forks?”

“It will be. Once upon a time I didn’t think that was possible, but I will miss Forks. And not just because of Charlie and Archer and Jessica and Angela and all the Lees. But it was hard to leave Phoenix, and I’m sure one day it will be hard to leave Chicago. Just because change is hard doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do.”

Joe nodded introspectively. “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

“Don’t quote classic rock songs at me, mixtapes boy.”

“You love my mixtapes,” he teased, circling his left arm around my waist, pulling me in closer, touching his lips to my forehead. Mint and pine and starlight sank into my lungs like an anchor through the surf. “And that saying actually goes all the way back to Seneca, my dear.”

“Don’t tell me he’s still philosophizing in some cloudy corner of the world somewhere.”

“Not to my knowledge. Although that’s an intriguing thought. We need more famous vampires. Caligula would have made for very interesting conversation. Lincoln, Napoleon, Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Dante...I guess it’s possible that anyone is still around. Maybe we should turn Meat Loaf. You know, for the good of posterity.”

“Is it not enough that they’re already cursed with student debt and global warming?”

Joe cackled, took my face in his palms, kissed each of my cheeks one after the other, then nudged my nose with his. “You ready to go, Baby Swan? I suspect we’re expected to participate in some holiday festivities tonight.”

“I’m ready,” I agreed. We threw our leftover pizza to the seagulls, disposed of the grease-spotted cardboard box, and walked back to my 1999 Honda Accord with our pulseless hands intertwined.

The evergreen trees along Routh 110 fled by beneath a sky freckling with stars. Sharp winter air poured in through the open windows. And I could feel that it was cold, in the same way that I could feel the warmth on Forks’ rare sweltering days; but there was no discomfort that accompanied that knowledge. Pain only came when the sky was unincumbered by thick clouds churning in off the Pacific, and then it felt something like staring into the sun had as a human. Sunglasses helped, but the surest remedy was avoidance, was surrender. And what an inconsequential price to pay for forever.

“Wait,” I said, spying the mailbox that marked the start of the Lees’ driveway. “They still deliver mail on Christmas Eve, right?”

“Uh, I think so, why...?” And then he remembered. “Oh, yeah, let’s check!”

I pulled up beside the mailbox and Joe leaned out, returning to his seat with a mountain of Christmas cards and business correspondence and advertisements from Costco and Sephora. He sifted through them until he found a single white envelope from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. It was addressed to a Mr. Benjamin August Hardy. Joe held it up to show me as we drove down the driveway, the Lee house coming into view and ornamented with a frankly excessive amount of multicolored string lights and inflatable reindeer.

“Oh my god!” I squealed, drumming the steering wheel.

“You want to be the one to give it to him?”

“Are you serious?! Yeah, can I?”

Joe passed the envelope to me as I parked my geriatric Honda, which Archer had pledged to keep alive as long as physically possible. In return, Ben let him and Scarlett borrow the Aston Martin Vantage no less than once a week. I dashed out of the car, up the steps of the front porch, and into the house that bubbled over with the sounds of metallic kitchen clashes and frenetic voices and Wham!’s Last Christmas.

“Ben?!” I shouted.

“Hi, honey!” Mercy called from the living room, where she and Lucy were putting the final touches on Scarlett’s gown. Scarlett was playing the part of semi-willing victim, wearing gold heels and an impatient smirk and her hair out of the way in a milkmaid braid; her train of vivid red lace billowed across the hardwood floor. From the couch, Archer and Rami were playing Mario Kart on the big-screen tv and nibbling their way through a tray of homemade gingerbread cookies.

“Oh wow,” I said, clutching the envelope to my chest, mesmerized. I kept waiting for Scarlett to start looking like a normal person to me, and it never happened. Tonight, in the glow of the flameless candles and kaleidoscopic Christmas lights and draped in lace the color of pomegranate seeds, she was Persephone: a goddess of resurrection, a face that death himself could not pass by unscathed. “You’ve outdone yourself, Lucy. Seriously.”

“One day I’m going to get you out of those thrift shop sweaters,” Lucy threatened me, placing a pin in the fabric at Scarlett’s waist.

“Yeah, okay. Let me know when that shows up in one of your visions.”

“Bitch,” Lucy flung back, snickering, knowing how improbable that was. I still appeared in her visions extremely infrequently, and then only when I happened to be standing next to whoever the premonition was actually about.

“Language, dear,” Mercy tutted, inspecting the hem of Scarlett’s gown.

Joe arrived beside me, his arms still full of mail. “ScarJo, I almost didn’t recognize you! Why do you have, like, no cleavage or fishnets or thigh slits?”

“Why do you have like no eyelashes?” Scarlett replied. “See, I can ask unnecessary and invasive questions too.”

Joe frowned, wounded. “What’s wrong with my eyelashes?”

“Lucy, darling, I think it’s just a tad uneven on this side,” Mercy said, showing her. “Maybe by half an inch...?”

“No, seriously, what’s wrong with my eyelashes?!”

Mercy replied distractedly: “Nothing, honey, you’re perfect just the way you are.”

“Mom!” Joe groaned.

“It really is gorgeous,” Mercy marveled as Lucy flitted around her to investigate the hem situation. “And so Christmasy. So perfect for the season. Scarlett, dear, you were right after all, and I’m so sorry for doubting you. I’d just never heard of a red wedding dress before.”

“Mom, it’s not a fucking wedding!” Scarlett exclaimed, for probably the thirtieth time since Thanksgiving. “It’s a nonbinding, informal celebration of an egalitarian romantic partnership. Will somebody please inform this woman that it’s not a wedding?!”

“Yes, yes, of course, whatever you want, sweetheart,” Mercy conceded dreamily.

Joe pointed to Archer. “Isn’t he supposed to not see the dress until the day of or something?”

“What a great question!” Archer replied, still deeply invested in Mario Kart. “You see, that would be the case if this was a wedding. However, I’ve been informed in no uncertain terms that it is most definitely not.”

Scarlett grinned triumphantly at Joe. “There you have it.”

She might snap petulantly, and she might complain, but Scarlett wouldn’t be doing this if she didn’t want to; we were all intimately familiar with the futility of trying to force Scarlett into anything. The not-wedding, as improbable as it seemed, had been her idea from the start. And she wasn’t doing it for herself. She wasn’t even doing it for Archer. Scarlett was doing it for her mother.

The first six months had been hell for Mercy. She didn’t resent me, as I had feared she might; Mercy made that clear, and Rami confirmed it. But she was gutted. She wouldn’t speak of Gwil, wouldn’t listen to us talk about him, locked every photograph of him away in dark drawers, wandered around with a remote, uncanny, unseeing smile until she walked straight into walls; and then she would blink inanely up at them, as if they had dropped out of the sky rather than been built by her own hands. She baked hundreds of cakes and almost never slept. She told us she was fine every time we asked, which was more or less constantly. But on the very rare occasions when she was left alone, Mercy would unfailingly end up in the field behind the Lee house, gazing out into the forest of western hemlock trees with tears snaking silently down her cheeks, the muted light of the cloud-covered setting sun flickering red and furious on her face like wildfire.

And then one afternoon, a package had arrived from Arviat, Canada, where Cato and the rest of the surviving Draghi had relocated shortly after the rebellion at Vladivostok. It was five feet tall and another three wide, and what we found after carefully peeling away all those layers of foam padding and packing tape was a portrait of Gwilym so skillfully painted that it could have been mistaken for a photograph. Mercy had stared at it for a long time—ignoring Lucy’s attempts to guide her away, deaf to any of our concerns—until she at last picked up the portrait herself and said, quite evenly: “I think we should hang it in the living room, don’t you?”

Things had been better since then—very, very gradually, and yet unmistakably—and Gwil’s portrait remained mounted above the living room couch like a watchman, his eyes sparkling and blue, his faint smile stoic and fond and omniscient. But even in the wake of Mercy’s continued improvement, none of us kids were about to risk another agonizingly despondent Christmas. So the solution was obvious. We would keep Mercy preoccupied with what thrilled her more than absolutely anything else: the pseudo-weddings of her children. Rami and Lucy had already secretly volunteered to go next year...and after that, who knew? And there was one other thing that was making Mercy’s burden a little lighter these days.

Charlie sauntered into the living room, wearing an apron covered in cartwheeling Santas and wiping white dust like snow—powdered sugar? flour? baking soda?—from his ungainly hands. He was palpably proud. “The sugar cookies are officially in the oven. And I managed to fit them all on one baking sheet, isn’t that great?! Cuts down on dishes!”

“Why, yes, I suppose it does!” Mercy said, alarm dawning in her eyes. Had my beloved father placed the globs of dough too close together? Would we end up with one hideous, giant monster-cookie? Only time would tell. Providentially, Archer and Joe could be counted on to eat just about anything.

Joe sniffed the air, his forehead crinkling. “What’s burning?”

“Nothing should be burning,” Mercy replied, almost defensive, forever protective of Charlie and all of his profound, incurably human imperfections. Sometimes I thought that she preferred him that way, that he was a link to a simpler world in the same way I had once been, that he was a puddle of memory she could drop into, that maybe he wasn’t so unlike her first husband Arthur. “Not yet, anyway. The cookies need at least ten to twelve minutes at 350.”

“Wait, 350?!” Charlie exclaimed, horrorstruck. “I thought you said 450!”

“Oh, this is tragic,” Scarlett said.

“I can fix it!” Mercy trilled buoyantly, breezing off to the kitchen as Charlie followed after her with a fountain of apologies. She shushed them away affectionately, patting his chest with her soft plump hands, chuckling about how luckily they had fire extinguishers stowed away in almost every closet just in case. And there were other reasons for that besides Charlie’s perilous baking attempts, but he didn’t know them. Now the record player was belting out Queen’s Thank God It’s Christmas.

Archer lost another round in Mario Kart and exhaled a great, mournful sigh. “Hey, Baby Swanpire, can you do something about this guy?” He nodded to Rami. “This is criminal. It’s nowhere near a fair fight. He knows every freaking time I’m about to toss a banana peel.”

Rami smirked guiltily up at me from the couch, not bothering to deny it.

“Do you mind?” I asked him.

“Not at all,” Rami replied. “I want to show this loser I can beat him even without the benefit of mega-cool extrasensory superpowers.”

“Rude!” Archer cried.

“So rude,” Scarlett agreed, smiling.

“Okay, here we go.” I sat down beside Rami, still holding Ben’s envelope in my right hand, and laid my left against Rami’s cheek. And I felt a fistful of numbness—like instant peace, like milk-white Novocain—pass from my skin into his, rolling into his skull, deadening whatever telepathic livewires had been ignited there in the August of 1916. The effect would last anywhere from thirty minutes to a few hours; and it worked on every vampire I’d met so far.

“Whoa, trippy,” Rami murmured. “It’s still weird, every single time.” He peered drowsily around the room. “It’s...so...quiet?! You guys really live like this? No one is constantly bombarding you with sexual fantasies or romantic pining or depressive inner monologues? How do you function?! Now I’m alone with my own thoughts, that’s actually worse!”

“Hurry up and beat him while he’s all freaked out and vulnerable,” Scarlett told Archer.

Archer laughed, picking up his Nintendo 64 controller, radiant with the promise of vengeance. “Yes ma’am.”

“Any good mail?” Lucy asked Joe.

“Yeah. Coupons and a ton of Christmas cards from random people. The vet sent us one with alpacas on it, so that’s cute. Oh, and here’s one from our favorite Canadians.”

Joe held up the card so we could all see. The picture on the front showed Cato and Honora sitting on a large velvet, forest green couch with a hulking Christmas tree illuminated in the background. The others were arranged around them: Austin, Max, Ksenia, Charity, Araminta, Akari, Morana, Phelan, Aruna, Adair, Zora, Sahel, and a few new faces I couldn’t name yet. They were all wearing matching turtleneck sweaters. And every single one of them was smiling.

Joe cleared his throat theatrically and read the text on the inside of the card:

“Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

(Oh, and Scarlett, congratulations on your not-marriage.)

- Cato Douglass Freeman”

“That bastard,” Scarlett muttered.

Rami offered me his controller. He had just slipped on a banana peel and rocketed off a cliff. “You want a turn?”

“No, thanks though. I have to talk to Ben. Is he around?”

Rami shrugged ruefully. “I would help, but my brain is temporarily broken.”

Scarlett rolled her eyes, taking a gingerbread cookie from the tray and biting into it as Lucy batted crumbs from the red lace dress, exasperated. “I think he’s out in the hot tub.”

“Cool. I shall return.”

Joe took my spot on the couch as I departed, shoveling cookies into his mouth, seizing Rami’s controller and kicking his feet up on the coffee table.

I opened the door to the back porch, and frigid December air rushed in like an uninvited guest. The field was coated with a thin layer of snow, the animals safe and warm in the barn, the garden slumbering. And in the spring and summer, when blossoms of a dozen different varieties came open beneath the drizzling grey skies, Mercy’s calla lilies didn’t bother my allergies at all. Nothing did anymore. Ben was indeed in the hot tub, puffing on his vape pen, wearing only a beanie hat and swim trunks.

“What flavor is that cartridge?” I asked as I approached. “Gummy bear?”

“Close. Strawberry doughnut.”

“Ohhhh, yum!” Ben passed me the vape pen, and I took a drag as I kicked off my boots and sat near him on the rim of the hot tub, slipping my bare feet beneath the steaming, roiling water. Then I handed his vape pen back. “So. Guess what I have for you.”

“Uh.” He glanced at the envelope. “Jury duty.”

“Better.”

“Someone I hate has jury duty.”

I flipped the envelope around so he could see the University of Chicago logo on the front.

“Oh god,” Ben moaned.

“Don’t you want to see what it says?”

“Not really,” he admitted, grimacing.

“Come on, Ben. Open it.”

“Nah.”

“Why not?!”

Ben sighed. “Look, if I open it and it’s bad news, it’s gonna make Christmas weird. Rami will know. They’ll all know. They’ll all feel bad for me and it’ll be pathetic and depressing and awkward. You can look if you want to, just don’t tell anyone else yet.”

“It’s not going to be bad news,” I said, tugging at the floppy top of his beanie hat. He swatted my hand away, but he was smiling grudgingly.

“You have positively no way of knowing that. Unless Lucy’s had a vision I’m unaware of.”

“She hasn’t. You know she never sees anything important.”

“She saw you coming,” Ben countered.

“She saw human-me and Joe in love and gobbling down pretzels at a Cubs game. So I’d say there were at least a few minor details missing.”

“There’s no way I got in,” Ben said, his green eyes slick and fearful and now fixed on the envelope. “We can’t all be geniuses like you.”

“That’s an unfair accusation. I’m far from genius. I’m just obsessed with the ocean.” I’d written my senior thesis on the feeding habits of Pacific angelsharks, and my advisor was still trying to figure out how I, an amateur scuba diver at best, had managed to get so many quality photographs with my underwater camera. The secret, of course, was superhuman agility and not needing to breathe.

“I fucking hate calculus. The MCAT wrecked me. I got a 517.”

“And their median score is a 519, so I’d say you still have a fighting chance. Plus you have like eight million volunteer hours.” Ben had spent the vast majority of the past year either in class or at the hospital. The psychiatrist-in-chief, Dr. Siegel, had been more than happy to take one of Gwil’s foster children under her wing. Every human in Forks except Archer believed that Dr. Gwilym Lee had drowned in a tragic boating accident while he and Mercy were on vacation in Southern California, and that his body had never been recovered. The town had held a wonderful remembrance ceremony and dedicated a free clinic at the hospital in his honor. “Now open it.”

“You do it,” Ben relented finally. “My hands are wet. Go ahead, open it up and tell me what it says. And then kindly euthanize me to end my immortal shame.”

“That wouldn’t work,” I pointed out, tearing open the envelope. I pulled out the tri-folded piece of paper inside, flattened it against my thighs, and read the typed black text.

“...Well?” Ben pressed, vaping frantically.

I looked up and smiled at him.

“No way,” he whispered.

“I hope you like pretzels and bear-themed baseball teams, grandpa.”

And for a second, I thought he might bolt up out of the hot tub, hooting victoriously, splashing water all over the back porch as he danced around bellowing that he’d gotten into one of the best medical schools in the world, that he would be following me and Joe to Chicago. But that wasn’t Ben. Instead, a slow smile rippled across his face: it was small, but perfectly genuine. Pure, even.

“Goddamn,” he said, watching me. Venom doesn’t just resurrect or ruin; it forms a bond that is simultaneously intangible and yet immense. It’s an evolutionary adaptation, a way to facilitate stability and the building of covens in an often violent and ruleless world. And now that he had turned me, Ben had family here in Forks in more ways than one.

“Gwil would be so proud of you, Ben.”

“I hope so. I really do.”

The back door of the house opened, and Joe stepped outside. He studied Ben for a moment, and that was all it took for him to know. “Benny!” he shouted, elated.

“I know, I know. Fortunately, I look amazing in red. Thanks, supermodel genes.”

“This is going to be so fun!” Joe said, sprinting over to wrap Ben—who was characteristically lukewarm on this whole physical displays of affection business—in a hug from just outside the hot tub. “We’re going to go furniture shopping, and eat deep-dish pizza, and find apartments right next to each other, and mail home Chicago-themed care packages, and get you hooked up with some gorgeous Italian woman...or whatever you like, I guess I shouldn’t assume. Women. Men. Gang members. Marine mammals. Jessicas. Whatever. There are options.”

Ben laughed as he playfully shoved Joe away. “Sounds like a plan, pagliaccio.”

“Oh my god, stop learning Italian without me! You realize you have to tell Mom now.”

“I will,” Ben agreed, with some trepidation. “I’ll wait until after Christmas.”

“It’ll be hard for her,” I said. “But she knows it’s what you want. She knows it’s what’s best for you. So she’ll get through it. I think it would be worse for her if you didn’t get in, if she had to see you unhappy.”

Ben nodded, exhaling strawberry-doughnut-flavored vapor, gazing up at the stars, Orion and Auriga and Lynx and Perseus reflected in his thoughtful jade eyes. “She’ll still have Rami and Lucy and Scarlett here with her. And Archer. And Charlie.”

“Especially Charlie,” Joe said, grinning.

Mercy would have to leave Forks eventually, of course. The Lees had already been here for nearly four years; they could stay another ten, perhaps fifteen at the absolute maximum. And there had been a time when ten or fifteen years seemed like quite a while to me, but now it felt like I could doze off one afternoon and wake up on the other side of it, like swimming a lap in the sun-drenched public pool back in Phoenix. We would find a new home somewhere after Joe and I finished our PhDs, after Ben finished medical school, maybe Vancouver or Buffalo or Amsterdam or Edinburgh or Dublin or Reykjavik. Wherever we went, I hoped it wouldn’t be far from the sea. But Mercy couldn’t bear to leave Forks yet. It was the last home she had shared with Gwil, the last house they would ever build together, and leaving it would make his loss all the more irrevocable. She would be ready to leave someday, but not today.

In the meantime, there would still be visits for breaks and holidays. Scarlett and Archer had the shop to keep them busy, a brand new eight-car garage that held a virtual monopoly on both the Forks and Quileute communities. Lucy had opened a bohemian-style clothing boutique downtown, which confounded most of the locals but attracted more adventurous customers from as far away as Seattle. Rami was interning for a local immigration lawyer and entertaining the possibility of applying to U Chicago’s law school in another few years. And Mercy had the farm; and she had Charlie. He had asked her for cooking lessons to try to help rouse her a few months after Gwil’s death, and it had grown from there. If it wasn’t romantic just yet, I believed it would be soon. And there were moments when I thought my father might have figured something out, when his eyes narrowed and lingered on me just a little too long, when his brow knitted into suspicious, searching lines, when the hairs rose on the back of his neck and some innate insight whispered that we weren’t like him and never could be again. But then he would chuckle, shake his head, and say: “You’ve gotten weird, my gorgeous, brilliant progeny. But Forks looks pretty good on you.”

“Can I talk to you upstairs?” Joe asked me suddenly; and did I see restless nerves flicker in his dark eyes? I thought I did.

“Sure,” I replied, climbing down from the hot tub. “Ben, are you coming inside? My dad is trying to bake Christmas cookies and failing miserably. It’s pretty hilarious. Not that you should be the one to critique other people’s kitchen-related accidents.”

“I do enjoy your company a lot more now that I don’t want to murder you and slurp you down like a Chick-fil-A milkshake,” Ben said. “Yeah, give me a few minutes and I’ll be there.” And as Joe and I headed into the house, I saw Ben pick up the acceptance letter that I’d left on the rim of the hot tub and read it for himself with incredulous eyes, grappling with the irrefutable fact that it was his name on the opening line, that he had somewhere along the way become the sort of man who dedicated his immortality to saving lives rather than ending them.

In the living room, Scarlett was back in her yoga pants and absolutely brutalizing Archer in Mario Kart. Rami and Lucy were entwined together on the loveseat, murmuring, giggling, feeding each other pieces of gingerbread cookies. In the kitchen, Charlie was leading Mercy in a clumsy waltz to Meat Loaf’s I’d Do Anything For Love, and each time he fumbled his steps or mortifyingly trod on her feet she would cry out in a peal of laughter brighter than the sun she had learned to live without. Joe spirited me up the staircase, into his bedroom—which, honestly, was more like our bedroom now, in the same way that my room in Charlie’s house had become Joe’s as well—and closed the door.

“You’re in luck,” he said. “Your dad totally ruined our song. Now I can’t hear it without thinking about some moustached guy in plaid trying to seduce my mom.”

“It’s the best Christmas gift I could ever ask for. Meat Loaf is vanquished. Oh, just so you’re aware, Renee and Paul are getting an Airbnb and coming up for New Years.”

“Cool. Do they still think I have a super embarrassing sunlight allergy and will break into hives and asphyxiate and that’s why we can’t visit them in Florida?”

“Yup.”

“Spectacular. Also, can you please tell me what’s wrong with my eyelashes?”

“They’re just a little sparse, amore. But I still like you.”

“Well, I am only moderately attractive, you know.” Then Joe steeled himself, taking a deep breath. Uh oh. He was definitely nervous. I still couldn’t believe I had the power to make him that way, but here we were. “So I get that we’re doing presents with the whole family tomorrow morning, and you do have some under the tree, so don’t worry about that. But there’s one I wanted to give to you alone. You know. With just us. Without an audience. Or whatever.”

“...Okay...?” A secret gift? A naughty gift? “I hope it’s a new vibrator.”

“Shut up,” Joe begged, laughing. “Here.” He reached into the drawer of his nightstand—our nightstand—and produced a small blue box topped with a turquoise bow. It wasn’t a ring, I was sure of that; I didn’t feel especially attached to the idea of marriage, and neither did Joe to my knowledge. How could rings or papers seal commitment when you already had eternity? I was right: the mysterious present was not a ring. When I removed the lid and emptied the box into my palm, what appeared there was a small plastic airplane.

“What is this?” I asked, amused but puzzled.

“Are you not college educated? It’s a plane.”

“Well, yeah, I can see that. But it’s also like two inches long.” I scrutinized the plane. “Are you magically transforming me into a tiny, tiny, little plastic person? Is that my gift? Because I actually got you something good.” And I really did: there was a collection of vintage Chicago Cubs photographs from the 1910s and 20s downstairs under the Christmas tree, packaged in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer wrapping paper.

“We’re going on a trip,” Joe said, grinning. “The day after Christmas. It’s just a short trip, nothing huge, don’t get too excited, we’re not going to Mt. Everest or Antarctica or anything. I think you’ll still like it. But I don’t want you to know where we’re going until we’re there.”

“How will that work? Considering the tickets and signage and pilot announcements and obnoxiously noisy other passengers and all.”

“ScarJo’s going to fly us.”

“Really?!” We were taking the jet. We almost never used the jet. “What’s in it for Scarlett?”

“She found out that Archer’s never had In-N-Out Burger before and is very much looking forward to initiating him into the cult of deliciousness.”

“Oh nice. I could go for a vanilla milkshake myself, now that Ben mentioned them.”

“Obviously I’m gonna buy you all the milkshakes and animal-style fries you want. Bankrupt me, bitch. But we have to get one other thing taken care of first.”

“So it’s somewhere they have In-N-Out Burger...” I pondered aloud. California? Texas? Las Vegas? I felt a brief but unambiguous pang of homesickness for Phoenix. But there was nothing there for me anymore.

“Stop,” Joe pleaded. “I’m sorry. I’ve already said too much. Please forget that. Get a traumatic brain injury or oxygen deprivation or something.”

“I hate to disappoint you, but I’m rather indestructible at the moment.”

He smiled wistfully. “I wouldn’t want you to be any other way.”

There was laughter downstairs in the living room. I could detect the aroma of a fresh batch of sugar cookies baking in the kitchen, mingling with the cold night air and pine trees and peppermint candy canes. I loved Christmas. The entire world smelled like Joe. The U Chicago décor, classic rock posters, and Italian flag were now interspersed with National Geographic pages and photos of the two of us together. The Official Whatever You Want Pass hung in a small, square picture frame on the wall above Joe’s bed. Our bed.

“How real is it, Joe?” I asked quietly. I climbed onto my tiptoes, linking my hands around the back of his neck with the tiny plane still tucked between my fingers. “Seriously. The wishes thing.”

“The world may never know. Akari never met me as a human, so she wouldn’t be able to say. But if I had to place a bet...” He shrugged, grinning craftily. “Kinda real. Kinda not real. Just like vampires, I guess.”

“I am alarmingly glad that you’re real, mob guy,” I said, abruptly somber. “I never thought I’d meet someone who saw me as remarkable, who could make me see myself that way. And it’s miraculous. And it’s terrifying too, honestly. Being a thing with you. Falling for someone you could have for centuries and lose in a second.”

“It’s the scariest thing there is,” Joe concurred, taking my hand to lead me back downstairs.

Joseph

Scarlett looks like a goddess, and she knows it. But she’s not one of those magnanimous, fragile, harp-plucking, pastel-colored goddesses. She’s ferocity and wildness and crimson like blood, and that’s exactly why Archer loves her. And as they stand in front of the Christmas tree with their hands clasped together—ivory on bronze, snow on sun—with matching sprigs of holly in Scarlett’s hair and pinned to the jacket of Archer’s suit, reciting truths but no promises, I can’t help but watch the other faces in the room: Rami, Lucy, Ben, Charlie, Mom with her beaming smile and shining eyes, the woman I met sixteen months ago and now can’t fathom life without. And it occurs to me for the first time that love, in its cleanest form, isn’t something that changes people as much as it allows them to become who they truly are.

On the evening of December 26th, as soon as the sun dips beneath the western horizon, we board the jet in the Forks Airport hangar. It’s much easier for Scarlett to fly at night; otherwise she has to wear two or three pairs of sunglasses on top of each other, and even then it’s still painful, it still feels like blinding needles burrowing into the jelly of her retinas. That’s not a wrench in my plans or anything. It needs to be night where we’re going, too.

Vampire hyper-acuity notwithstanding, FAA regulations require Scarlett to have a copilot, so Archer joins her in the flight deck with his newly-minted license and spends most of the journey flipping through the latest issue of Motor Trend. As we begin our descent, he peeks back at us and teases: “It’ll be your turn eventually, guys. Scarlett and I did our time. Rami and Lucy can go next year. And after that...unless Ben happens to find someone worthy of a not-wedding...” He wiggles his black eyebrows.

“Bring it on,” I reply casually. “Fake wedding are my jam. It’ll be ocean themed. Or Roaring ‘20s themed. And we’ll all do the Cha-Cha Slide in the living room and shame Ben as a bonding activity.”

“Mercy can set up a mashed potatoes bar,” Baby Swan adds.

“Yeah. With pineapple.”

“No. Not on potatoes.”

“Yes on potatoes.”

“Over my dead body.”

“Too late,” I tell her, touching my lips to the knuckles of her cool, steady hand.

We touch down at a small noncommercial airport just outside the city, and Scarlett and Archer stay back to secure the plane as Baby Swan follows me outside. And she realizes where we are as soon as the wind hits her, as soon as her eyes soak up the sand and cacti and cloudless night sky like rain swallowed up by parched earth.

“Phoenix,” she whispers, smiling like a child.

“But wait, there’s more!” I announce in my best Billy Mays voice. I take the little glass bottle from my pocket, walk across the runway to the naked desert, crouch down when I find a suitable spot, and fill the bottle with dry, sandy earth that crumbles in my palms. Then I seal the bottle with a tiny cork and bring it back to give it to her.

“I know what it’s like to have to leave home,” I say. “You’ve had to say goodbye to Phoenix, and soon you’ll have to say goodbye to Forks, and next will be Chicago, on and on forever. You’ll always be leaving the places you learn to call home. Every five or ten or fifteen years, we start over again. Like a snake shedding its skin, like a hermit crab swapping shells. Like the water that travels from rain to seawater to mist and then back again. But now you can always have a little piece of home with you, and maybe that will make it easier.”

She takes the glass bottle and shakes her head in disbelief, in wonder. Because this is exactly what she wanted, what she needed, even if she didn’t know it yet. “Joe...how did you...?”

“What’d I tell ya? I’m a talented guy. Now you have to dance with me.”

She laughs. “Oh no. Hard pass. I don’t dance.”

“When we’re alone in my bedroom you do. So just pretend we’re alone now. In, like, a really really spacious, sandy bedroom. With probably some lizards.”

“Fine. But only because I’m willing to degrade myself for milkshakes.”

She slides the glass bottle of Arizona earth into her pocket and takes my hands. She’s still a pretty terrible dancer, honestly. She hasn’t lost that. And I love that about her. I love damn near everything about her. And it took me a long time to figure out what exactly her subtle yet peerless cocktail of fragrance is, because it wasn’t somewhere I’d ever been. The scent that drifts from her pores—the scent that now lives in my bedsheets like a shadow or a ghost—is sunlight and heat and clarity and resilience and wisdom older than the pyramids. Her scent is the desert.

Now she’s mischievous, her eyes gleaming with the reflections of the Milky Way and the full moon and the stars that are dead and yet eternal, just like us. “So what, you think you’re Vampire Boyfriend Of The Year material now or what? Some dirt and In-N-Out Burger? That’s the height of your game? Is this what I have to look forward to for the rest of my perpetual existence? I totally should have pursued that polyamorous triad with Scarlett and Archer when I had the chance—”

“Yeah,” I say, very softly, smiling, tilting up her chin to kiss her beneath the universe and all its eccentricities. “I love you too.”

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