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softboywriting · 3 years

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Back To You (WIP)

Summary: After six years away you’ve returned to your hometown to be reunited with Shawn, the man you loved and left behind. Much has changed, including Shawn having a son, but your love for him has not. You’ll have to navigate falling in love all over again, rouge werewolves, and being a parent to the child you never thought you’d have. [werewolf story]

Word Count: 14k

|Masterlist of Stories in Bio|

The wind whips around him as he steps through the freshly fallen snow. He's been here before. Both in his real life and in dreams. He knows how this will end. The Wolveswood calls to him like it had the first time he came here. Soon he will round the corner and find the small white pup buried in the snow at the foot of the giant oak.

But this time is different. He rounds the corner and catches the scent of something familiar. Someone. His footsteps quicken, the feeling of finding someone so familiar but foreign. As he approaches the base of the tree there is not a small pup but a woman. As he drops to his knees to uncover the body it stirs, familiar eyes meeting his. The eyes of a woman he hasn't seen in six years grip his heart and make him feel as if he's suffocating.

Shawn sits upright in his bed and looks around his bedroom. His alarm is set for four in the morning and it's a quarter till. There was no going back to sleep now.

___________________

You find yourself in the kitchen of the house you grew up in. The cabinets are painted with sunflowers and daisies they way they had always been. Something is cooking on the stove but you can't smell it. Small hands grip your pants and you look down to see a little boy trying to get your attention.

“Momma. Momma.”

You pick up the child and hold him on your hip. He's adorable, dark hair and dark eyes. From behind you a door opens and you look back. There's a man walking toward you, a smile on his face. He's familiar but you can't quite sort out why. He kisses the boy's head and then yours. The moment his lips meet your temple you know who it is and your heart soars. Shawn. You've missed him.

You wake up, eyes blinking out the sleep as your bedroom comes into focus. What a strange dream. You can only assume being back in town is what has triggered it. You can't help but wonder if Shawn is actually still around.

____________________

Moving back to Brighton was not something you expected to do any time soon, but after losing your apartment due to a rent increase and losing your job due to layoffs, moving back home seemed pretty good. You parents moved away recently and left the house to you and your brother. Jeremy had no interest in moving back to Brighton, he was getting married soon, halfway across the country too.

Driving into town brings a sense of nostalgia, a taste of home. You grew up here, born and raised in the little brick house on the corner of 12th and Main Street. The tiny garden your mom put in when you were ten still grows ever vibrant under the front windows. The old oak stands tall and proud in the front yard, the swing your dad put up when you and Jeremy were toddlers is still there as well. It felt amazing to have a sense of belonging again. The city was great but it wasn't home. Never was.

You drive down Main St and notice a lot of the shops are closed up or are new businesses all together. The grocery store is still open as well as the thrift shop and the printing place. The drug store and sports shop are still there too. The old liquor store has closed up and you are glad for it. Two years ago Brighton became a dry town, no alcohol sales allowed in the town limits. It wasn't a surprise, most of the werewolf townships were going dry. Liquor lead to reckless wolves and no one needed that in this day and age. Werewolves had enough trouble with humans already. While most humans didn't mind them, there were plenty who did. A few rotten apples can sour a bunch.

The old cafe is gone but over head is a sign that reads Full Moon Brew. A small coffee place no doubt. Curiosity gets the best of you and you pull over into a parking spot along the street. The wind whips your oversized sweater around you as you head into the shop, hair a mess from the weather.

The place is warm, both visually and physically. Old wood floors and rust orange tablecloths really set the mood. Little art pieces made of tea cups and spoons hang over head on the high ceilings. They're delightful, beautiful little mobiles. There is a small line of three people as you approach the counter. Somewhere nearby you hear a child squealing, but you don't see it.

The line moves up and you see a familiar face behind the counter. Those dark chocolate curls are as unmistakable as the laugh that comes out of him. Shawn. Gods you cannot believe he's still in town and after the dream you had this morning you can't believe you're actually seeing him. It makes your heart giddy with each step you take. Never did you think he would be in your life again. His voice, heavens and earth, his voice is still just as enticing as it was when you were a teenager.

“Next,” Shawn says cooly as the man in front of you steps forward. “What can I get for you today?”

Your pulse goes wild, the thought of facing him again after six years is sending you into a fit. He's the one man you always wanted, and leaving Brighton was a mistake. Never returning before now was a mistake. Gods knew you were in love with him when you left and they know you still are now. There was no denying it. Man alive you were going to have a conniption fit right here in this line.

“Ne-” Shawn's voice falls away, a cup tumbles to the floor behind the counter and you look up from where the man in front of you has moved. His legs replaced with the dark wood of the order counter. “Hey, I thought I recognized that perfume.”

“Hey.” You lift your eyes fully, forcing them to meet Shawn's. “Long time no see yeah?”

“Yeah.” He grins. His smile put the sun to shame. Bright, gorgeous and his teeth so perfectly straight. Those fangs a bit too large to be human, but that's because he wasn't. “You look good...I can't believe you're here.”

“Same actually.”

“What can I get you? I mean, you came for coffee right? Or did you come for me? I mean that would be weird?”

You chuckle nervously as you step forward and lay your hand on the counter top. “Can I get a-”

A toddler comes into view screaming from behind him. “Daddy! Daddy! I made drink!” The small boy brandishes a tall paper cup with a mysterious substance sloshing out of it.

Your heart stops. The boy from the dream. He has the same dark hair and dark eyes. This was too weird. “Daddy?” you whisper and Shawn looks at you.

He tears his eyes away from yours and looks to the boy. “This is my son.” He kneels down and takes a sip of whatever is in that cup. Brave man. “It's great bud! Go share with Ms. Lettie?”

“Okay!”

Shawn stands up and runs his hand over his hair. “I'm so sorry. He usually doesn't run in here like that. What can I get you?”

“I...I'm just going to have a mocha.”

“It's a long story.” He says as he rings you up. You didn't ask. You didn't need to. “I can explain later but I understand if you don't want to know its-”

You're not as shocked that he has a son as you are that your dream was happening before your very eyes. You aren't sure what to say. How do you explain a dream like that to someone you haven't talked to in years? The only thing you can manage to say is far from what you mean to but it comes out nonetheless. “Did you really drink that?”

“What?”

“The cup he had. Did you actually drink it?”

Shawn chuckles. “Yeah it's just water and apple juice. He mixes his sippy cups into a paper cup. It's fine.”

“Oh.” You laugh softly and hand over a ten dollar bill for your order. “And I'd love to talk later if you're free.”

“I'll leave my number on the receipt then.”

_____________________

The moment you step outside the wind picks up again and you cling to the warm cup in your hands. It's mid November but you can swear you see snow flurries whipping by in the gusts. You turn your back to the wind and walk toward your car. It's so cold you wish you'd grabbed a jacket this morning.

“Hey! Wait!”

You turn and Shawn is walking toward you. “What? Did I leave something?”

“Yeah.” He hands you your receipt with his number on it. “I forgot to give you this.”

“Oh! Right.” You smile down at the crumpled piece of thin paper. “I guess I would have known where to find you though.”

Shawn smiles. “Meet me at the Wolveswood around five?

“Won't your wife wonder where you're at?”

“Wife?

“Yeah...or girlfriend. The boy's mom?”

Shawn shakes his head. “No it's just me. I'll explain later. Five o'clock?”

“Yes. I'll be there.”

____________________

It's just before sunset as you stroll into the Wolveswood. The white trees and dark pines create a stunning and magical aura about the place and that's because in a way it was. Every werewolf township had a Wolveswood. There was something about the trees that grew in them that provided a perfect place for the wolves to be themselves unguarded and uninhibited.

You loved coming here as a kid, though your parents strongly advised against it. Being a human in a town of wolves you had to take precautions. Now that you're older you understand that it was only because the Wolveswood was a place for the residents to run free and you were not a wolf. Though the only times you entered was with Shawn and he would never let anything happen to you.

You head toward the massive oak that sits in the middle of the woods. It's a sprawling work of nature and is the most sacred tree in the Wolveswood. You have countless memories of this place. Most of which involved Shawn and the two of you hanging out after school. A stick breaks behind you and you see Shawn heading towards you in a dark navy sweater. The little boy from the shop is by his side, running ahead to jump on the sticks and snap them.

“You came,” Shawn smiles as he stops before you. “I was worried you might be weirded out by my son.”

“No not at all. I'm curious more than anything.”

Shawn leads you to the trunk of the tree and sits on one of it's massive exposed roots curving up out of the ground. “Well. It all started right here.”

“Like...”

“I found him here, lying abandoned in the snow two years ago almost. He didn't shift into a human for weeks. I had to fight the council to keep him.” Shawn chuckles and watches the boy chase a cardinal nearby. “I didn't know his name, I didn't even know if he knew his name. He didn't speak much, not even babble when he shifted.”

“Wow, he was just left out here?”

“Yeah. We tried everything to find out who his parents were but we can only assume it was a wandering pack or maybe some loners or something. Why they left him behind I can't fathom.”

“What's his name?”

“Myles, but he answers to Pup usually.”

You lower yourself onto the cold dirt and wave at Myles. “Hey pup, hello.”

Myles ducks behind Shawn and hides with his back to the root that Shawn's sitting on. You lean over to try and see him but he must be really curled into the trunk.

“He’s shy.” Shawn reaches back and rubs Myles’ hair. “I want to enroll him in preschool soon but I can't afford anywhere around here and the closest public place is two towns over.”

“What about the library?”

“Expensive. It's a private program.”

“But I'm starting work there next week. I can take him. Employees get free child care. No one is going to ask if he's mine if I bring in his documents.”

Shawn's face lights up. “You would do that? I mean you don't have to. I'll sort something out.” He shakes his head. “No I can't have you do that. I'll just home school him.”

You stand and lay your hand on Shawn's shoulder and he covers it with his own. “You’d do the same for me.”

“Of course I would.” He chuckles. “You know, I missed you. I missed my best friend. Why did we ever split up?”

“I missed you too Shawn, and we split because I wanted to see the world. But the world ended up being an apartment in the city and two part time jobs to get myself through community college. It wasn't worth it.”

“We all make mistakes.” He stands and his hand finds yours. “It's how we learn from them is what matters.”

“What did I learn?”

“That the grass isn't greener on the other side. Now, can I take you to dinner?”

“I'd love to go.”

Myles comes out from behind the root and grabs Shawn's free hand. “I'm hungry too dad.”

Shawn grabs him and hauls him up on his shoulders. “Wanna get a grilled cheese, bud?”

“Yeah!”

____________________

Dinner goes well. You and Shawn catch up on the last six years and discuss how things have been aside from the obvious. It feels like you never left. Being with Shawn feels as natural as if you had just been gone for a few days and came back home. Myles keeps to himself, eyeing you from time to time. He's adorable, all big eyes and big teeth as he puts away a grilled cheese and two plates of sweet potato fries. He could be Shawn's son, if he hadn't told you the truth you would have guessed he was his biologically.

“You're not a wolf.”

You and Shawn halt mid conversation to look at the boy who is leaning with his chin on his arms, staring at you. “What's that bud?”

Myles is silent.

“Pup, it's okay if she's not a wolf.” Shawn rubs his back and he sighs heavily.

“Smells funny.”

“Myles James please don't say that to people.” Shawn looks to you. “You don't smell funny. You smell amazing and I love your perfume.”

“He hasn't been around a lot of humans has he?” You ask, smiling at the two of them. This was amusing.

“No. Mostly the work clientele are wolves from town. You probably smell strange to him because you were in the city for so long. There's a difference between here and there.”

“I smell like city pollution?”

“No, no oh my god. Well maybe? I don't know. A few days in town and you'll be right as rain. I think it's time to head home. Someone needs to go to bed soon.”

____________________

The next few days you stop by the coffee shop and chat with Shawn a while before work. He's so cute when he's got his sleeves rolled up, whip cream smeared across his cheek and hair curly and a mess from the steam of the espresso machines. On the fourth day you come in, Myles is standing at the end of the counter waiting for you.

“Good morning pup,” you smile and wave at him. “How are you today?”

“Can I see your teeth?”

“My teeth?” You glance up at Shawn and he just sighs. “What for?”

“Because.” He bares his little teeth at you and you raise your eyebrows.

“Pup. Leave her alone.” Shawn sighs heavily as he makes your usual mocha with extra cream.

You grin big and show the small boy your teeth. He just squints and then nods. “Do I have teeth?” You ask with a giggle.

“Yes. Good.” And with that Myles just turns and goes back to his play area at the corner of the shop.

You stand up and Shawn passes you your drink. “I'm sorry. He had a nightmare last night and I guess all his teeth fell out. He asked me about mine this morning but he's always asking weird stuff so I didn't think about it.”

“I don't mind. He's curious. I'm just happy he talked to me.” You look over at the play area and Myles is coloring something on a little table.

Shawn smiles big and shakes his head. “He's something. Hey, do you want to go out tonight? My mom is available to babysit if you want.”

“Sure. I'd love some one on one time with you.”

“It's a date then. I'll pick you up at six?”

“I'll be there.”

____________________

A date with Shawn is just what you need. The two of you walking hand in hand through the park is just like old times. You don't feel so stressed like you had in the city. It's wonderful.

“So, a coffee shop huh?” You ask, breaking a silence that was comfortable but getting to be too much.

“Yeah. It's a funny story. Lettie needed help for the summer after you left. I wasn't going to stay for long, hell, I wanted to get out of here too. Everything reminded me of you.” Shawn swings your joined hands. “I found that I really enjoyed making drinks and creating things. I also discovered I loved cooking too. Lettie taught me everything. One summer turned into a year and then another year. Pretty soon I was running the place and Lettie retired.”

“But Lettie is still there?”

“She comes in now and again and she'll pick up a shift or two sometimes. It's just hard on her to work forty plus hours anymore.”

You stop and the two of you sit on a bench. “Why did you adopt Myles? You said you fought for him. Why?”

“Something inside me knew he was meant to be mine.” He looks down and fidgets his hands in his lap. “The way he looked at me, he reminded me of you. I can't explain it honestly, but there was something in that kid that was so very like you. I loved him the second I lifted his tiny form out of the snow.”

“You never thought you'd see me again did you?”

Shawn looks over and there's tears in his eyes and his lip trembles as he speaks. “No. No I didn't.”

You feel your chest cease up and tears blur your vision. You reach for Shawn's hand. “I'm so sorry.”

Shawn squeezes your hand tightly. “I figured six years was a sure thing. You were never coming back. Then you walk in the shop out of nowhere, and it was the most incredible moment when I saw you. I went home that night after our dinner and I had to make sure I was actually awake.”

“I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have ever left. I know you said I was your mate and-”

“You are. You still are.”

“And I didn't understand that then. I didn't really grasp what it meant. I thought it meant I'd be trapped here forever. But I think I do understand now. I think. I have an idea anyway.”

Shawn brings your hand up to kiss it and then leans over, cupping your cheek to kiss your lips softly. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

_____________________

Friday morning you walk into the coffee shop and it's a little early, Shawn must have just unlocked the door when he got in because the closed sign is still up and the lights are still off. There's a radio blaring from behind the counter and you can hear someone shouting along in the backroom.

Sure enough Shawn appears, backing through the swinging door with an arm full of a sack of beans to be roasted. He's shouting at the top of his lungs.

“Marry me Juliet you'll never have to be alone! I love you and that's all I really know!”

You grin as you approach the counter and watch him sing and dance along to the song. The two of you listened to that one all the time in highschool. He had even requested it at prom for you.

“Good morning.” You say softly and Shawn jumps, turning and flushing bright pink.

“Hey...you didn't see that did you?”

“Oh I got the whole performance. You're quite good, even for yelling the lyrics.”

“I couldn't help myself. It was our song. Remember?”

You laugh and walk around behind the counter to meet him. “Of course I remember. How could I ever forget?” You put yours arms around his middle and hug him. “I still listen to it sometimes too.”

Shawn holds you close and rests his chin on your head. “Are you still planning on taking Myles today?”

“Mmhmm. He's registered for the kids care, all I gotta do is bring him in.”

“Dad! Dad! I need juice!”

“Speaking of which, there he is.”

Myles comes wandering through the back room door. He holds his cup up and Shawn goes for the fridge to get a carton of juice for him.

“Are you excited for daycare today bud?” You ask as you squat down to his height. “You get to play with other little wolves. Does that sound fun?”

“Can I color?”

“Yep. And you get lunch, and music time and story time.”

“Dad?”

Shawn turns and looks down at his son. “Yes pup?”

“Can I go?”

“Yep. That's the plan.”

Myles takes his cup from Shawn and chews on the spout. “Okay. We can go now.”

“I'll lock up real quick. I want to take him in on his first day.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I should go with. He might have a hard time."

____________________

Daycare goes off without a hitch. Myles was shy at first but he opened up quickly. As soon as he realized he got to do all his favorite things with other little kids, it was like something switched on inside of him. That social pack mentality kicked in and he was ready to go.

For the first few days you went and checked on him every couple hours. There is a door with a half window that you could go and peek through to see the care room. He looked so happy, so energetic.

Until. The incident. One week into kids care and you're called away from the story time event in the library. Lena brings you to the little time out room, an old office, in the back of the daycare.

"Myles, do you wanna tell her what happened?" Lena, his co-teacher says as she closes the door.

"No."

"Should I tell her?"

Myles curls up where he's sitting on the pillow in the corner. "No!"

"Lena, let me talk to him." You say softly and Lena steps out. You're nervous. Myles isn't actually your kid, you have no place reprimanding him for whatever happened. "Pup?"

"No. Nononono."

You take a seat beside him and lean against the wall. "What happened? I thought you were having a good day? Sha- Dad made you pancakes and everything this morning."

"I bit Jacob." He whispers, sniffling and looking over at you. "We were playing!"

"Oh," you try not to chuckle. You thought this would be much more serious. "Did you say sorry?"

"Yeah."

"Why are you upset?"

Myles huffs. "Because I didn't want to tell you."

"Why not?"

"Because then Dad will make me come home."

You reach over and rub up and down his back. "I don't think Dad will make you come home for biting. You said you were playing?"

"Uh huh."

"And you got carried away and you said sorry?"

"Uh huh."

You run your hand over his hair and he falls sideways on his pillow. "No more biting okay?"

"Mmhmm." He sniffs. "Promise Dad won't make me stay home?"

"I promise. Let's get you back out there okay?"

"Okay."

_____________________

A few days after the biting incident Shawn decides to take Myles out into the wood for a run. It'll be his first one and he thinks maybe he's ready. If he's play fighting at school he's most likely ready to go out. Shawn invites you along and the three of you head for the Wolveswood.

"Are you excited pup?" You ask of the boy on your shoulders. "You and Dad get to run in the woods today!"

"You too!" Myles cheers and plays with your hair. "You gotta run too."

Shawn stops at the large oak tree and you set Myles down. "She doesn't shift, remember?"

"Oh yeah. Is she leaving?"

Shawn squats down and smiles. "She will still be here. You'll see bud, it'll be fun."

You take a seat on a root and watch as Shawn and Myles shift into their wolf forms. Shawn is pretty big, bigger than you remember and Myles is small like a couple months old puppy. He was small for his age so you're not surprised. The contrast between the two is alarming.

Shawn walks forward, nudging Myles toward you and he stumbles a bit. You reach out and pet Myles' head and he jumps into your lap.

"Hey bud," you pet his head again and he rolls onto your lap. "I don't think your dad wants you to lay on me."

Shawn paces and sits at the edge of the path. You set Myles down and he runs over to Shawn. You follow the two into the dense trees and it reminds you of when you would come here with Shawn when you were younger. The two of you spent hours with each other in these trees.

The two run along and you just enjoy the wilderness. It's just how you remember it being. The trees are all baren now, and the leaves cover the ground in beautiful orange and brown hues. Six years ago you left this place. How could you have been so stupid.

You feel something bump your back and you turn around to see Shawn. He has Myles at his side and you rub his ear softly. "What's up?"

Shawn bumps you harder and you stumble back. He does it again and you tumble into some leaves.

"Hey!" You brush leaves off your hair and Myles runs over, pouncing in the leaves around you. "What was that for?"

Shawn stalks towards you and Myles jumps in front of him, growling his hardest. You raise your eyebrows. Myles howls loudly.

Shawn shifts and stands before you and the pup. "Looks like someone is protective."

You put your hand out for him and he pulls you up. Myles runs off and hops around in the leaves nearby. "He reminds me of you."

"Yeah?"

"Mmhmm. Remember when we'd come out here with friends and you'd all shift?" You smile and shake your head. "You would never let anyone near me."

"Well that's because I had to keep you safe." He tucks some of your hair back as the wind picks up and blows it around. "Some of our friends were assholes."

"Yeah but no one would have hurt me."

"Accidents happen with young rambunctious wolves."

You smile softly and lean your head on his shoulder. "Yeah. You were always super cautious though." You loop your arm around his and he takes your hand.

"Do you think Myles is okay? Like I'm doing okay?"

"What? You're doing great. He's healthy and smart. He's not very big I'll admit but he was small when you found him right?"

"He was so tiny. Definitely the runt. It makes me sad to know he was possibly abandoned because he was so small they didn't think he'd survive."

You smile as Myles makes his way back toward you and Shawn. He looks delighted, like he's having the best time. "He's adorable."

"He likes you." Shawn says kissing your temple. "He knows that we're mates and he really looks up to you."

"He knows?"

"Hes a wolf. He can tell when others are taken. He might not understand it yet, I don't know, but he can definitely tell."

"I'm really glad I came back."

Shawn squeezes your side. "You can't imagine how I feel."

"I'm sure I can." You lay your head against his chest as he wraps his arms around you. "But I don't want to. I'm so sorry I put you through that loneliness."

"It's okay." He kisses your head. "You're here now. That's all that matters."

_____________________

It's a Monday when you and Myles head out of the Library front doors and see a woman sitting on the tree box. It's not unusual to see people sitting on the wood frame while waiting for someone or a ride or something. But there was something off about this woman. She put that sense of uneasiness in your heart, the way one might get when they experience something terrible. You guide Myles away from the tree and toward the sidewalk, hand firm in his.

"What's wrong?" He asks softly as you pick up the pace. Smart boy.

"Nothing Pup. I just want to see your dad."

"But you see him all the time."

You stop and pick Myles up and set him on your hip. He's heavy but not too bad. "I miss him is all. It was a long day."

"Yeah. It was." He sighs and lays his head on your shoulder. "Alpapabet is hard."

"Mmhmm." You murmur and hold his head against your shoulder. You can still feel the woman staring at you, but you will not look back and verify the feeling.

The walk to the coffee shop is long and exhausting with Myles on your hip. You don't want to put him down, something in you says to keep him as close as possible until you're with Shawn. The bell chimes over the door and you're glad to see the seating area is empty at the moment. It's nearly closing time, being late after noon, people aren't exactly flocking for coffee.

"Hey, how was school?" Shawn says, tossing a dish rag aside and walking out from behind the counter. "What's...?" You shake your head to cut him off.

You set Myles down and he begins to babble about his class and what he did all day. You take a seat and look out the window to see if the woman followed you.

Shawn sits across from you, having taken Myles to the play area behind the counter. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened. There was a woman outside the library and she made me uncomfortable. It's nothing, I just got a weird feeling."

"Was she saying anything? Did she approach you?"

You shake your head. "No. She just stared at me and Myles. It was weird, like I said, I was uncomfortable."

Shawn reaches across and takes your hands in his. "It's okay. Don't feel bad for trusting your instincts."

"No, I don't. I just hope Myles isn't uncomfortable."

"I don't think he is." He looks over at the small boy in the play area with his power rangers. "He seemed normal. Trust me, he will tell me if something is wrong. He has no filter. If something comes up again let me know?"

"Of course." You squeeze Shawn's hands. "I promise."

_____________________

You and Shawn go out on a date Saturday night, his mom has Myles again. Shawn hasn't seemed himself all week since the incident with the woman. You don't think that's what is really bothering him, as he hasn't said anything at all. Something is on his mind though and you can read him like a book as he picks at his dinner unenthusiastically. It's unlike him not to eat.

"So, what's going on?" You say nonchalantly.

"Hmm? Why do you mean?"

"You're not eating. You've hardly said a word."

"Sorry." He sits up in his chair and looks at you. "I'm just thinking about work."

"Work?"

"Yeah. I've got some things to sort out. It's fine."

You reach over and rub his forearm. "Talk to me. I'm here for you."

Shawn takes a deep breath. "The shop isn't doing so great lately and I need to find a way to make extra income because just selling coffee for ten hours a day and only making the gross majority of my profit in the morning, isn't working out."

You nod. "I see. What have you come up with?"

"Food? But I'd need to sink more money into expenditures to get food to make that."

"Mmm. What if you do something simple? Two sandwiches and a soup offering? Bakery goods? Could you partner with another shop in town?"

"I could do simple items, things I can get in bulk for pretty cheap. Or buy baked goods in bulk for cheap and resell for a small margin."

"What about breakfast?"

"Pancake mix I can stretch, and eggs aren't too expensive." Shawn runs his hand over his hair. "I've got some in savings for Myles, just for like in case he needs something but I can use a little."

You lean your chin on your hand. "I can bring my parents patio set over to the shop and we can set it up out front for outdoor seating."

"Really? They've got that nice black set right?"

"Mmmhmm. They left it with the house and I am never going to use it. I can even help you prep if you need in the morning."

Shawn smiles big. "I could offer WiFi at the shop too?"

"You could, but remember that's another bill."

"Yeah, true but I think I could make it work. Maybe charge a bit for the WiFi?"

"You could. Or maybe bring in some live music? In the afternoons?"

Shawn nods and smiles slightly. "That'd be good, I could charge a small fee to set up. It'd definitely bring people in I think."

"Alright, then you have a plan." You steal a fry off his dinner plate. "You better eat now before I take it all."

Shawn slides his plate away from you. "I will eat. You're just as bad as Myles."

"Am not."

He grins. "You're right, he's worse because he is as bad as his Dad."

You roll your eyes. "You are terrible when it comes to food theft."

Shawn holds a fry up for you. "But I'll share. A good alpha cares for his mate."

"Stopppp," you groan and take the fry. "No mate talk right now."

"Save it for the bedroom?"

"Shawn!"

He cackles and you drop your head into your arms on the table. "Hey," he reaches over and scratches your head. "Don't be so shy. It's okay to be mated and talk about it."

"I know. It's just so much to think about still. We haven't taken the time to discuss it. I think I understand but y'know, I'll probably never fully understand."

"I'll help."

"I know. It's only been a few weeks...a month? Shit. I'm still processing my move and seeing you again and Myles. Everything has happened so fast. Don't get me wrong, I love that you're here and I love Myles a lot even though we've just met. I'm happy but I'm just a little overwhelmed, or maybe I'm overthinking."

Shawn takes your hand and squeezes your fingers together gently. "Take your time. No one is rushing you into anything. I'm here no matter what you decide to do."

"I'm not leaving, if you're wondering about that."

"I've wondered yeah."

"No, I'm home again, for good."

"Good because I'm not too keen on letting you go again."

___________________

Laying in bed with Shawn, staring at the ceiling, it feels like the last six years never happened. The man beside you is out cold, arm up over his head, jaw slack. He's so beautiful when he's like this. Relaxed, innocent, not a care in the world. You swallow hard and sigh heavily. You hate feeling like this, like everything is just going too well.

"What's wrong?" Shawn asks and breaks the silence. He shouldn't even be awake.

"I thought you were passed out."

"I was. I felt your heartbeat quicken and woke up."

"Oh."

Shawn rolls onto his side and slides his hand up your bare stomach to tuck it around your rib cage. "Have you slept?"

"A little."

"Is your brain too loud?" He yawns. "Anxiety?"

You pause. He remembers that you have anxiety. Of course he does. "Yeah, I'm just in my head."

He noses at your neck gently, gives you a little kiss and a soft lick. He's always done this. His affection has always been a little different than any other guy you've known. "Talk to me."

"There's nothing to discuss. It's just me, just my head. I'm overthinking everything and you know how it is."

"Let's get up." Shawn pushes up so he's leaning over you. "We'll get some water, have a snack or something."

"Alright. I'll try anything."

Half an hour later you're in the living room of Shawn's apartment, legs tucked up under you while the tv plays silently across from you. It's some early 2000s sitcom rerun that plays late at night on the lower cable channels. You're not paying much mind to it.

"Here, an adult lunchable." Shawn says, placing a plate with crackers, cheese slices and ham cubes on your lap.

You can't help but crack a smile. "Adult lunchable huh?"

"Yeah." He sits beside you and pulls the blanket off the back of the couch. "You heard me."

You pick up a cracker and a cheese with the ham and pop it in your mouth. It's good. Really good actually, the cheese is strong and you raise your eyebrows at Shawn.

"Aged swiss. I got it at the farmers market last week. It's so good." He grabs a combo of food from the plate and eats it.

"When did you get so fancy?"

"Sometimes you just gotta treat yourself. Besides, I thought you might like it too."

You giggle a bit and shake your head. "You're something else Shawn."

"I am." He curls his lip up to reveal his fangs. "That's not news though."

"Not like that you goofba-" A loud banging stops you dead mid sentence. It's almost three in the morning. Who the hell is knocking on a door? Or trying to break it down.

Shawn stands and goes to the window that overlooks the street below. The apartment is above the coffee shop, so there aren't any neighbors. "I can't see anyone."

"Maybe something fell in the shop?"

"No, that was a forced banging. I'm going down." Shawn grabs his jacket from beside the door and you jump up, setting the plate of food aside.

"What if someone is down there?"

"I'll kick their ass?" Shawn opens the door and you grab his arm. "Honey, I'm not going to let someone break into my shop and ruin my whole lively hood."

"Call the police."

"No time. I need to see what is going on."

"What if-" The sound of breaking glass makes you jump and let out a little scream.

Shawn runs down the stairs and you grip the railing to the lower door tightly. He disappears outside and you remain frozen, eyes trained on the doorway.

Five minutes or so tick by so slowly until he reappears. "What is it?"

"I have no idea." Shawn motions for you to come downstairs. "The window looks like it just fell out of the doorframe to the shop."

You follow Shawn outside and to the shop door. Sure enough there is absolutely no glass left in the frame. It's like he said, the glass just fell out and broke. "That's weird. What about the banging?"

"I'm not sure. The door is locked." He pulls his keys from his jacket pocket and unlocks the shop. "Stay here while I go inside."

You grip your phone in your pocket and wait for him to give you an all clear. A moment later he returns, the lights flickering on in the shop reveals nothing out of place. It just looks like the shop at closing time.

"This is wild, I can't tell what made the banging. That absolutely sounded like someone at the door."

"It did. I don't know. Maybe someone was trying to get help and then the glass popped out and scared them off?"

Shawn scrubs his hand over his face. "Yeah, maybe. I can't even tell if it was a wolf, there are too many lingering scents here."

"Let's clean up."

"I'll clean up. You go on up to the house. Try to sleep if you can."

You wrap your arms around yourself, his sweatshirt so warm against your skin. "I'm not tired anymore."

Shawn walks around a nearby table and cups your face in his hands. "Please? You haven't slept. I know you don't work tomorrow, but you need rest."

"But..."

"No buts." He kisses you softly. "Go upstairs."

You lay your hands on his chest. "Come get me if you need me."

"Yes darling."

_____________________

You wake up sometime later, not remembering falling asleep. Your body must have been at it's limit. The light is dim shining in the window, likely a storm blowing in. Maybe it'll snow. You stretch out and your am collides with something soft.

You lift the blankets and find Myles curled up on Shawn's side of the bed. He's asleep, clutching his stuffed sea otter that he got at the zoo. He's told you the story about a hundred times in the last several weeks as small children do. Clearly it's very important to him. Shawn must have picked him up from his parents place before opening the shop.

The bedroom smells like coffee and you take a deep breath. It's so good. Rich and bright smelling with hints of hazelnut. You're such a sucker for coffee, Shawn really chose the perfect profession. You sit up and run your hand over your hair. Should you wake Myles up? No. Let him sleep.

Moving to get up you freeze, a little hand curling around your forearm. You look back and see Myles awake. He rubs his nose into the pillow.

"Good morning Pup."

"Mmmrning."

"I see you found me in Dad's bed."

Myles nods.

"Does Dad know you're in here?"

He giggles and shakes his head.

You run your hand over his hair. "It'll be our secr-"

Shawn walks in the open doorway and gasps playfully. "What is this? Have you stolen my mate?!"

Myles cackles and buries himself down in the bedding.

You laugh and Shawn leans down and kisses your forehead. "Good morning Shawn."

"Morning Honey." He tugs the blankets back to expose Myles. "I see I have a rouge pup in my bed, loving my mate up."

"Daddd! I was snugbulling!" Myles crawls over to your lap and lays his head on your thigh. "Momma's warm."

Your eyes go wide. Shawn must pick up on the way your heart stops because he lifts Myles off your lap and carries him over to the other side of the room. You can hear him say something to the boy but you can't make it out he is speaking so low. You remember your dream, the one from the day you found Shawn again. The one with the boy calling you Momma.

"Shawn?" You call out.

He turns and looks over to you, startled at the loudness of your voice. "Yes?"

"It's okay." You stand up and cross the room and put your arms out for Myles. "He can snuggle."

Shawn raises his eyebrows. "He can?"

"Yeah." You pet back Myles' mop of dark hair and he lays his head on your shoulder. "It'll be easier to start now."

"Are you ready for that? I thought you were still sorting things out?"

"I can't let myself wait to figure it out. I just have to do it, to be here and be in this." You kiss Myles' head. "I need to be a mate."

Shawn steps close and pulls you in, sandwiching Myles between the two of you. He presses a kiss to your head and whispers, "I love you."

"I love you, Shawn."

"I love you too Dad." Myles mumbles and blows a kiss. You both chuckle at him and he wiggles to be set down. "Breakfast Dad." He grabs Shawn's hand and you take the other one, fingers intertwining.

______________________

Another Monday comes following the really great weekend of staying at Shawn's place. You're sitting in the back office of the library getting books sorted that have been damaged. You're taking logs to make sure and order new ones of them. Your coworker Brenda who works the front desk walks in and closes the door behind her, making you look up from your work curiously because the door always stays open.

"Is Myles adopted?"

"Um, y-yeah?" You swallow thickly. Had someone found out he wasn't your son? It wasn't a big deal, but maybe it was. "Why?"

"Well, there was someone here asking to pick up a child early. She wouldn't give me a name but said his adopted mother worked here. I know you're not a wolf, so I thought maybe Myles was adopted and she was asking for him?"

You stand up and knock over your stack of books. "Is she still here? "

"No. She left when I told her she would need to bring a note of approval of absence from a parent."

You wrap your arms around yourself. "Do you have security camera access?"

"Yes of course." Brenda nods. "Do you need something?"

"I want to see the video footage of the woman who came in. Please?"

Brenda opens the door and waves you to follow. "Come on, I'll show you. Obviously you're concerned."

"Of course I am." You follow her down the hall. "If that woman was here for Myles then I need to know. No one should come for him besides myself, Shawn and Karen, Shawn's Mom. I'm going to assume it was not Karen."

"She would know his name, right?"

"Exactly."

____________________

After viewing the footage you call Shawn. The woman was the same one from the other day outside the library. The one who made you uncomfortable. The phone rings and rings. Shawn probably has it on the charger in the storage room. You click to hang up and go to Brenda.

"Can you put a note in Myles' file that no one is allowed to pick him up but Shawn or myself?"

"Of course. Is something going on? Do you think that woman was really here for Myles?"

"Yeah, maybe. Even if she wasn't, that behavior is extremely fishy. Can we ban her?"

Brenda nods and holds up a printed copy of a screengrab from her computer of the footage. "I'm already on it."

You nod. "Good. I'm going to finish my ordering. Let me know if anything else comes up."

____________________

As soon as you get to the shop with Myles and work you tell Shawn what happened, and how the woman was the same one that made you uneasy. Shawn closes up early and locks the front door. He's not happy, it's quite obvious.

"Does Myles know?" He asks as he sinks into the corner booth where you're sitting with a cup of tea he made for you.

"No, he doesn't. Brenda wasn't going to let him out of the care room under any circumstances. She didn't even know for sure if it was Myles she was asking for. The woman didn't know his name."

"Good." Shawn runs his hand over his hair and tugs. "You're absolutely sure this was the same woman?"

"Yes Shawn. I'm a thousand percent sure. I knew something was up, I just didn't know what. Why would someone try to take Myles?"

"I don't know." He looks to his son in the corner as he stages a little cafe with his power ranger toys and pretends to take an order. "I've had him for almost three years now. He'll be five, or what I assume is five, honestly we have no idea how old he is but developmentally he is almost five."

"His birthday is coming up?"

"Yeah. I found him just before New year's, out there in the snow."

"So that's his birthday?"

Shawn nods. "Mmhmm. The day I found him is his birthday. But that aside, I've had him this long and I've never had any problems. No one has ever come for him, or showed up looking for him."

"Maybe that woman is related?" You stir your tea and chew your lip nervously. "Maybe she has been looking for him."

"I've been afraid of that, but I figured that three years passed, no one would come back. Then again I thought six years was a sure thing you weren't coming back but here you are." Shawn lets out a heavy sigh that borders on a growl. "Fuck."

You reach across and grab his hand on the table. "Shawn, it's up to you what you want to do. You're Myles' father. If this woman is his mom, or his Grandma or related in someway, it's up to you if you want him to meet them. They left him, abandoned him to die in the Wolveswood years ago. They have no claim to him at all."

"I know. I'm torn. What if this woman can tell me something about him? What if I should know something?"

"I think in three years you would have found out if there was anything wrong with him. He's been to the doctor right?"

"Yes of course. Every six months he has his check ups and he's gotten everything he needs to be healthy. I even take him to the dentist twice a year to make sure his teeth aren't coming in wrong."

"Then he is fine. If that woman shows up again, then you can speak with her. Or if you don't want to do that, simply tell her to leave."

Shawn nods. "Yeah, I don't want to confuse Myles. I'll tell her to leave us alone."

"Sounds good."

"I do want to keep Myles here tomorrow. I'd just feel better if he was close, in case that woman comes back to the library."

"I'll let Lena know he'll be out." You bring Shawn's hand up and kiss it softly. "You're doing your best, don't stress."

"I know." He smiles tiredly. "I'm glad you're here."

"Me too."

______________________

Shawn keeps Myles home the next day. He has Lettie run the shop while he gives his son a really good day together. They go out for breakfast, go to the park, watch the geese at the lake, make lunch together. He makes sure Myles knows he is loved, not that he would really doubt it. Shawn gives everything he has and more to the child.

Wednesday rolls around and you have a day off since you're picking up a co-worker's Saturday shift. You decide to hang out with Shawn, learn a little bit about coffee and drink making. It's slow in the shop. Myles is down for a nap, Shawn having kept him home again since you wouldn't be at the library.

"So you wanna make drinks?" Shawn says sing songy and grabs a cup off the stack by the registers. "You wanna know my secrets?"

You giggle. "Share your sage advice oh wise barista."

"First you start with the bean!" Shawn grabs a handful of beans ready to go in the roaster. "THE MASTER OF ALL!"

You roll your eyes and let out a reluctant chuckle at his antics. "My god you're ridiculous."

"Maybe. But maybe I'm the bean whisperer. How bout that?"

You grab the cup from him and go to the coffee tanks. "Enough bean master, let's get to the mixy mixy."

Shawn chuckles to himself and steps up behind you. "Start with your brew strength." He points out each tank labeled with blonde, medium, dark roasts. "Then choose your flavors or sweeteners."

You pour out a dark roast cup. "I want caramel."

"This way, Honey." He says, going over to a little tiered set up on the back counter of pumps of flavouring. "Toasted caramel? Salted caramel?"

"Which is sweeter?"

"Toasted."

You lift the cup to the pump and out your palm over the spout. "How many?"

"Well, do you want the coffee to be lightly flavored or," He presses his nose into your hair and grabs your hips. "Extra sweet."

"Shawn," you giggle and he sways your hips in time with his. "Quit it."

"I can't help it." He wraps his arms around you. "I'm in one of my moods."

You pump down two squirts of the caramel and set the coffee down, eyes scanning for a stir stick. "Your moods huh?"

"Yeah." He slides a hand up your shirt and you slap your hand down against it to stop him. "We are in the shop Shawn!"

Shawn kisses along your neck and you can't help but shiver. "We've had fun in much worse places haven't we?"

"Shawn. Please, someone could walk in."

He lets out a growl and peels himself away from you. "Alright, fine. You ruin my fun."

You hold your cup up. "Maybe I have to because you have alpha brain right now and you just want to fuck and I want to learn how to make a caramel cream coffee."

"Yes darling." He shows you to the milk machine. "Alright so this is where we steak the milk. Please be careful."

You turn on the machine and wait as it bubbles inside. "Okay, when?"

"Hold on now." Shawn grabs a metal cup with a handle and gets under the bar to get a carton of milk. "We have to get the milk first."

"Oh. It's not in there?"

"No. It's going to just heat it." Shawn kisses your cheek. "Let me do it the first time okay?"

You step aside and he pours out the milk to a notch in the metal cup. He puts the cup up onto the spigot and flips it on. The machine bubbles and the milk gurgles in the cup. "That looks easy?"

"It's hot."

"You're hot." You smirk and Shawn gives you a warning look. You know you shouldn't tease him when he's already in a mood.

"Your milk." He pours it into your cup and stirs with a stir stick from a cup on top of the machine.

You lift the cup and take a sip. It's good. Not exactly what you wanted, but it's good nonetheless. "Should we check on Myles?"

Shawn nods. "He should be woken up. It's almost time for lunch."

"I'll go get him." You offer, setting aside your coffee. "You should watch the shop."

"I better not come up there and find you snuggled up if you don't return."

"But what if he wants snuggled? Shouldn't the baby boy be snuggled?"

Shawn rolls his eyes. "Five minutes. Don't spoil him."

"Oh he is already spoiled."

"Yeah," Shawn chuckles. "He is."

____________________

You walk into Myles' small bedroom and see him sleeping on his little toddler bed. It's precious, completely space themed with the bed being a rocketship. Shawn truly spoils this child rotten. You kneel beside the bed and lay your hand on his back, rocking him gently to wake him up.

"Pup, it's time to wake up now."

The moment your voice reaches his ears he jumps, small body jerking with incredible force as he presses himself to the wall. There is terror in his eyes for a flash of a second before he registers who you are.

"Myles are you alright? Did you have a nightmare?"

He crawls and begins to cry, arms wrapping around you as he clambors forward. You hold him, pulling him off the bed and into your lap as you take a seat on the floor more comfortably. He shakes, fingers curled tight in your shirt.

You rub his back and he continues his soft crying. "Tell me about it?"

"I was in the forest and Dad was gone and uh, uh a lady says I should go with her." He wipes his nose on your shoulder. "But but Dad said no because I don't know her that I don't do that. So I said no! and she got mad."

"Oh." You swallow hard, worried this dream could be connected to the woman who keeps appearing. "Did anything else happen?"

"No. I woked up and I thinked you were the lady."

"Oh bud, I'm sorry I scared you."

Myles releases you and sits on the floor in front of you. "It's okay Momma."

Your heart clenches. You won't get used to that name anytime soon. "Let's go see Dad. He probably has some lunch for you, or maybe we can get some."

"Oh good. I'm starving." Myles says matter of fact and goes to his bedroom door.

You follow after and he takes your hand as you go down the stairs to the door outside. It's busy, the shops across the street having people coming and going. You spot a woman on the bench across from the shop, opposite side of the street in front of the hardware store. It's her. You pick Myles up and he hugs you tightly. Your heart races and you stare at her, memorizing her face, hoping she is looking at you and understanding she is not welcome.

When you get into the shop it's busy and Shawn is rushing around behind the counter. The line is six deep. You carry Myles around behind the counter and into the storage room. Shawn gives you a look but you shake your head.

You wait until the line goes down and Shawn has a free moment to call him over to the backroom. He doesn't need much encouragement, he is on his way the second he realizes he is free.

"What is going on?" Shawn asks under his breath.

"Myles had a dream about the woman and she was across the street on a bench. I think she's stalking him."

Shawn sneers, flashing his teeth in a rare threatened alpha moment. His eyes go to the doors of the shop, scan across the windows to see anyone outside. "What does she look like?"

"My height, brown hair, quite a bit older than us. Maybe early forties? Or maybe time wasn't kind, but she is white and has on a brown sweater and-"

Shawn stalks across the shop and opens the door, going out and leaving you speechless.

"Daddy's mad." Myles mumbles and grabs your fingers. "Is he okay?"

"Yes pup. He is unhappy with someone outside."

"Can I have juice?"

You look around. "Where does Dad keep your cups?"

"Here." He walks over and pats a cupboard door under the register. "Juice is in the refridgermater."

You eye the front doors as you retrieve the juice for Myles. You don't want him to worry, but you're sure he already senses your anxiety rising.

A hand lands on your leg and you look down at Myles. He wraps his arms around your thigh. "It's okay Momma."

You clench your jaw and hold back your emotions. The boy is so sweet and so sensitive. You squat down and hand him his cup. "It's okay, I know. How bout we go see what Mr. Red ranger has ordered today?"

Myles smiles big and hurries off to the backroom where his toys are laying by a storage shelf.

The door jingles upon opening and you look over to see Shawn walking in. He's not much happier than he was before he went out. His teeth are still prominent, eyes wild. You're going to assume he has not found the woman.

"I don't like this." Shawn growls. "I don't play games and not with our son at risk."

"Our son."

"Yes that's what I said, I-" He stops and realizes the weight of his words. "My son. Our son? He calls you Momma so-"

"It's okay." You lay your hand on Shawn's shoulder. "He's our son."

"Yeah, he is. No one is going to take him."

"Over my dead body. She was gone wasn't she?"

"Yes. She was completely gone. I just want to talk to her, to find out what her problem is. We assume it's Myles, but maybe it's not?"

"You think she's after me?"

Shawn shrugs. "I don't know. She hasn't seen me as far as we know, and she's only come to your work until now. Maybe she needs to see you?"

"No, it's Myles. It has to be. He dreamed about her, there is something going on I just don't know what."

"Next time we see her, we will approach her."

"Absoultely. As long as I don't have Myles with me. I'm not risking her snatching him or something."

Shawn shakes his head. "No of course not. I have a feeling she will be back though. I'll take care of it."

_____________________

The next few days are quiet, not much going on at work or at the coffee shop. You have dinner with Shawn and Myles one night, go see a movie at the drive in another night. Life feels normal and good until you get home one evening and something isn't right.

It starts on your drive home. You turn the radio off while you think about the woman that has been appearing. You're not sure what has gotten you thinking about her, but something has. It bothers you. Why didn't she approach you? Why didn't she talk to you? What was her motive? It all points to Myles. She must be related somehow. Maybe she doesn't even know how yet. Maybe she just recognizes a familiar scent on him. You sigh and turn into the driveway of your house.

You sense something is wrong when you turn the handle on the front door and it's not even latched. You know you locked it because you locked yourself out that morning and had to go in through the garage to get your keys. You step back and grab the strap of your purse, hand going to your pocket for your phone.

"Anyway then he said he couldn't go but I know he could..." You spin around and see your neighbor and a friend walking past your house chit chatting.

"You okay honey?" The friend asks, stopping your neighbor in her conversation.

You step down off the porch and clutch your phone. "Y-yeah."

"You look like you've seen a ghost. Are you sure?"

"Actually..." You glance back at the door. "Have you two seen anyone here? Or anyone you don't recognize around the neighborhood?"

The neighbor shakes her head. "No, not that I can recall. Is something wrong? Is your house okay?"

"I think so? It's just my door is unlocked and I know I locked it this morning. I'm worried that someone may have broke in and-"

"Oh honey, call the police. I wouldn't mess around with that." The friend says, pulling out her phone. "My husband works at the precient let me just give him a call."

"Oh that's okay he's probably busy. I probably just made a mistake or something."

"Dear you should have someone stop by before you go inside. If you're confident you locked it and it's unlocked then you should not go in." Your neighbor ushers you toward the sidewalk. "There could be a feral wolf in there. Y'know I heard one of them rouge packs has been in the Wolveswood lately."

"What? Really?" You bring your phone up and open Shawn's contact. "When did you hear that?"

"About three days ago? Some of the ladies at the book club were talking about it. I really wish the city council would do something about it. What if one of the kids gets hurt out there?"

You nod and lift your phone to your ear. "Excuse me, sorry." The phone rings and rings. Finally after six times Shawn answers. "Shawn? Can you come by the house?"

"Of course. Should I bring Myles?"

"No. Drop him off at you mom's house. There is something going on."

Shawn says something to Myles. "I'll be there in a few minutes. Have you called anyone else?"

"No, um well, the neighbor is calling her husband who's a cop. I'm not sure what's going on but the door to the house is unlocked and...Shawn I don't want Myles to be scared. I don't want you to panic."

He takes a deep breath. "I know. I'll try to stay calm. I'm on my way."

You lower your phone and stare at the front door of the house. If that woman is in there you're going to lose your shit. This has gone too far. What if you had brought Myles home with you before stopping at the coffee shop? What if you went in and the woman was there? Would she hurt you? You step back and your neighbor lays her hand on your shoulder.

"Breath dear, you're turning blue."

"Sorry." You shake your head and take a deep breath. "I'm just nervous."

"That's alright. I understand, this isn't something to take lightly. Hopefully all is well and nothing has happened and you did just forget to lock the door."

"No, I locked it, and it's not even latched. Someone was in my house or is right now."

"The cops are coming." Your neighbor's friend says softly.

"Thank you."

____________________

The moment Shawn arrives he pulls you into his arms. The cops arrived only moments before and have gone into the house to investigate. Shawn buries his face in your hair and cups the back of your neck with his hand as if he let go for just a moment he might lose you. He's burning hot, skin radiating heat through his clothes and into you. You're sure he's going mad in his head, mind racing with every scenario that could have played out. You slide your hand up his back, nails raking gentle against his spine to soothe him, to bring him down from a feral high.

"The house is clear." An officer says as he approaches. His badge says Martin. "There's signs of an invasion, we'll need you to verify any missing items."

"Yeah, sure." You nod and step away from Shawn, hand going to his. "Come on honey."

Shawn walks with you to the front door and he tenses, eyes darting around as if he senses something, or someone. "What is going on?"

"Hmm."

Your hand falls away as you step through the door frame. "Is something wrong?"

He shakes his head and follows after you.

The house has been ransacked. Your living room is torn up, the couch flipped, Myles’ play pen is destroyed, the drawers of your end table opened and emptied. You cover your mouth and stifle a cry as you take it all in. Whoever it was, wanted something.

"Ma'am, I know this is difficult to take in. Please let us know if anything is gone. We will add it to the report."

"Is the whole house like this?" You turn and look at officer Martin and he gives a gentle sorrowful look.

“Some of the rooms are too.” Martin says.

"Oh my God."

"Honey, they'll find who did this." Shawn says and wraps his arm around you to pull you into his chest. "Or I will." He says under his breath.

You look at the mantle and a photo of you and Shawn with Myles is missing. "The photo from his first day of kids care."

Shawn looks back and forth across the mantle. "It's gone. Why would they take it?"

"For reference?"

Officer Martin steps in. "Something gone?"

"A photo of us with our son, Shawn's son technically." You explain, lifting another frame. "It's this big or so."

"Maybe it's in the mess." Officer Martin offers, looking around the floor. "Is there anything of value in the frame?"

"No, just the photo."

Shawn moves away from you and pulls the officer aside. "Sir, can I talk to you outside? It may pertain to the situation."

"Of course."

"Baby, I'll be right back, I'm going to talk to the cop outside okay?" Shawn calls to you as you walk into the kitchen.

You nod. "Yeah, okay I'll be here." You look around the kitchen and it's fine for the most part. Some stuff has been moved, drawers opened but not emptied. Beside the kitchen is the mudroom and it's untouched. You stare up the stairs adjacent, nervous to find out what your bedroom looks like, not to mention the other two rooms up there. You take a deep breath and start the climb to find out.

_____________________

Your room is untouched. It looks exactly how you left it this morning. You waste no time looking around and move to the guest room that was once your brother's bedroom. It's okay, the same as always. Then you go to the room that used to be yours, the smallest upstairs and the one you use for Myles when he comes over. It has a twin size bed and some of his toys in it. It is the room you're sure won't be untouched.

The door falls open when you push on it and inside is dark. You turn on the light and sure enough it looks like someone has localized a tornado in there. Everything from the bed sheets to the spare change of Myles' clothes are strewn about. You cover your mouth. Had the intruder really come for Myles, thinking he was here?

Shawn calls your name and you turn in the doorway to see him at the top of the stairs. "We should go get Myles."

"I'm not bringing him back here."

"No, we're not. We'll go to the apartment. I don't want you to stay here either. I think we should be together right now."

You walk down the hall to meet him and he puts his arm around you, cradling your head to his chest. "Why is someone doing this?"

"I don't know. They want Myles back? I can't imagine why. He was abandoned. It’s been years."

"I know. I just feel like it's my fault somehow. Everything started happening when we got back together."

"No, shh." Shawn kisses your head. "You haven't done anything wrong. Let's finish up with the officers here and go get Myles and go home. It's too stressful in this house right now."

_____________________

Morning comes the next day after a restless night and you wake up in Shawn's bed with a weight on your chest. It's Myles. He is using you as a pillow, legs and body stretched out across Shawn's side of the bed. You rest your hand on his hair and scratch gently. He stirs, wakened by your touch.

"Momma?" Your heart races, it does every time he calls you that.

"What, Pup?"

"I'm sorry."

"You didn't do anything. Why are you sorry?"

Myles turns his head and faces you, his little cheek squished into your skin. "Because you're scared." He pats his hand in time with your heartbeat over your chest.

You smile softly. "I'm not scared. I just woke up."

"But your heart is all bumbumbum."

"That's because I love you." You put your hand over his and he makes big eyes at you. "I realized you were sleeping on me and I am happy because you're my favorite pup."

Myles giggles. "Ohh. My heart goes bumbumbum too when you get me after school sometimes."

"That's when you get excited. Your heart can beat fast for a lot of reasons."

He nods. "Dad's does that when you are near him. What's that mean?"

You smile big and close your eyes. This child is so sweet, he has no idea. "It means Dad loves me and is happy when we are together. Let's go back to sleep. I'm very tired."

"Me too." Myles says as he stretches. He shifts around and lays beside you, cuddles against your side. "I love you too Momma."

You turn and hold him against you, chin on his head. He's warm like Shawn, the wolf in him making him run hotter than average. You close your eyes and relax, he's safe and so are you.

_____________________upadate

When you get up later in the morning Shawn is still gone. You assume he is at the shop working like usual but when you go down with Myles he isn't there.

"Lettie, is Shawn out?" You ask as you place Myles down by his toys.

The sweet old woman looks up from her magazine. "He wasn't here dear. I saw him come down this morning and head out across the street. He texted me last night about running the shop today for him. I figured he was going to your place but now I see that isn't the case."

"He left? He didn't say anything to me about that. What time did he leave?"

Lettie looks back at the clock. "Around five this morning."

"He's been gone all morning. Can you watch Myles? I'm gonna run upstairs and check for a note."

"Sure thing dear."

You head out the door and go to the door to the apartment stairs. Surely Shawn would have left a note or even a text saying he wasn't going to be at the shop. He never said anything about leaving yesterday, in fact he was pretty hell bent on keeping you and Myles close. You search the living room and kitchen counters for any notes. Nothing. No luck at all. Maybe something came up? But with who? His parents? The woman? You sink down onto the couch and stare at the ceiling.

"Shawn, what are you doing?" You ask out loud. "Why on Earth did you leave me here with Myles when shit is hitting the fan?"

You a,re torn. On one hand you want to go see if he's at the Wolveswood because you have a feeling that after finding out about a rogue pack he may have gone there for answers. On the other hand you have to keep Myles safe and leaving him with someone else isn't exactly your best option. Not that you stand a chance against a werewolf should anything happen gods forbid it but you'd rather he be with you.

There is no use keeping Myles downstairs with Lettie if Shawn's not working. You'll grab him and bring him back up for some breakfast and play time. It's best you just stay home and wait to hear from Shawn.

Two hours later and it's nearly noon. You've not heard from Shawn despite calling him twice and leaving messages. You're beginning to worry if he's alright. Myles knows something is wrong but he doesn't say anything, just sits real close and lays on your lap while you watch TV.

Nearly four in the afternoon and you have yet to know where Shawn is. Panic is starting to set in and you worry he's gone after the woman or the rogue wolves and gotten hurt. How could he be so reckless? How could he just leave you without warning? At least leave a note so you can send the police for him if he doesn't return by a certain time.

You grab your keys and get Myles dressed to go to his Karen's house. You're going to go after Shawn and the best place for Myles is her house. You have no idea how you're going to find him, but you're going to try locating his car first and work from there.

After leaving Myles with Karen you double back to the entrance of the Wolveswood. Sure enough Shawn's Jeep is there but you realize you have absolutely nothing to defend yourself with if you go inside. You turn back onto the road and head for your house. You have a taser in the top drawer of your dresser and you might have a knife or two in the garage from your dad's hunting and fishing stuff your parents kept in there.

You are in and out of the house fairly quickly, having found the taser and a good-sized knife for skinning deer. You hope you won't have to use either one but if the occasion comes you're ready. There is one last stop you need to make and it's at Shawn's place to lock up. You had forgotten in the rush to get Myles to Karen's place and you don't need someone wandering into his house.

You climb the stairs to the apartment and you freeze with your key in the lock. You can hear someone talking outside the lower door. It spooks you and you open the door and go inside, flipping the lock just in case. You go to the front windows and look down to see if there is anyone out there on their cell phone. There is someone there and it's a guy in maybe his thirties, looking at the door, then to your car. Your stomach sinks.

You feel around your pockets and realize you've left your phone in the car with your purse. Outside the guy stops talking and is standing in front of the door, looking up. You back away from the window and go to the kitchen. You grab a dining chair and shove it against the front door handle. The only other exit is through the fire escape in Myles' bedroom.

Just as you get the window open you can hear pounding on the front door you've blocked. As you suspected, the guy was not just some innocent passerby. You duck out of the window onto the railings of the fire escape. If you can just get down to the shop you know Lettie is in there cleaning up. You're not alone. You take a deep breath and try to calm your racing heart and shaking hands. Panic won't help you.

The latch on the ladder is stuck, rusty and unused. You kick at it trying to loosen it. If you can't get it undone you're not going to get down. The ladder stops short about ten feet from the ground and there isn't even a dumpster you can land on in a movie like escape. You kick harder and still nothing. You look up to the roof and there is a ladder there for maintenance but that's not going to help you if you're discovered. The roof is a trap.

You lean into the window and look around Myles' room for something you can hit the latch with. His room isn't exactly filled with tools or anything outside of plush blankets and action figures. There's a bottle of lotion on his dresser. Maybe it'll work as a lubricant. You crawl in and grab it and head back out to get to work.

Inside you hear the chair in front of the door scoot loudly against the wooden floor. You kick the latch one more time and it drops, the ladder extending down to the ground. Your heart clenches and you're gone, climbing down as fast as your hands and feet will allow. The ground under your feet is sweet solace as you barrel through the back storage room door into the cafe.

"Hey! Who's there?!"

"It's me Lettie!" You yell and head for the phone on the wall in the small office area where Shawn keeps his paperwork and invoices. "I don't have time to explain. Someone has broken into Shawn's apartment."

"What?!" Lettie looks up at the ceiling. "I heard some noise from up there but I figured you were just cleaning or something while Myles is away."

You dial the police and hold the phone against your ear as it rings. "I got out through the fire escape."

Lettie grabs her keys and heads for the front door. "That son of a bitch isn't getting away with this."

"Lettie! What're you doing?"

"I'm locking them in!"

"How?"

"I've got keys. It used to be my place before it was Shawn's. I've got the spares in case Shawn locks himself out." Lettie says triumphantly. "Let's see them escape now."

"Lettie- yes hello, I'd like to report a break in." You turn away from the old woman going out to lock the stairwell door to the apartment. "I'm at 223 Main Street at the Full Moon Brew coffee shop. My boyfriend's apartment above has been broken into. Yes I'm fine. No I'm not alone, I'm with an employee in the shop."

The operator asks a few more questions and informs you a squad car is on its way. Just as the woman is repeating back your information the line clicks and goes dead. "Hello?" You pull the phone away as the dial tone beeps. "Fuck."

Outside Shawn's Jeep pulls up in front of the shop and your heart stops. What impeccable timing. You can see Lettie talking to him and he looks upstairs then into the shop. He looks wild and you know he isn't going to wait for the police.

______________

"Shawn." You say softly as he enters the shop and strides up to you. "He's safe, he's with your mom."

"Oh thank Gods. How did you know what I was going to ask?"

"He's our son and he's not here." You glance up at the ceiling. "Of course you're going to ask."

"Who's in my house?"

"I have no idea. They showed up as soon as I got here to lock up. I'm pretty sure they followed me from the Wolveswood."

Shawn growls low and curls his fingers around the nearby countertop ledge. "He's one of them. There's a whole pack trying to find Myles. From what I gather he's the son of their alpha and his mother abandoned him because she and the alpha were not mates."

"How did they find him?"

"The mother confessed. She is the one we've been seeing everywhere. She thought she could just take him and save her life if she brought back the child before anyone found out she abandoned him." Shawn glares at the ceiling as footsteps creak across the floor boards. "I'm willing to bet that's the alpha."

"His dad."

"No. I'm his dad. I raised him and he is my child." He heads for the back door, following the footsteps overhead. "And no one is going to take him from you or me without going through my dead body."

"Shawn, don't start a fight. If you die, what happens to me? Do you really think they'll just interrogate me into giving Myles up and let me live?" You shake as you speak, voice trembling harshly. "Let the police take care of this."

Shawn stops at the backdoor and grips the frame harshly, the wood splintering under his grip. "I'm that guy's worst nightmare. He came after my family, my child. I won't wait for the police, I have to deal with him myself."

"Just wait! Shawn! No!" You shout as he runs out into the alley. He's going for the fire escape no doubt. You step out the door and he's already on the metal overhang above you.

__________

to be continued

*****Note: none of my works should be posted anywhere outside of my linked accounts. I do not give permission to repost with or without credit to my accounts. Please notify me of any reposted works.*****

#stories #werewolf au

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heyseoulsister · 2 years

Text

i wrote a story based off of the following prompt a while ago and here it is! i should mention that it’s a work in progress and has been for at least a year or two, so do expect updates to this post!

Your parents have always been protective of you for as long as you could remember. The entire house was padded even when you grew out of your toddler years. You were homeschooled and someone was always hovering to make sure you don’t trip or hurt yourself. You thought this was them being irrationally overprotective until one winter day, your hands were so dry that your skin broke. A drop of blood fell to the ground and almost instantly, red flowers bloomed from where it landed.

CHAPTER 1 (MADDOX)

I gasped as the red flowers forced their way up through the floorboards. I slowly stretched a hand out, gently touching a finger to a single red petal and shuddering. My mother’s eyes widened, and she ripped the flowers out of the ground violently. Acting on a moment’s impulse, I bolted out of the room, tearing the front door open and running out onto the street. I could hear her calling out behind me, but I got farther and farther away from my mother. I ran until I ran out of breath, until I could no longer see the line of houses that were so familiar, the houses that were my whole world.

Not that far back? Oh, you wanted to hear about her.

I had been roaming the streets for a week, hungry and disheveled. Barefoot, because in my haste to leave I had forgotten shoes. My socks were torn, and my feet were cold. I couldn’t really feel my toes anymore.

I was sure my mother was looking for me, but only because of whatever happened back at the house. I didn’t really know what happened, but I had resolved to think about that later, when basic survival wasn’t an issue.

Anyway, I was at about the one week mark of being really, truly alone, like a ghoul haunting the street corner, and that was when we met.

A tap on my shoulder made me gasp and feel my pocket for my pepper spray which, from its apparent absence, meant I had left it at home, just like my shoes.

I turned to find a tall girl staring at me. She had tattoos veiling her arms and piercings all over her ears, but strangely nothing on her face. I guess she liked it like it was. I think I did as well.

I felt I was being scanned like a bag of carrots at the grocery store, simply a barcode at the expense of her dark brown eyes. She looked me up and down and I did the same, taking notice of her only slightly wavy almost-black hair and her tan skin. She must have been from Indian descent, judging by the high cheekbones and darker complexion.

When she spoke, I was almost startled by her low voice, something that hit me in a place I didn’t know existed. “Are you lost?”

Interesting. She sounded like she was from the northeast. New York, perhaps? No. It must have been somewhere else. Chicago?

“Uh, I’m not sure,” I answered, hearing my voice quiver the tiniest bit. She must have noticed it as well because she raised an eyebrow slightly.

“I think that means that you are. Where are you trying to go?” Her voice did something to me and it was not good. I never knew a person could make you feel like this.

“I, u-um…” God, why couldn’t I speak properly? She was going to think I was dumb.

“How old even are you? You look young enough to still be in grade school.”

“I-I’m in high school,” I offered, and she nodded.

“Oh, man! You’re probably trying to get home. Do you need directions or something?”

I shook my head, violently. I couldn’t go back to that woman who had lied to me. Was she my real mother, even?

“Oh. Did you… run away from home?”

I nodded at her slowly, looking down at my feet. I felt her step closer to me.

“Okay. Do you need a place to stay? I mean, of course, you need a place to stay. Come with me.” She took my hand and gently led me towards the sidewalk. “I don’t live far from here.”

“Y-you never told me your name,” I said, thinking maybe I could trust her more if I knew what she called herself.

“Arlo,” she replied after a long pause, “My name’s Arlo.”

I wondered until much later why she thought about what to tell me her name was. I figured that perhaps she hadn’t given me her real name, or maybe she didn’t like her name. But the thought escaped my mind at that moment when she pulled me into an alleyway. A little sketchy.

After ducking into an almost-hidden doorway, we climbed about two flights of wooden stairs, grey and scuffed and worn down with use. She looked back at me and grinned, showing her perfectly straight teeth that were a relief to look at because they weren’t bleached.

I was out of breath but smiled back at her.

In front of us stood a door painted a blue that resembled robin eggs. I wondered if she had painted it that color; I liked to imagine her with her sleeves rolled up, newspapers scattered haphazardly around and smudges of blue paint on her cheeks.

She caught me staring and she cocked her head to the side, turning her key to open the door. I felt heat racing to my cheeks as she ushered me inside.

At first glance, I would have liked to say that her home looked like something out of an IKEA catalog, something you’d see in a magazine of perfect houses. But no, I looked again and I saw chaos. It was more like an art gallery- all the pieces were their own entities and didn’t necessarily peacefully coexist. They screamed at me in different colors and patterns and fabrics, but they all came together in the end to form something close to perfection.

It seemed more like a home than anything in a magazine; I could picture Arlo sprawled on the couch, reading Hemingway- because she seemed like she’d read Hemingway- with snacks spread out on the center table.

“Sit,” she said, pointing to the very couch I was thinking about and I felt myself blush lightly. “Are you hungry?”

“Uh, not really,” I lied, but Arlo looked at me and shook her head.

“I bet you’re a cheez-its type of gal, aren’t you?” She floated over to the kitchen in the most majestic of ways and opened cabinets left and right until she found the box she was looking for, then tossed it at me.

“Tell me about yourself,” she commanded me, and I smiled to myself.

“I’m Maddox. I’m 17.”

“Any nicknames?”

“No.”

Arlo frowned, scrunching up her nose before vaulting over the back of the couch, landing right next to me.

“That won’t do. I’ve gotta have some type of cute nickname for you.”

I shrugged.

“M’Kay, anyway, how long has it been since you left?”

“About a week.”

“Jesus. A whole week? Have you been eating?”

“Yeah, a little bit.”

“No way. You look hungry. Lucky for you, it’s dinner time.” She stood up and stretched, showing a little bit of her midriff. I looked away, not wanting her to think I was creepy. She glided to the kitchen, and took out a few things from the pantry.

“Are you allergic to anything? Or vegetarian?”

“Uh, no. My family was vegetarian but I’m fine eating meat.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I promise,” I replied, shivering a little bit. It seemed to be cold everywhere.

“You can go shower while I’m cooking, okay? Just go in my room on that side. You can wear anything that fits you.” She gestured towards the hallway.

“T-thank you,” I headed over in that direction and went on my way.

CHAPTER 2 (ARLO)

I had been on my own since I was 17. Being out on the streets from such a young age was tough, yeah, but I made it happen. I found jobs anywhere I could and made sure that I could survive. Eventually, I scraped together enough money to be able to start renting an apartment. That’s something I’m really proud of- my apartment is a bit of a hidden gem. It was pretty bad at first, but within a year of me having it, I made repairs here and there and now it’s my favorite place to be.

You what? Oh. You wanted to hear about her.

I’d been living on my own for two years when I met her. She looked like she’d take flight at the slightest sound. But she also looked… I don’t know. Something about her. Like she would do whatever she needed to survive. It drew me towards her- She looked stronger than how I was when I first left home. That’s why I went over to her and asked if she was okay. That’s when she came home with me and all of a sudden I had this whole other person to take care of.

So I made this gumbo that my grandma taught me how to make because it was something that just warms you up from the inside. Maddie came out wearing a shirt of mine that was much too big and shorts that I couldn’t remember the last time I wore. I couldn’t breathe for a second, which was weird, but then I poured out some of the gumbo over rice in a bowl and placed it on the table. She sat in front of it.

“This is for me?”

“Yeah it’s gumbo, there’s some shrimp in it but not a lot of meat cuz I didn’t want you to get an upset stomach and I don’t know if you’ve eaten a lot of meat before so uh-”

She sniffed the bowl cautiously but then grinned. “This smells really good.”

“Thanks.”

I sat down to eat as well, and we were just in awkward silence for a while.

“Do you read Hemingway?”

“What?” The question caught me completely off guard.

“I just- You look like the type to read a lot of books so I was just wondering.”

“Yeah I read Men Without Women like three times. I must still have a copy somewhere around here. It wasn’t that good though.”

Maddie had smiled to herself, and I wondered until a lot later why that was.

CHAPTER 3 (MADDIE)

She read Hemingway! I was right. Arlo was different than anything I was used to. I was used to clean lines and dull grays and whites and baby-proofed corners. Arlo was all bright colors and messy hair and so, so real. The gumbo! It was so good, but spicy. I had only ever eaten bland vegetables and beans and meat-substitutes. Although Mother called meat the substitute for real food.

A couple weeks passed where Arlo went to school in the mornings and work during the afternoons, and I stayed at her place, reading and falling in love with what eventually I began to think of as my home. My birthday passed, and Arlo came to know about it when she found me in tears in the bathroom, thinking about my parents who never bothered to come find me. She didn’t say a word, only left for a while and came back with groceries. When I finally pulled myself together enough to wash my face and leave the bathroom, I saw a cake on the counter, cooling, and a package of candles next to it. Arlo looked up, eyes wide and forehead dusted with flour.

“I didn’t know if you liked frosting so I made some but I didn’t put it on the cake yet. I actually made two different kinds- there’s a whipped cream frosting and then like the other kind so you can pick-”

“I love it. I love anything you make. Thank you,” I cut in, just to set her mind at ease because I knew her habit of rambling when she was nervous.

That birthday must have been among my favorites. We both sat on the couch, eating pieces of cake with dollops of frosting on top and it was then I realized I felt for her something I’ve never really felt before. I wasn’t sure what. I just wanted to stay with her like this for the rest of my life.

I got a job. I worked for a coffee shop near the apartment, because it had clicked in my mind that Arlo worked every day to pay for what had become my home. It wasn’t much, but I took as many hours as they could give me and worked harder than I had ever worked before.

“You should apply to a few colleges,” Arlo said to me one day, while she was cooking dinner. I was a little surprised, since she never talked about school with me.

“You think so?”

“Yeah, have you ever thought about what you wanted to do after school?”

“I mean, not really. I just thought I would take care of my parents when they got older.”

“You never talk about your parents,” She said, and it was more of a question than a statement. She wanted to know, I realized, about why I left. I had been cautious, and although I hadn’t really figured out the whole weird flowers growing from my blood thing, I just tried not to get cut anywhere.

“It’s a long story.”

“Okay.” She would never force me to tell her anything. That I knew with every fiber of my being. But I wanted to tell her, I just didn’t know how.

“It’s- I don’t know how to explain this. Do you have something sharp?”

“W-what? What do you mean sharp?”

“Hold on,” I said, hopping off of the counter and grabbing a dull knife from the drawer. Arlo looked nervous, presumably because of the knife, and so I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring look.

I didn’t really know the parameters of the thing, but I assumed there had to be dirt involved. We had plenty of plants, but there was one pot with dirt in it that nothing really grew in. I grabbed that one from the windowsill, sliced my hand, and dribbled some blood over it, which was kind of nasty. Arlo looked alarmed, and promptly took the knife away from me. I stared at the pot, waiting for something to grow, but nothing happened.

CHAPTER 4 (ARLO)

“Maddie! What did you think was going to happen? You just- oh my god you’re still bleeding. What if you need stitches or something? Wait, I have to get the first aid kit. Jesus. Wait right there.”

I was amazed at how stupid that was. I didn’t know what was going on inside her head, but she just sliced her hand open like it was some kind of weird ritual thing.

I found the first aid kit, and then headed back to the kitchen, only to see her right in front of the pot, which had little sprouts in it.

She looked up and told me, “I watered it.”

“You-”

“It took a second. Look! It’s still growing.” And it was. In the time we were talking, it had grown a stem and then there were red flowers that were blooming.

“Holy shit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t be sorry. That’s why you ran away?”

“Kind of. I didn’t know I could do that until it happened by accident. But my parents knew. The entire house was baby-proofed even after I grew up and that’s why I was homeschooled. I rarely left the house. The only reason I know everything that I do is because I read a lot.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. That’s the reason I left. Because they knew, and they didn’t tell me. I’m still not sure how it works, or why it happens.”

“Okay. Just please promise me you won’t do that again.”

“I won’t.”

I had, by that point, remembered about her hand, and went to clean it. But it was already closed up.

“Your hand?”

“Oh it does that too.”

“Oh.”

CHAPTER 5 (MADDIE)

She was afraid to touch me. I’d noticed that physical touch was important to her- she’d brush her fingers against mine when walking by or bump my hip with hers in the kitchen- but now it was as if she was scared to come too close to me. It broke my heart.

“You know I heal really quickly, right?” I asked Arlo while she was making dinner one day. I was sitting on the counter.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So why don’t you touch me?” She froze momentarily before taking a spoonful of the soup she was making and walking over to me.

“Taste this.” She blew on the soup, cooling it before holding it out to my lips.

“It’s good.” I said after tasting it, and she moved closer to me, until her hips were in between my knees.

She was so close.

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I know,” I said, and she put her hands on the counter on either side of my hips. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t. I was just… It was weird. I’ve never seen anything like that before. Not that you’re weird! I just, you know. The blood thing. That’s weird. But not really. I just got spooked. Honest. I don’t think you’re weird.”

I smiled. “You’re weird.”

“Ooh. That one hurt.” She smiled back, bringing a hand up to brush the hair out of my face. I tugged on a piece of her hair, and she leaned in closer to me, resting her forehead against my shoulder. I could feel her breath on my skin.

“You always smell like coffee.” She mumbled against my neck, and I made some noise of agreement.

Then I felt her body stiffen, and she stepped back with a gentle, “The soup’s gonna get cold.”

The loss of contact was almost painful, and I found myself confused. Every time we got close like this, Arlo pulled away. We’d be on the couch reading or watching TV, her head in my lap, and she'd suddenly remember something she had to do, or come up with some excuse to create distance. I was tired of it.

“Arlo.”

“Maddie.” She was serving the soup into bowls. She didn’t even look up at me.

But I lost the sudden burst of courage. “It looks really good.”

“Thanks. It’s chicken and rice. Cuz I know you like rice with your soup.”

“Arlo, when’s your birthday?”

“In November, why?”

“Just wondering.”

We sat down to eat. “We should get a pet.”

“That’s- that’s like having a child, Maddie.”

“Exactly! We’re a family. We need a pet. Besides, I’ve seen this cat roaming around this street lately.”

“What if that’s someone’s cat?”

“Couldn’t be. It looks mangey.” “Maddie! You want to bring some diseased stray cat into our home?” Our home. She called it our home. I love her.

“Yes. We can bring it to the vet! Please?”

“You have to show me the cat first, okay?”

“Of course! Let’s go now!”

“After dinner Maddie, please.”

CHAPTER 6 (ARLO)

She was so excited to get a cat. Of course I was going to bring the cat home. Was that even a question? I just had to make sure it wasn’t someone else’s cat. But I knew if there were more than one cat, I wouldn’t be able to resist taking all of them. I’m an adult! I can’t have 5 cats in my house.

But for Maddie… I might consider it. Her happiness made me happy.

We went downstairs, both barefoot, with some chicken and rice from the soup and a bowl of water. Maddie made a vaguely cat-like noise and the cat came running, mewling back as if they were having a conversation. We set down the food, and it ate.

“It’s definitely a stray.”

“I know. Can we keep her please?”

“Him.”

“What?”

“He’s a boy cat.”

“Really? Oh. I’ve been calling him a girl this whole time.” I nodded, and noticed the cat was done eating.

“Grab the bowls for me please.” She did so, and then I scooped up the tiny cat, who was half wet from stepping into the bowl of water. We started back towards the apartment.

“So here’s the deal. It’s pretty late right now, so we can bring him to the vet tomorrow. Until we do that, he’ll have to sleep on a towel.” We had reached the door by this time, and I unlocked it with my free hand. “We also have to get him food, a bed, a collar, flea medicine, and maybe a crate.”

“That sounds good.” She was shaking. She was this excited over a cat?

“You love that cat.”

“I do.”

“What’s his name?”

“Barry.” The cat’s ears twitched at the name, and I laughed.

“You thought he was a girl and you named him Bartholomew?”

“BartholoMEW.”

“Wow. Okay Barry, this towel is for you,” I gestured. He looked at it, and then jumped up on the couch.

“Ooooh not on my nice couch, you heathen!” I exclaimed, at which Maddie snorted.

“He can sleep in my room.” She said, and I shrugged.

“Have fun being up all night,” I teased, smiling at how she had gathered up the ball of fur and started carrying him to her room.

“Nope. This is our child now. You come too.” She shouted from across the hall, and I remember feeling something weird in my stomach.

I followed, if only to see what her room looked like. The last time I had been in there was when it was my spare room, not her room. She had laid out the towel on the padded armchair in the corner of the room, and Barry was happily settled.

Maddie was putting away clothes, and she plopped onto her bed when she finished.

“You can sit down, you know,” She mentioned, and I nodded, looking for a place to sit. Other than her bed. I was kind of avoiding that. She reached out and pulled me down onto her bed, though, and her nose was scrunched and she was smiling and-

“Why are you so afraid of this?” Maddie asked, and I didn’t know how to answer.

“I don’t want to take advantage of you. And it feels like I’m doing that since you’re staying in my house and you’re younger than me and my job pays more.”

“That doesn’t matter to me,” she whispered. “There’s been so many times I wished you would just stay, but you always leave. You always find a reason.”

“I don’t want you to ever feel like I’m pressuring you.”

“You’re not! If anything, you’re doing the opposite. You let me have my own room!”

“You pay for our home too.”

“I don’t. I pay for groceries and bus tickets. You pay for the house.”

“But that doesn’t matter. This is our apartment. Not mine. I decided to share it with you and you decided to stay. Which, by the way, was wonderful because I was thinking I was going to end up as a weird plant lady.”

Maddie cackled, and I grinned at her, flopping back onto the mattress. I wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her down with me.

“I’m glad you came into my life.”

CHAPTER 7 (MADDIE)

“And I’m glad you came into mine. And I really care about you. Which is why I know about your habits of rambling and cooking away your frustration.” She frowned at this, and I ran a finger along the bridge of her nose. “But it’s cute.”

She was so close that I could make out each of her eyelashes, even in the dim lighting.

“Would you believe me if I said I’ve never loved someone like this before?” I asked her, and she tilted her head, considering me.

“I might.” This was all she said before she slowly inched closer to me until I could feel her breath on my nose, almost taste her vanilla lip balm.

“This is your decision,” She whispered, “What do you want me to do?”

She raised an eyebrow, and I looked away from her, not being able to bear looking into her dark eyes that asked a million questions I couldn’t answer. But finally, I leaned forward and pressed my lips to hers.

I woke up the next morning to the sight of Arlo curled up next to me, and Barry had nestled himself at the end of the bed. My arm was numb, so I carefully shifted to my other side, with my back to Arlo. I didn’t want to wake her up, but she draped her arm over me and pulled me into her.

“You stole the blankets.” She mumbled into my neck.

“Maybe.” I snorted, moving so I was on my back before trying to distribute the blankets more evenly between us. This woke up Barry, who promptly made his way over and stepped on my stomach. “Oof.”

“You,” Arlo said, grabbing the cat, “are a heathen.” Her sleepy voice was very, very cute. Just a note.

“Christ, he smells bad. Today is, in fact, vet day. And bath day.” She noted, and I nodded, stifling a yawn.

“I’m gonna take a shower.” I got up and stretched.

“K. Do you want breakfast now or do you want to grab something on the way?”

“Mmm on the way sounds fine.” I responded while I grabbed clothes out of my dresser. Arlo had, at that point, sat up, holding Barry like he was a small child and absentmindedly stroking his ears. I leaned over, kissed the tip of her nose and the top of his head, and went on my way to take a shower.

When I came out, drying my hair with a towel, Arlo was trying to get Barry to sit still inside a bag. She heard me come into the room, and she smiled at me sheepishly.

“I was seeing if he fit. We don’t have a crate for him yet.” I laughed, and took Barry from her.

“The vet is too far from the bus stop, so we’re going to have to ask Jack for his car.” She said, frowning. Arlo usually didn’t like borrowing things from other people, and Jack was no exception.

Jack was wonderful, almost like the father that we didn’t have. He was caring and helped us in any way he could, in exchange for food that Arlo made. Which was understandable, because her cooking was so amazing that whenever she made something particularly fragrant, our neighbors would come over to see if she made enough for everyone. Which usually she did. She knew what kind of food each neighbor liked, so if she was making some you could usually expect me to deliver a tupperware of food to you as soon as it was done.

But, Jack. He’d fix our sink, our AC, anything we needed, just because he cared. And we loved him.

Arlo and I took the stairs up to his apartment, Barry in my arms, and rang Jack’s doorbell. He answered, and a huge smile came over his face when he saw Barry.

“What do you need, girls?”

“We have to bring him to a vet, and there’s none close by.”

“You need the car?”

“Yes, please.”

“Arlo, actually I have a proposition for you. I just bought a new car. Do you want my old one?”

“I-” Arlo looked at me, and I shrugged.

“We could definitely use a car.” I said, thinking of how it would save us money on bus passes.

“How much do you want for it?”

“I don’t need you to pay me! You’re practically family, girls.” Jack insisted, and I could tell that Arlo was uncomfortable.

After much back and forth, I finally chipped in with a, “Well, thank you very much, Jack. We really appreciate it.”

“No problem. But you guys please stay safe out there. Just come back soon so we can transfer the ownership to you.”

“We will. Thank you again!”

He tossed us the keys, and we went back down to our apartment to grab our bags and leave.

“We’re going to pay him, aren’t we?” I asked.

“Of course!” Arlo said, “I have money in my account. I just have to send it to him.”

We got in the car to find it cleaned out, as if he had been planning to give it to us for a while. It was an older hard-top Jeep, with black paint that had worn down over spending years in the sun. Arlo smiled briefly, popping open the hood to make sure that everything looked good. She declared that the Jeep was rusty, and I decided that was its name. Arlo hopped back in, starting the engine and easing the car out of the garage. We drove for a while, stopping for some food at the corner store. Arlo carried around Barry in a bag, and I scanned the isles for snacks.

“You eat too many oreos.”

“Uh, that’s what you think,” I replied, holding my huge pack of double-stuf oreos to my chest. “You drink too much Red Bull.”

“There is no such thing.”

I scoffed. I had made several necklaces, bracelets, and key chains out of the multicolored tabs from the cans of red bull she consumed weekly.

She frowned at me, before grabbing two more Coconut Berry flavored cans out of the cooler and adding them to our basket. So far we had Oreos, powdered donut holes, Takies, Red Bull, gum, and apple juice.

“Is this seriously our breakfast?” Arlo questioned, and I laughed as we set the basket on the counter for the cashier to scan.

I heard the door jingle as I swiped my card to pay for everything. We grabbed the bags and headed to leave, Barry in tow.

“Emilia?”

I felt my stomach drop as I made eye contact with him; I barely responded to the name, since it had been months since I last heard it. I felt Arlo’s free hand clasp mine, and I squeezed it gently. ‘

“Let’s go.” I said, and we brushed past my father, almost reaching the door before he called out to me again.

“Emilia! Come back here this instant!” Arlo scoffed, pushing open the door with maybe a little more force than necessary, and the both of us ran back to the car. Arlo started the engine, speeding out of the parking lot. Both of us were gasping for breath.

“That was your dad.”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t seen him in months.”

“I haven’t.”

She didn’t look at me. But her hand reached for mine, and I placed it over hers on the gear shift. Barry, who was dozing on the back seat by this point, was snoring softly, and as we hit the highway, I relaxed a little.

CHAPTER 8 (ARLO)

I was kind of jittery after we ran into Maddie’s dad. Also, I didn’t know what the whole “Emilia” this was about, but I didn’t ask her because she also seemed shaken up. And I trusted her. I didn’t question it.

She was holding my hand, I guess to help both of us.

“Can we eat those Oreos now?” I said, and she smiled. She peeled open the package, giving me one and opening a can of Red Bull. We sat in silence, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. I just… I knew her by then. So we didn’t have to talk. I looked over at Barry and at Maddie every once in a while, checking to make sure they were okay. Maddie was watching out the window.

We finally reached the vet, and Maddie grabbed Barry as I parked outside the office. Her hands were shaking slightly. I bumped my elbow against her arm gently, and she looked at me with wide eyes. “We don’t have to talk about it. But are you okay?” I asked, and she sniffed a little before nodding.

We brought Barry in to the vet’s office, and signed paperwork. Soon, they called Maddie’s name, and we went into a room with Barry.

“Hello there, I’m Dr. Weslington. What are we doing today?” Weslington was a tall, broad-shouldered man with dark hair and dark eyes. He smiled at Barry, who was sitting on the exam table by this point.

“So we found him on the street, and we’re adopting him. He needs his shots and just a checkup to make sure he’s doing well.” I told him, and he nodded, glancing at papers on his clipboard before turning towards the little cat.

“Well hello there little Barry! We’re going to give you some shots today!” Barry looked like he sensed something drastically wrong, and made a break for the door. I caught him right as he jumped off of the table.

“Dude. What if you have rabies or something? Let him give you the shots. Jeez.” Barry meowed angrily, claws sinking into my arm.

“Barry, darling, you need to get shots so you can be healthy. Don’t you want to live in our home with us?” He mewled back at her, and retracted his claws. I set him back on the exam table gingerly, and he huffed before laying down.

I glanced at Maddie, wondering if Barry actually understood her for a second. I thought to myself, ‘That’s dumb.’ But she had done that thing with the flowers, so who knew what else she could do.

We got through the visit, Barry only clawing me once more before we left. We finished the rest of our snacks on the drive back, and I sighed as we walked from the parking garage back home. Maddie looked as exhausted as I felt.

“Hey.”

“What’s up?”

“Go sleep. You look tired,” I said, and she protested gently.

“We still have to give Barry a bath,” She answered, and I nodded at her.

“I can do it. You go sleep, okay?”

“Mkay.” She trudged off to her room, and I grabbed Barry, bringing him to the bathroom. I set him down in the tub, taking out the soap we had gotten while shopping for things for him on the way back.

“Rrrow.” He bit me, and I huffed at him as I started the water, waiting until it ran warm before I took soap to lather him up.

“RrROWW!”

“I know, Barry, but you’re stinky. You need a bath.”

“Rrrr.”

“It won’t take long. The less mean you are to me, the easier this will go.”

He seemed to resign himself to the fact he was being bathed, and before long he was clean. His fur was actually mostly white with gray patches, instead of the grayish brown I had thought it was. I towel dried him, and he yowled at me angrily before running out of the bathroom. I heard a surprised yelp from Maddie, and I giggled a little bit before making my way to her room.

She was hiding under her blankets and Barry- still damp- was attacking her from on top of the heap.

I took the cat and set him on the floor, and Maddie came out from under the blankets. She smiled at me.

“I thought you were sleepy.”

“I was, but then I got attacked.”

“Ah.”

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“Come here.” She held out her hands to me, and I leaned forward a little bit. She grabbed my shoulders and pulled me down with her, groaning as I fell right on top of her. I laughed, and moved to the side a bit so I wouldn’t squish her. She pulled me so my head was resting near her shoulder, and she stroked my hair gently.

“Arlo.”

“Maddie?”

“Can we just stay like this?”

I turned to look at her.

“Maddie.”

“I mean, I just… I like… I don’t know. Please don’t leave. You always leave.”

“I-”

“Don’t say anything. Just stay here with me,” she said, and I pressed my mouth against her neck.

“Okay.”

“Okay.” She replied.

CHAPTER 9 (MADDIE)

I woke up the next morning, struggling a little bit when I tried to yawn. Arlo had, at some point during the night, settled right on top of me. I rolled her off gently, trying not to wake her.

She grumbled anyway, gathering up all of the blankets and cocooning herself into them along with the cat. I looked at the two of them sleeping and my heart panged as I thought of what I had to go face up against today.

My heart sank as I crept through the apartment, and I gathered some charms Arlo had made for strength (after learning about my affliction she’d started believing in good luck charms and I started finding impossibly small wax-sealed jars in my jacket-pockets). I made my way down to the parking lot, patting Rusty and hopping in. The engine stalled for a bit before finally kicking in.

It was a long drive back to my old house. I wasn’t sure if my parents would be home, simply because their schedule must have changed since I left. It had been almost a year, which I’d been mostly happy to spend with Arlo.

I needed answers, though. I’d gotten several cuts and scrapes that resulted in flora everywhere, and the colors, I had learned, could be whatever color I wanted.

I pulled up onto the driveway, shuddering at how similar the house looked to that day I ran out. I locked Rusty, and then trudged up the walkway until I reached the front door. I didn’t even need to touch the doorbell- my mother yanked open the door with wild abandon. She scowled, one hand balling up into a fist. Her first impulse was to hit me?

She didn’t recognize me. She should have, because I hadn’t changed so much. But hadn’t I?

I stood taller, and I’d lost that fear of my parents. That fear of being punished for stepping out of line. Maybe that’s all it takes.

“Emilia,” She whispered, finally realizing who I was.

“I’m here for one thing, and then I’ll be on my way.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to tell me everything you know about my condition, if you will.”

“What are you on about, Emilia, really. Where have you been so long? Living on the streets like some sort of lowlife?”

“I’m doing fine. You need to tell me about this or I swear to Sappho that you will never see me again.”

“Emilia. Stop speaking so loudly.” She grabbed my arm and yanked me into the house that I hadn’t seen for ages.

CHAPTER 10 (Arlo)

I woke up to Barry scratching up my arms (with love, obvi). I tossed him onto the ground, looking around for Maddie. When I realized she wasn’t in her room I groaned, rolled out of her bed and tumbled onto the ground quite graciously. After picking myself up off the floor, I made my way outside to the rest of the apartment.

I noticed the car keys were missing from the hook, and assumed that Maddie had gone to get groceries or the like. I started on making lunch.

By the time she got back, I’d made lunch AND dinner. I wasn’t sure why, but the air felt different. It was like looking at a completely different person.

“Mads, are you alright?” I approached her cautiously, noticing she didn’t have any grocery bags in her hands.

“I’m going to bed,” she responded, rushing past me. My mouth hung open as I watched her close the door to her room. Barry seemed equally concerned, so I scooped him up as I headed to her room.

I knocked softly on the door, and I heard her stand up from her bed to open it. Her eyes were red and she looked exhausted, mascara smudged under her eyes and teartracks dried on her face.

“Do you feel like talking about it?” She shook her head and made her way back over to her bed. I followed her, and wrapped the both of us and Barry in a blanket. I felt her shaking as she cried quietly, and I ran my fingers through her hair, hoping to comfort her.

I’m not the best at comforting people when they’re sad. I wasn’t then and I’m not now. But all I wanted to do in that moment was to help her feel better. I couldn’t think of how to do that.

#wip #work in progress #fiction #story #short story #cute #lesbian #gay #gay love story

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badartfriend · 3 years

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There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

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Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”

Image

Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to — that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

#emmie this for you

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neednothavehappenedtobetrue · 3 years

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okay. this is a post about a new character, who is a person in the same 'verse as the main one for Robert and Isabelle, sci-fi and spaceships. she is a pastor in the one specific "limits on technology" religion I made up, but also, she is very cool. she does not live on their main terraformed colony, she lives in another colony with some definite cultural differences.

I am mostly posting this for my own future reference. there are definitely people who will enjoy Gwendolyn a lot, even with the extensive trigger tag situation here, but I think "a short story that has space for more nuance" would be a better venue for her than "my thoughts from Skype at 4AM"

if you do decide to read this, check the tags first, please

shoutout to @anonymus-maximus-er for being my thought partner on this.

but as I understand it now, there are, like , degrees of Intensity in Church Of Man

like, even their chillest followers are kind of intense about it because it's hard to be real, real chill about "god said we were only allowed to use these specific fifteen technologies" or whatever the exact rules are

but as far as incubators go, Aimee's community, the one you saw, would definitely have been like "well, too bad God wants that baby to die" and there are some other communities which would be more like "okay, probably make sure your baby does not die, do what you've gotta do there, but don't come back and talk to us afterwards"

and also for sure there are communities like "do literally whatever you have to do to make sure your baby does not die, we will be here with whole-made casseroles when you're home again"

and like, could some of those kids have benefitted from subsequent quality-of-life stuff they didn't get? probably, yes

to varying degrees

but hopefully Aimee finds a nice community where she can be like "this is so important to me but my babies and I experienced a bunch of technology in order to not die and we got excommunicated."

and they're like "wow that sounds like a lot of Not Your Fault would you like some whole-made casseroles and toddler clothes?"

and she's like "I got excommunicated" and they're like "did you know, perhaps you didn't, that there is no Central Authority for every Church Of Man church in the galaxy? there for sure is not! the people from New Maryland often pretend they are, but we didn't vote for them! your old pastor is just not at all the boss of us, is the thing"

that is the future epilogue I want for Aimee

I feel like the Tau Ceti Church of Man community is small and some people think they're weird, but they're nice neighbors. their pastor is a woman named Gwendolyn or something who is just constantly mad about Richard Brinton That Fucking Asshole

she has never called him any of those words because of decorum, she has just spent a lot of time talking to new people like "wow you seem very traumatized did you know he is not the boss of us?"

"we don't have a pope!"

"we've tried to have a council a few times, but it's logistically complicated"

"every church is supposed to make its own rules in accordance with the texts"

"yes, I have read every single one of his missives to the world, I know which bits of the Texts you probably have memorized, here are some bits I like a lot"

Gwendolyn has some opinions

like, churches are supposed to set their own rules about "necessary" technologies and she has quietly labeled almost all life-saving medical technology "necessary"

meanwhile, Brinton thinks it's necessary for him to have access to telecommunications equipment to he can send his editorials all over the galaxy, so people can be Educated

huh

of course, he does not actually physically touch the telecommunications equipment, he keeps like four people who know how to use it around so they can spread his word, but also, huh

the thing about Gwendolyn is that she has spent a long time watching traumatized New Marylanders join her community, many of them quite young and quite traumatized

also, she was never a New Marylander, she is fourth-generation Tau Ceti, which, crucially

means that her first set of principles is "Church Stuff, Misc" and her second set of principles, right there after the first is "you're not the boss of me"

even if somebody could point to actual scripture that said they were the boss of her, she would have some trouble with it, but some dude! who cannot point to anything at all! no justification whatsoever! nothing in the texts even a little bit! keeps trying to be the boss of her! and also keeps traumatizing all of the people in his community pretty badly! and making everyone else look like jerks!

"I'm more conservative than you, therefore, I am the boss of you"

NOPE

not for Gwendolyn

Gwendolyn votes in every local election and votes for her Senator, who she has met and quite likes. she occasionally goes to protests when the local government does some dipshit thing, but the Tau Ceti local government is pretty well-behaved because if it's not the citizenry will absolutely be like "fuck you, you're not the boss of me" at its government

she has some Very Big Opinions about debtor employment. she's not thrilled about the like, severity of the gang situation in her city, but she doesn't have a lot of optimism that the Government is gonna fix it, so she does community groups instead

also, in recognition of the fact that she can't just throw these traumatized New Marylanders right off into the personal autonomy deep end she is like "okay, if you need someone to tell you what to do sometimes, I will be the temporary boss of you until you are ready to be the boss of you"

she does not Love that aspect of her job, but sometimes you gotta

you can't bring people from "obedience all the time" to "you must make every choice in your life with no backup" overnight, they'll just collapse in on themselves or become targets for worse people

so she does the thing

she and Brinton have a <very> passive aggressive correspondence going as church leaders

there are many many long letters back and forth

they are very polite and also, if any of them are preserved, historians will find them fascinating

"wow these people just fucking loathed each other"

Anonymus, 5:05 AM

your obedient servant, A. Burr

5:05 AM

if they did not live on separate planets, legitimately maybe

like, if she could get to Brinton's house on a horse to yell at him in person, she would have by now

she didn't swear a lot in real life, but sometimes she wanted to

she got real good at saying "that man" or "sugar" or "nonsense" in A Tone, but you could tell

I can't decide if she has a husband or a wife

Aimee's church definitely thinks gay people are Modern and therefore Wrong, but like

I feel like probably their specific religious texts don't even have that much on being nice to people? like, there's definitely a few pages on like "kindness is an ancient value, we hold fast to ancient values, these are them"

but it's like 70% Rules Minutiae

it's also not a super long book

so everybody has very different opinions about how to interpret the Rules Minutiae in light of the 30% of the book that's like "here are our actual values"

"modesty" and "fidelity" are both in the Ancient Values bits for sure

and I feel like different denominations went in different directions on the "modesty" and "fidelity" implications of "gay people"

no, I've decided, Gwendolyn definitely has a wife

show her in the actual rules where she can't have a wife

yes, fidelity, that thing she has with her wife

Anonymus, 5:13 AM

can the wife be a very proper rebbetzin?

organises all the casserole chains

5:14 AM

yes, she can definitely organize all of the casserole chains

5:18 AM

right

Gwendolyn's wife's name is Tara and she came from an Earth Church of Man community where they were like "technically it's not illegal for you to be gay, but, like, ehhhh? we'd rather you didn't and also you definitely cannot have children if you're gay"

5:20 AM

and she got to Tau Ceti and met Gwendolyn who even in college was like "show me in the texts where it says I cannot have a wife."

"show me."

Anonymus, 5:21 AM

sounds like excellent breeding ground for Very Textually and Theologically Conversant, but not actually a religious authority

5:21 AM

the thing is, Tau Ceti is Bad At Authority

if they had a motto on their coins it would just be "you're not the boss of me" but maybe in Latin

but maybe not even in Latin because people who know Latin often think they are the boss of you

Anonymus, 5:22 AM

WHO MADE U KING

5:22 AM

for real

I think there is a dude who is technically the "boss" of Gwendolyn and they take turns giving the sermons and calibrating which parishoners they support based on like, communication styles in a way that often ends up with just all of the women and queer folks being Gwendolyn's people

she is smarter than him, he handles all of the Local Politics things that require you not to go "EXCUSE me, where is the LAW ABOUT THAT"

Anonymus, 5:24 AM

different type of smart

5:24 AM

if he ever tried to pull rank on her, she would either be so startled that it would work or she would unhinge her jaw and eat him

so he's never tried

he doesn't want to! very few people on Tau Ceti even want to be in charge, both because it's like herding cats who will hate you if they catch you herding them and because the finely honed distrust of authority doesn't go away when you become authority

Anonymus, 5:26 AM

"I'm pretty sure I'm up to some bullshit"

5:27 AM

yeah, Gwendolyn spends a lot of time with these sad transplants from other communities, nearly all of them women (because for SOME REASON women tend to get excommunicated WAY MORE OFTEN. HUH. are there ADDITIONAL RULES for WOMEN? I DON'T SEE ANY)

and they're like "please I am so sad and scared just tell me what to do"

and she wants to be like "I am not the boss of you, you have to be the boss of you" but they often are not ready for that, so she just tries to get a sense of what they want to do or what might be healthiest for them and tells them her strong recommendation is that they do that thing

everyone in her community knows she is passionate and can get fired up about some of this stuff, she doesn't hide that, but also, there are some conversations she (a only has with her wife and also (b has had with her wife a number of times

they are basically "our community is like 55% traumatized exiles from other communities and like 30% traumatized people from This One Dude's Community specifically. he traumatizes women and girls and girls he calls women and gay people and parents with sick babies!"

"we have so so many people we take care of now who are so so shaken and traumatized and sad"

"and we only get the people who don't leave the faith entirely!"

"it's not fair! it's not fair that he gets to do that! it's not fair!"

because when you carry the faces of like twenty good people all traumatized by the same garbage person and all you can do is try to take care of them and send passive-aggressive letters, sometimes it sucks!

if they lived on the same planet and she could get there on a horse, she would have done something ill-advised by now. yelled, certainly

but then again, if she had been born on New Maryland she would be a super different person and if he had been born on Tau Ceti there would have been a hard upper limit on how much he could get anyone to listen to him

like, bad bullshit happens on Tau Ceti, but the first time he married a fourteen-year-old girl off to her rapist, his neighbors would have set him on fire

church of man neighbors, regular neighbors, possibly neighbors who are criminals, just all the neighbors

5:37 AM

so her wife listens to her cry and reads over her letters to Brinton to make sure she doesn't actually say anything Too Impolitic (I think her boss also reads them, but he's less invested)

and her wife has these new folks over for dinner and helps them find clothes for their kids and adapt their modesty rules to the thing where it's like, as hot as it is possible to be in Tau Ceti

5:38 AM

like, most of the summer it's like 120 degrees, on a brisk day in December it drops into like, the low nineties

5:39 AM

sometimes people from other communities are like "we do modesty more modestly than they do" and they have to be like "okay, your choices are us dressing this way or us using air conditioning, because people do die in real life of heatstroke sometimes, that is a thing that can kill you"

also, even before Gwendolyn came along, her previous pastor was definitely like "we're gonna make electric fans permissible. we're just... heatstroke sure does kill you in real life"

"particularly in Modest Dress"

she liked him. they had meetings like twice a month when she was young because she had A Lot of questions and her parents were less invested in the answers than she was

when she was like twelve, he was like "maybe they'll give you my job one day" and she was like "I don't want your job! you're the boss of people!" and he was like "they very much would not give you my job if you wanted my job, kiddo"

(even 50% of the organized crime leaders on Tau Ceti are like "hey, I'm not the boss of anybody, I'm just a guy you don't want to fuck with because of all of the friends that I have got"

"I am not the boss of you, but I do have this gun")

5:49 AM

final thought on Gwendolyn: she had a real hard time when Robert Thompson died, because that dude thought her faith was a good reason to murder a husband and father.

and like, that dude is a fucking asshole, obviously, but it's hard

and then Brinton puts out an editorial about it and it is the only time Gwendolyn and Tara's children ever hear one of their mothers swear

because she is usually super meticulous about that

but also, sometimes

there is a limit

she makes several attempts before she writes him her next letter and the subtext of the entire letter is just "fuck you SO much, I do not generally believe in Hell, however, I will make an exception"

there is a limit! a man is dead and his wife and daughter are grieving and then a dude who everyone thinks is, like, the pope of her puts out some bullshit like "of course we don't do hate crimes but also that dude who got murdered deserved it" bullshit

there is a limit she is past it!

5:53 AM

also, they have seven adopted kids

#rape for ts #religion for ts #religious abuse for ts #there is a bit about babies dying in here #because their religion does not always allow for medical technology #I don't know what the succinct tag is for that #hate crimes for ts #organized crime for ts #is that a thing?#guns for ts #briefly #the ghost and the machine #as inappropriate as the gun #her tag would be #show me in the texts #I might legitimately need to write this

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justa-starrynite · 4 years

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Choices: One

A/N: It is finally here! We have been excitedly talking about and anxiously waiting on posting our first Collaboration story together. We have been working on these for a month or so. Finally we get to share it with you all. We hope you enjoy this little adventure we’ll be taking you all on!

This is new territory for us so bear with us! For now, this page is solely for this story, but you never know what can happen down the road!

If you would like to be added to the tag list, feel free to leave a comment or shoot us a message!

Co-authors: @justahopelessssromantic & @starrynite7114

word count: 4175

tagged list: @chibsytelford @phoenixhalliwell @lady-pswrld @carlaangel86 @cocotheclown @mrsjaxtellerfan @loveandglamour26 @nakusaych9 @courtrae89 @briannab1234 @vicmackeybullshxt @gemini0410

Felipe had his gun drawn, cautiously making his way up the driveway of an old friend he knew so well. ell. Looking behind him he saw a few of his colleagues surveying the area. Seeing the footsteps and the front door that was wide open, he knew that they were too late.

“I think we’re too late.” Felipe told his colleague.

Quickly, they made their way up to the front door and found the place in disarray. The smell of gunpowder was still fresh in the air.

Felipe heard the cries then. Making his way to the back of the home, he saw his former colleague and his wife, face down, their blood pooling under them. Their daughters surrounded them, crying as their parents became colder and colder.

“Mommy,” Amelia shook her mother, begging for her to wake up. “Arper, she no wakey.”

Harper frowned, shaking her mother as well with the same result. She turned when she heard the footsteps, immediately wrapping her arms around Amelia. When she realized it was Felipe, her face scrunched up, the tears now flowing down her eyes. Felipe picked her up, his colleague, Jorge picking up Amelia.

“It’s okay bebita, Tio Felipe is here now.” Felipe kissed her head.

This was the reason he started anew in California, why he had to keep Angel and his newborn, Ezekiel along with his wife Marisol away from this. The cartel was hardly forgiving, and this was evidence of that. Looking at the two young toddlers in his arm and Jorge’s, he knew he had to do the same for them.

Harper sat down by the computer in her room, letting out a sigh. Packing was a bitch. Moving from Seattle all the way down close to the border was a feat. It’s not like she couldn’t find a place in Seattle to work. Plenty of hospitals needed nurses, but she wanted to work at an underserved community and well, her recruiter found her a job in Santo Padre. Which was fate bringing the puzzle pieces together.

She’s been wanting to see Felipe, to thank him for everything he’s done for her all these years.

More importantly, she wanted to meet Angel, Felipe’s eldest son and the man who’s had her heart since she was eight years old. It was surreal how this all began over the phone and after all these years, they’ve never met face to face.

Her adoptive father, Jorge, always spoke highly of Felipe, they used to be comrades of war. He never spoke about it often. But every once in a while, when he had enough to drink to let his inhibitions go, she could get a few things out of him.

“I know it’s hard to believe, but your parents love you dearly.” He would always tell her that, yet, he would never elaborate what happened to them. She knew they were no longer in this world and she had a sister, but from what her father told her, when he found her at an orphanage, it was only her left.

Harper remembered bits of pieces of her childhood, but at times, she felt that she blocked it out.

Too traumatic or some shit.

Regardless, here she was, spending her last night at her parents home. Her older brothers Oliver and Dominic were having a hard time letting her go, even though they themselves no longer live in Seattle. Oliver was currently stationed in San Diego with the Navy and Dominic was in Arizona. Right now, they were in Seattle since they were going to drive down to Santo Padre with Harper. No matter her age, Harper would always be their baby sister, no amount of degrees or make up could change that.

Her parents taught her the value of hard work.

They provided a roof over her head, gave her things that she wanted as long as they could afford it. They were never rich in the sense of materialistic things but their family was always rich with love and laughter. Jorge seemed to be a very strict man due to his military background, but he was the biggest jokester of them all. Harper’s friends growing up love coming to her home and just talking to her father, hearing his stories. Her mother, Elia, was an amazing cook and much like her father, a jokester.

Harper felt blessed to have her family. She couldn’t even say she missed her biological parents cause she never knew them.

But she was grateful for being blessed with Jorge and Elia. Along with her two doofus older brothers.

Dominic was the eldest at thirty four years old. He was currently a manager at a bank in Phoenix, Arizona where he resides with his partner, Brandon. They were in the process of adopting a baby boy, four months old. Oliver was thirty-two years old and was currently an active member of the Navy. He currently resides in Coronado, close to base, with his fiancé, Haley.

The three were all close growing up, the two boys taking in the toddler than their father brought him. They always wanted a sister and they got one in Harper. Blood or not, Harper was their baby and no one would ever harm her, especially not the people that killed her parents.

“Harp! Is everything packed?” She heard Dominic holler at her.

“Yes! We’ve been over this for the seventeenth time!” She yelled back.

“Okay smartass, if you fucking forget one thing tomorrow I’m throwing your ass in the lake.” Dominic warned.

Harper laughed before she stopped and rechecked her items. She wasn’t taking everything, this would always be her home after all. The most she took were her clothes and this dresser her father had made for her, she could never truly part with it.

There was a knock on her door.

“Come in!” She called out. “Who knew you knew how to knock Dom.”

Looking up, she found her father, a small smile gracing his lips. This has been difficult for him. He didn’t want her to move. Though the threat may no longer be there, he was still hesitant to part with his baby girl.

“All packed?” Jorge asked as he sat beside Harper on her bed. The bed where she shed tears over the first boy to break her heart. The bed where he read her endless stories about happily ever afters. The bed where he would hold her and lull her to sleep whenever she dreamt about the night her parents were slayed. The bed where he promised her that no matter what, he would always protect her.

“Yes, don’t believe Dominic, he’s just being an asshole.” Jorge gave her a look and she immediately corrected herself. “A jerk, Dom’s being a jerk.”

“You’re twenty-nine years old Harper, you’re allowed to cuss.”

“Yes well, you’ve embedded it in me that if I get that look, that means I’m not supposed to do something.” Harper gave him a sheepish smile.

“I know.” Jorge chuckled. “I decided to come along with you and your brothers, it would be nice to see Felipe again.”

“Really?” Harper grinned. “That would be great, you two could catch up and you could ease my nerves about moving to a new place.”

“You’ll be fine mija. If there was one kid I wasn’t worried about, it was you.”

Harper chuckled. “Thanks dad.”

She was ready for this new chapter. However nerve wracking it may be, she had a good feeling about this, that she was on the right path.

It was the path that led her to Angel and unbeknownst to her father, her sister.

Miguel fastened the last button of his white shirt as he walked into the dining room greeting his family. “Buenos días my beautiful familia.” He grinned looking as his two favorite women and his precious little girl. He gave his mother a kiss on the cheek then leaned over cupping his beautiful wife Amelia’s face in his hand leaning in for a soft kiss before turning to the other side and placing a sweet kiss to the top of his daughter, Marisela’s head. He then took his place at the head of the table unfolding his cloth napkin and setting it across his lap. “How was everyone’s night?” He questioned as he looked to Marisela. He had been working all night so he had not come to bed. The last thing he did before shutting himself in his office was tuck his daughter into her bed and read her favorite bedtime story. He was hoping last night was finally the night she could sleep by herself, nightmare free. The poor thing had been suffering from terrible nightmares, waking up crying in the middle of the night before finding comfort in her parent’s bed. He loved her dearly but it could only go on for so long before something had to change.

“I had ‘nother nightmare.” Marisela spoke up quietly looking up at her father with her big brown eyes. “A scary monster came and swooped me away from you and I would never see you again.” She recalled, her little eyes filling with tears.

Miguel and Amelia’s hearts broke at the sight. They felt for their daughter and wished more than anything to be able to rid her of these fears. “You have nothing to fear mi princesa.” Miguel spoke softly to her, “Papa would never let that happen. You’re safe, surrounded by people who love and protect you.”

“Like tio Nessy?” She asked, perking up a bit. Nestor and Marisela had a very special bond, the little girl holding a special place in his heart as well.

“Ella,” Amelia spoke up catching her daughter’s attention. “Did you know Mama used to get terrible nightmares too when she was little like you?” Amelia had suffered from nightmares that would plague her after she was adopted. They were always so vivid and felt real but at the end of the day they were just dreams and eventually they faded with time. Hopefully it wouldn’t take Marisela’s quite as long to disappear for her.

“You did?” Marisela asked, eyes wide. “How’d you make ‘em go away?”

“Eventually they just did, baby.” Amelia said, giving her a comforting smile and reaching out to brush a curl behind Madisela’s ear. “Yours will too.”

Miguel watched on intently, Marisela was beautiful looking just like her mother and he thought about how lucky he was to have his family. “So,” he spoke up taking a sip of his coffee, “What are our plans for today?”

“Well, we’ll probably just have a little girl’s day.” Amelia said buttering her toast, “Do some shopping, maybe get our nails done and then dinner at (restaurant name)?”

“That sounds wonderful. I’ll make sure we have a reservation.” Miguel said.

Nestor stepped into the room instantly gaining the attention of Marisela. She perked up at the sight exclaiming, "Nessy!" Nestor smiled at the little girl walking over to her as she bounced on her seat. He'd never get tired of the excitement she had every time she saw him. Looking up at him as he got closer Marisela pouted. Where the nightmares were a terrible feat for her she also knew how to use them to gain the sympathy of those already wrapped tightly around her little finger. "Had 'nother scary dream tio Nessy," She informed him, bottom lip jutting out as her eyes watered over.

"That's no good," he said brushing the stray tear away that trailed down her cheek.

Amelia looked to Miguel hoping she could have a moment to speak with him. The nightmares had been at the front of her mind for some time now. She hated seeing her daughter suffer through similar things to what she had growing up. She also missed having the bed to herself and husband again, the frequent addition blocking any and all intimacy between the two.

Miguel picked up on his wife's silent signal. “Why don’t you go wash up," He suggested to his daughter, "You've got a big day planned ahead, mi princesa. You'll need to be heading out soon."

"I'll take her, Mykie." Nestor offered lifting the girl off her seat and taking her hand. "Come on now little Ella." Amelia smiled at her daughter as Nestor and Marisela walked out of the room to clean up leaving Miguel, Amelia, and Dita still sat at the dining table.

Amelia’s smile faltered as she sunk down in her seat exhausted once her daughter was out of sight. She looked to Miguel again. “We can’t keep doing this Miguel. The nightmares have to stop. Marisela is barely sleeping." She rubbed her temples between her fingers in an attempt to massage the stress away. "Maybe it would be good to seek outside help, find someone she can talk to. Someone who could help her more than us."

Miguel grabbed her hand, stilling her movement and bringing it down to his lips for a kiss to the back of her soft skin. He held it tight giving it a squeeze as she placed her other hand on top of his “I think that’s an excellent idea, amor." He agreed. "We’ll find someone, look into it together. I promise."

Dita sipped her tea remaining silent throughout the conversations until now. “She’s a child, they have nightmares all the time.” She spoke up waving it off, “She doesn’t need a shrink messing around in her little mind and filling it with nonsense." She set her cup down on the table looking to her daughter in law "What she needs is for you to stop letting her sleep in your bed every time she has a silly little dream. The sooner she learns she doesn't have you to fall back on she'll get over it." She said sternly. "She's a Galindo, strong like her father." Dita smiled at her son.

Amelia gave her mother in law a tight lipped smile in return. It took everything in her to keep her calm. She and Dita did not often get along, Dita thinking Amelia belonged in the role of loving mother and doting wife nothing more and certainly not getting involved with the cartel business. What Miguel and Amelia had was a partnership though. She refused to be left in the dark. They respected each other, were a true power couple through and through. It was because of that that their marriage remained strong.

Amelia was adopted by the Mendoza’s, another powerful cartel that was south of Sonora. Together, their marriage would unite the two powerful cartels, sparing bloodshed between the two. The Galindo’s never crossed a certain border, helping the Mendoza’s retain their power in that part of Mexico, while the Mendoza’s helped the cartel keep their territory intact. After the DOJ’s meddling, the Galindo’s were not as powerful as they used to be. The partnership, forced partnership, with the government made them look weak, leaving distaste to other cartel families. But they also understood why everything occurred the way it did. And now, Miguel Galindo was in power and it was different to his father’s reign. They were unsure of his prowess, but he has proved that he could play their game, they just didn’t know how well he could. Regardless, the Mendoza’s allied themselves with Miguel, strengthening their partnership with a marriage. If they had a marriage, a child, it would be hard to betray one another, the fallout would be far too great.

Amelia and Miguel knew one another from when they were children, and always had polite conversations. When they were informed that they would be arranged, there was no fight from either as they knew their fates. Powerful families rarely wanted to marry outside of their class. Even though it seemed ridiculous at this time period, with all the progressive ideals that has been put forth, old habits were difficult to break. They’ve been married for

Miguel made her a promise the night their engagement was announced.

‘I know this is not ideal Lia, but I will protect you. I promise you that no matter what happens, it will be you and me against whatever is thrown against us.’

And Miguel has kept that promise. He’s even gone against his mother for her.

Miguel squeezed Amelia’s hand in support as he addressed his mother. “This is between Amelia and I, Mama. Marisela is our daughter. It is our decision to decide what is best for her. Even a Galindo could use a helping hand every now and then.”

Amelia gave Miguel a grateful smile, squeezing his hand back. Dita gave them both a tight smile before leaving the two alone. Amelia didn’t hate Dita, but she didn’t particularly like her either. More often than not, Dita always inserted herself in their marriage.

Amelia smiled as Marisela slowly awoke from her small nap during the ride over to town. She had to drop off a few things at the post office and she figured no better time than the present to see who her Pediatrician would recommend for Marisela to meet up with. Though, they most likely would go to San Diego as the choices were by far vast.

Hearing the familiar roar of the motorcycle, she looked as two Mayans passed her by, parking across the street at Carniceria Reyes. Coco and Angel dismounted, taking off their helmets and placing it on their handles. Coco looked back, his eyes meeting Amelia’s. She managed to give him a small smile and he returned it, their past memories running through both their minds.

What could have been.

What should have been.

“Still can’t believe she’s married to Galindo.” Angel shook his head. “Hola Amelia, come estas?”

Amelia rolled her eyes and flicked off Angel.

“Very nice to do in front of your kid.” Angel further teased her.

Coco smacked Angel’s arm, shaking his head. “Leave it, you don’t want Galindo breathing down our neck because you’re fucking with his wife.”

“You’re right.” Angel nodded his head, stepping on the sidewalk to make his way over to his father’s butcher shop.

Coco knew that no matter how he felt, this was the best for Amelia. Like what Miguel told him the night Amelia collapsed in his arms, she was better off with him. He could get her the proper treatment for his condition and he, a nobody, could barely reap his benefits from his military service. It was one of the hardest things he had to do. A relationship that lasted less than a year had such an effect on him, still did to this day. He dreamt of her often, how she would laugh at his corny jokes, take in his words of wisdom and always compliment on how intelligent he was. Those were the most cruel dreams, they were equivalent to nightmares, since it was a taste of what he had and could never have again.

“Yo, you alright?” Angel broke him away from his thoughts.

“Huh? Yeah, I’m good.” Coco turned away from Amelia, moving towards where Angel was.

Much like everything else in his life, Amelia and his children, were pushed to the side, because they were better without him. He would just ruin his life, much like how he always fucked up in his.

The club was the only family he had and it would always remain that way.

Harper walked in, the nerves in her stomach were going inside. Her father Jorge followed after her, smiling at Amelia’s excitement. He was glad that she was finally able to meet her Tio Felipe again after all these years. Ever since Marisol’s death, Felipe’s visits were sporadic at best, but Harper understood she always did.

“Be with you in a moment,” Felipe had his back turned to them, preparing the meat he was going to place in the display case.

“Take your time.” She responded.

“Compadre, you’re moving slower, should we be concerned?” Jorge couldn’t help but tease Felipe.

Felipe froze and turned around. “Jorge?” He wiped his hands with his apron, taking it off as he made his way towards them. His eyes then landed on the young woman beside him and his smile even grew larger. “Harper?”

“Hello,” she shyly greeted him.

“Don’t be shy now, go hug him.” Jorge gave his daughter a slight push.

Harper walked over to Felipe, wrapping her arms around him. The warmth she felt was similar to the one she felt when her father would embrace her. The men who saved her and her sister, wherever she may be.

“Mija, you’re so grown.” Felipe rarely smiled, but seeing Harper in front of him, even though he had seen Amelia numerous times, it was different. Harper was kept away, just to assure that the two would not be put together and hunted down. It was ironic how Amelia was now married to the family who got her parents killed in the first place. Felipe didn’t know who Amelia was going to be adopted too, he trusted a friend of his to find a good family for her, a family who would be able to afford her condition.

And those were the Mendoza’s.

“What are you doing here?” He questioned Harper once he pulled away. “What are you both doing here?”

“Came to help her unpacked, make sure everything is in order at her apartment.” Jorge wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

“I got a job here as an ER nurse, I’ve always wanted to serve underserved communities and my recruiter found me one here.” Harper excitedly told him. “I jumped at the opportunity as I’ve been wanting to see you and Angel as well.”

Felipe chuckled, shaking his head. His eldest son was enamored with Harper. Ever since they were younger, Angel always spoke to Harper. It was odd that they became as close as they’ve been, but Felipe was thankful. He felt that he failed Angel, that he didn’t give him the love that he deserved. He would make it up to Angel eventually, but he was glad Harper was here now, just so the two could finally meet face to face. Every time they would try and meet, it was never the right time. It was upsetting to say the least, but Angel always pushed through.

“Angel has been looking forward to meeting you for so long, I’m sure it would make him immensely happy to see you.” Felipe chuckled. “Have you two eaten? Let’s go grab some food and bring it back here.”

Felipe went to the back to lock up and change, Jorge following after him. Harper stood by the counter, checking her phone. The bell rang, indicating someone walked in. She looked up and found two men, one taller than the other, wearing leather vests. Giving them a small smile, Harper’s attention went back to her phone.

Angel studied the young woman before him, his eyebrows furrowing. “Amelia, weren’t you just outside?”

Harper looked at the man behind her and gave him a confused look. “Amelia? My name is Harper.”

Angel froze.

Harper.

He knew that voice.

It was her voice.

Angel didn’t know how he could feel so strongly about someone he never met. He’s always felt at ease with Harper. He could even say that he loves her. She’s been his best friend, his confidant for years. And to have her in front of him, he was in disbelief.

“Is it really you?” Angel studied her face, she looked just like Amelia, but she just looked different, seemed different. The smile on her face was brighter, more genuine. Her hair was burgundy stuck out to him. He remembered when she was nervous about coloring her hair and she looked beautiful. The half sleeve tattoo on her arm caught his eye, a sleeve she had shown him before.

God, she was gorgeous.

“Want to pick up your mouth bro, it’s kind of embarrassing.” Coco couldn’t help but tease Angel. Though it was eerie how much she looked like Amelia. “Fuck, I owe Gilly money.” Coco took his phone out, preparing to text their third musketeer.

And the fact she wasn’t a dude really surprised Coco.

His voice registered to Harper then. Her mouth dropped open before she shrieked and ran over to him, jumping in his arms. Angel’s arms immediately wrapped around her.

“Angel!” Harper buried her face at the crook of his neck.

“Fuck, you are real.” Angel couldn’t even explain how overjoyed he was to finally have Harper in his arms. He always thought that maybe life was playing a cruel trick on him and he was being fucking catfished, especially since she would never show him pictures of herself. She reasoned that her parents wouldn’t allow it, that people were looking for her and his father explained the same thing to him. Angel never pushed it, which was surprising for him, but he knew it must have been something if even his father and mother advised that it would be best to wait to see Harper

#angel reyes #angel reyes fic #angel reyes x oc #angel reyes fanfic #coco cruz fanfic #mayans mc #mayans mc fanfiction #coco cruz x oc #miguel galindo

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thenightling · 4 years

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What the Hell IS Daniel Hall?

There seem to be some people on Tumblr very confused about what Daniel Hall is. I guess someone is going to have to try to explain him. Please note: I do not have the annotated Sandman. This is purely from my own observation while reading Sandman.

Okay, very simple answer. Daniel is Dream of The Endless.

He is not still “only twee-years-old.” He is not Morpheus’ “son.” He is not Morpheus’ heir. He IS Dream. We are literally told this in every single comic he has appeared in.

Let me try to explain...

If you’ve read American Gods you know there are multiple versions of Odin based on the different ideas of him. And how the Icelandic Odin is not Mr. Wednesday even though both are Odin, that’s sort of what this is like.

To begin we need to discuss Daniel’s conception. Daniel is the son of Hector Hall and Lyta Hall. Hector is the son of Carter Hall, whom many of you may know as Hawkman. Hector gets reincarnated and so does his wife. And every time they reincarnate, at some point (usually in adulthood) they regain the memories of their previous life . Keep that in mind.

Hector was tricked by Brute and Glob into believing he was The Sandman. Gifted with some of the Sandman powers Hector. There’s just one problem. Hector was dead. Hector is a ghost.

And Lyta, though originally from a defunct (now AU) timeline had at one point been Wonder Woman’s daughter (again, now defunct continuity / AU continuity) which gave her a direct link with The Furies (The Kindly Ones).

Lyta lived with Hector in a false version of The Dreaming inside a boy’s head, in a hazy dream-state. This went on for years. Still pregnant. Any normal child would have been born already but two years had passed and she was still very much with child.

Eventually Morpheus unwraveled the great scam and forced Hector’s spirit to move on.

So the baby conceived in dreams, possibly by a ghost, (as in Sandman lore it’s unclear if Hector was alive when he impregnated Lyta) was born. From the very start Morpheus could sense the child was of The Dreaming and it was clear this was no normal child.

He was gestating in dreams for over two years. That child is more dream than flesh.

When Daniel is finally named, he names himself. This isn’t some cute “Morpheus speaks baby” moment. This is a psychic communication between him and Daniel.

Notice how Morpheus puts his fingertips to Daniel’s forehead there. This is how they psychically communicate. In the Kindly ones he mentions how he and Daniel have “spoken” and this is later confirmed by Daniel, himself in his more mature / True form.

Morpheus did not name Daniel. Daniel named Daniel.

Daniel isn’t a name chosen at random. Daniel picked it for himself because Daniel is the Biblical Oneiromancer. Daniel is the Dream prophet or Dream Scryer of the Bible. He was the prophet who had visions and prophetic dreams foretelling the future and communicating with God. Daniel in Sandman chose this name for himself because he knew who and what he truly was.

Even Lyta (despite her resentment toward Morpheus) knew the name was right for her son and smiled when she repeated it.

Later (though still appearing very human) Daniel is revealed to be what some might call a dreamwalker. A dreamwalker is someone who can lucid dream and enter the dreams of others at will- what is supposed to be a very rare ability. Daniel lucid dreams his way to The House of Secrets and stays for story time.

The striped pyjamas are no accident. This is a nod to Toby in the fantasy film Labyrinth. In Labyrinth Jareth, The Goblin King, does choose Toby as his heir and does plan to turn him into what he is. There is a similarity in that Morpheus knows Daniel will take his rightful place in his realm but he did not pick a human child at random as an heir. Daniel was born into Dream Magick. He literally gestated in it. This is no normal baby.

Now we come to the explanation of what Daniel is.

Morpheus attempts to explain being Dream of The Endless to Matthew, and how all anthropomorphized incarnations of Dream of The Endless are just “aspects” of a greater whole, he uses the metaphor of facets of a giant jewel.

During Sandman: The Kindly Ones, Puck and Loki burn away all that was human from Daniel. Daniel (as a being) survives this transformitive fire because he is clutching a phoenix feather. But he is now transformed. The human part (what human there was) is gone now.

Puck and Loki did not give him that feather. They didn’t even know what he had in his hand at first.

Now here’s where things get weird... er. Before even this, Cluracan has a brief vision of Daniel in his true adult Dream of The Endless form. It’s similar to the illustration of Daniel’s Dream of The Endless form previously shown in Destiny’s book.

Notice here when Morpheus shakes hands with Daniel, we see Daniel in a pose that is most assuredly not a normal pose for a toddler. He is posed like a noble greeting another noble. One hand cupped behind his back as he stands up straight and shakes Morpheus’ hand.

When Morpheus “Dies” Daniel comes into his own. He physically becomes Dream of The Endless corporealized- with all the powers and memories that go with it.

This scene can be interpreted as Daniel finally taking his true and proper form as Dream. Also notice the dreamstone is shrinking. Each dreamstone is made from a piece of Dream’s very soul. Daniel is absorbing that soul fragment into himself and becoming wholly who and what he is supposed to be. He IS Dream of The Endless. That is not a title. That is who and what he truly is.

This is further solidified when in Sandman: The Wake Daniel tells Matthew that HE was the one who stopped The Corinthian from killing him. And that was while Daniel was still in the form of Toddler-Daniel, making it clear that even at that point he wasn’t truly a normal toddler.

Daniel, himself, tries to tell the reader that he IS Dream of The Endless. He’s not Morpheus but he IS Dream. Dream of The Endless isn’t a mere title. It’s WHAT he is. It’s who he is. He’s a facet of this great crystalline entity.

This is made more clear in Sandman: Overture when we see Morpheus meeting the other aspects of Dream. He acknowledges that they are all “him” yet they are autonomous to each other. Self-aware and self-contained yet linked.

Daniel isn’t some human baby that Morpheus randomly chose as his heir. Daniel IS him. Both are shards of the same being. But here’s the thing. Facets of Dream of The Endless CAN exist autonomously from each other. This is how Morpheus was tricked into thinking the cat (Desire) was another aspect of Dream (another shard) in Sandman: Overture.

So you see, when I “Ship” Morpheus with Daniel I speak of two pieces of a greater whole finding a balance, kinship, and understanding with one and other. I speak of two adult aspects of a greater whole. Not a man and child. Not a man and his heir. Not a child who was groomed by a supernatural being. But two supernatural beings with the same knowledge, power, and (for the most part) memory as each other- pieces of the same soul corporealized. Both connected by being facets of the great jewel that is Dream of The Endless yet autonomous to each other.

Even if Daniel had been human he would be pushing thirty-years-old right now. Characters in Vertigo Comics were aging at real-world speed (until they switched over to DC Black label, which was only a few months ago). This is no three-year-old, folks.

Now for a hypothetical.

Morpheus would be the younger of the two as in my “shipping” of the duo requires Daniel to have resurrected Morpheus as a dream entity. As a dream entity Morpheus would no longer quite be Dream of the Endless anymore but free from that role in his own “death” as Dream of The Endless.

I feel this is what happened- that he became a dream entity posthumously. Notice his appearance in Hob’s dream in Sandman: The Wake. He was there with Destruction. Hob did not know who Destruction was other than a random street artist he saw once. he did not know Destruction’s connection to Morpheus. There is only one explanation for that dream he had of them. The only explanation is that it truly was Morpheus in his dream, brought back as a dream entity but dead as “Dream of The Endless.”

If Morpheus exists as a dream entity now, that’s Daniel-Dream’s doing. And therefor Daniel is technically the older of the two now, as Morpheus had to be recreated to become this dream entity. (Sort of like how Matthew became Dream’s raven.)

Morpheus may have his ancient memories and knowledge (as Daniel does as well) but in his current state (as a dream entity) Morpheus would technically be the younger, at least in that form.

There. That’s the best way I can explain it.

I hope I have that right.

#Neil Gaiman's The Sandman #The Sandman Universe #The Dreaming #Daniel Hall #Morpheus #Dream of The Endless #Neil Gaiman #Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Universe

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someone-give-me-a-hug · 3 years

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I never believed in karma

This is a little story based mostly on a story of when I was younger and a prompt I found somewhere that said right a story about why you believe in karma. I was bored and so we have this. also this isn't proofread so :) there are a few mentions of abusive behavior.

I never believed in much as a kid. I knew from the age of 4 that the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real. That Santa was nothing but a myth. Not even being read stories of miracles and magic, giants and dragons could sway the little pessimist in my head who would constantly nag that the world was cruel and the universe could never give back. My parents hated it, in fact, it became a running joke that they found it so hard to convince me to believe that they would drop me off at the police station one day and see if I would believe in the miracle of them coming back. It was never that funny but everyone else would laugh. When I was about 8 my parents were divorced, it was like the only world I had known had been split down the middle like a dry log and placed on the fire that fueled my spitful ways. I was angry, at myself, at the world, at the same stupid universe who tried to trick kids into thinking the chocolate eggs in their garden came from a rabbit who had now torn my life into 2 separate factions; one filled with the rage of a drinker who screamed at the little things but wore the sweetest smile and held me tight as though I might be the next to leave and another filled with false promise and manipulation. Neither was ideal and so I taught myself how to grow up and focused on becoming better than my parents. The years went by in an endless cycle of the seasons. Spring spent watching the cherry blossom tree in my fathers' fancy new house bud and grow whilst wishing to be anywhere but there, Summers spent in isolation, left alone and separated from my friends, Autumn spent in public libraries to get away from home for a few hours and Winter spent praying for the isolation of summer or really anything to get out of Christmas dinner and having to face everyone. Father time treated me as well as he could, the image of a wise old man, gray beard littered with the stories of my life, and eyes that looked straight through you as if you were a ghost. No matter how much time passed I still didn’t believe in anything of great significance and I certainly didn’t believe in Karma. That was until I turned 11. It had been a couple days after my birthday, I had gotten a few bits and bobs that would find their way into the draw of rubbish that was religiously searched by my dad but most importantly I had gotten a phone as a way of contacting either parent when I was staying at the other's house. To me this was a dream come true! I could finally text the people that mattered and blend in with other kids my age who for the last 2 years had been trying to act 5 years older on the internet. I wasn't allowed it at night (which was understandable as I would spend all night trying to contact and interact with people all within the four walls of my room and huddled in between the 2 plush white pillows I had on my bed). Little did I know, my dad would search through the messages sent to my mum or grandma about how unhappy I was up at his with his girlfriend who treated me like I was a problem, and where I went below the dog in the pecking order. Now in these messages, I had referred to my dad's girlfriend as a “Step-witch” and when he found this out he wasn’t happy at all, I was locked in the lounge and shouted at for more time than I would like to admit. Now one thing I will say is when I get scared or too emotional I can’t talk, the words escape my throat and the oxygen can never find its way in. I begged and pleaded fresh tears gliding down the salty remains of the old ones to be able to write as a way of speaking and saying sorry. “No!” they insisted “we won’t tolerate this disrespect and you aren’t a toddler you can speak like a normal person!”. After that, I wasn’t allowed to use my phone at all and all the messages I sent had to be run through them before my finger could hit the send button. A few weeks later when it was time once again to make my Monday trip to Dad's after school I was shocked to receive a message from my father telling me my mum would be dropping me up as they couldn’t manage it. It wasn’t until mum left me on their

meticulously de-weeded and bleak front door and had to let myself in with the spare key that I realized what had happened. The house had been swept through by the flu, everyone was sick! Not wanting to give up the ongoing battle of where I should live with my mum, my dad had said he was busy and asked her to drop me up when in fact he was bedridden by the vicious illness. They were all coughing, sniffling, sneezing into a tissue, and then throwing it onto a growing pile the size of Mount Everest herself. The only one who seemed to be unaffected was my Oldest step-brother, let’s call him Dan. Dan never treated me like some old gum he had stepped in that just wouldn’t get off his shoe like the others, he never said anything bad to me or about me (at least to my face) and he was the only person in the house who treated me as if I was human. So as my Dad and Sammy (let’s just call her that for now) were holed up in their room Dan took it upon himself to take care of me for the 3 days of my stay. You see Dad and Sammy had lost their voice and resorted to writing on paper to communicate to us what they needed (or they used their phones but they were charged on the other side of the room to the bed and they could hardly muster up the strength to walk all those 10 steps to get them). However, there was 1 problem with this: all the led in the pencils were always broken and could never sharpen right, all the pens never wrote and we could never make out the frantic hand signals they would make. Now I’m not saying they deserved it for everything they did nor am I saying that it was karma who ripped their voices from their throats just as they had ripped my only means of communication to the outside world and to plead my case that day. All I am saying is from that day forward the universe and all her wonderful ways stuck on that tiny list of things I believed in. And who knows maybe next year I might catch a glimpse of a fat, red and white man and his big clumpy boots climb back up the chimney, leaving presents and mince pie crumbs in his wake.

#Story #i wrote this when I was sad #wish it happened like this #tw mentions of abuse #tw manipulation

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beauregardlionett · 4 years

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Queens of Queens - Ch.1

AO3 Link

Putting the barbell back onto the holders with a quiet huff of exertion, Fjord ducked backwards out from under the weight and shook out his wrists. His left one still ached from working at the docks the afternoon before. Beau had wrapped it tight and firm for him before they started working out today, telling him to go easy with it for a few days. She was a damn hypocrite, and they both knew it. Regardless, Fjord had decreased the amount of plates he usually had on the barbell in an attempt to set a good example.

It ended up being a fruitless gesture. Halfway through their session, Fjord spotting Beau as she squatted twenty pounds over her max from two weeks ago, she had realized she was late for work. Fjord didn’t mind working out alone, it was just more entertaining and passed the time a little faster when she was there, too.

Sighing as he rolled out his wrist a few more times for good measure, Fjord decided to just call it a day.

As he was packing up his bag, he spotted the familiar blue hoodie that Beau always wore sitting tossed against the mirrors and forgotten. Scooping it up and tossing it overtop his bag, Fjord tugged his phone out of his pocket and sent her a quick text.

Fjord: hey you left your hoodie here

Fjord: want me to drop it off?

Tucking his phone away again, Fjord moved to the locker rooms and dropped all his things in a locker before heading to the showers. He wasn’t in desperate need for a shower considering they hadn’t done that vigorous of a workout today, but it was routine at this point. He only remembered to check his phone for a response once he was dressed and toweling the dampness from his hair.

Beau: shit I knew I forgot something

Beau: yeah could you stop at the bar and drop it off?

Beau: drinks on me if you do just don’t let the peacock know

Snorting quietly at the last text, Fjord texted back an affirmative and got an address for the bar in response. Tucking all of his things and Beau’s hoodie into his bag, Fjord hefted it over his shoulder and made his way out of the locker room and onto the bustling streets of Queens, New York. A colorful mix of civilians walked past Fjord, and he felt a little more at ease here every time he noticed another like him among the population.

He was nowhere near old enough to remember magic, but the stories in their history books in school had been enough for a young half-Orc like himself to imagine a better world. He had once dreamt of a time when magic and gods and less sideways looks were real and present fixtures in everyday life. Fjord knew now that it was a folly dream of a child, but New York was one of the closest places on Earth to that feeling. Dense with Tieflings, Halflings, Elves, Firbolgs, Kenku, and countless other once magical races, a half-Orc like Fjord was just another passing face instead of a sore thumb.

A human woman passed by Fjord with her child, tugging the toddler closer by the hand. She shot him a dirty look as he headed for the subway entrance.

Okay, so he was a passing face to most people.

The bar Beau worked at was a five-minute subway trip and a quick walk from the gym, tucked into the homey bustle of Jackson Heights on the main boulevard. Among the throng of restaurants, gas stations, schools and homes, there perched an unassuming wooden door with an ancient deity’s symbol carved into the wood. The front window was floor to ceiling and shrouded from inside by heavy violet drapes. A tall, muscular woman sat on a stool outside the door. She had black and white hair with several intricate braids set throughout, and a leather jacket with dark fur lapels and collar to match tucked snug across her shoulders. She glanced up at Fjord’s approach, mismatched eyes giving him a quick sweep up and down as he stopped a good foot away from her. He glanced at the door she seemed to guard and then back to her piercing gaze.

“Is the bar open? I’m just here to drop something off with Beau.” Not the full truth, as he was planning on taking her up on that free drink. But dropping something off was more concise of an explanation.

The woman held out one hand, expression not changing at all. In the softest voice Fjord had ever heard, she said, “ID.”

Blinking once, Fjord’s hand moved to grab his wallet from his bag and only fumbled a little in tugging his license free. The woman gave it a cursory glance, tilted it this way and that in the dim light and then handed it back over. Fjord gave her a quiet nod of thanks as she gestured behind her for him to enter. Moving past her, the door gave a quiet squeak on the hinges; the sound lost beneath the music thrumming from the speakers and into the veins of every patron inside.

It wasn’t obscenely packed, considering it was just before nine on a Thursday night, but it was still an impressive crowd. There was a decent balance of ostentatious and raunchy fashion dispersed across the tables and bar stools, and Fjord had to admit, he was a little impressed. It took a bit of effort to force his eyes to sweep for Beau, continuously distracted by various articles of clothing that caught his attention.

After a few attempts, he found her behind the bar, a grey waistcoat immaculately fastened over a navy button up, the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her hair pulled back into that signature topknot, Beau flashed her familiar sharp grin at the patrons currently fawning over her bartender flare. Making his way over to the sticky countertop, Fjord slid into a relatively empty slot, the stools on either side occupied, and waited for his friend to finish up her flexing for the swooning girls.

It took a couple minutes, but Beau noticed Fjord down the bar as she was cleaning out the shaker she had been using, eyes lighting with recognition. Waving graciously to the girls and collecting tips, Beau casually slid her way down to Fjord and reached over to give his shoulder a light punch in greeting.

“Hey, man!” she called over the music and the chatter. “Thanks for coming by. What can I get you for the trouble?”

Handing the hoodie over to her across the bar top, taking care to avoid letting the sleeves drag across the tacky surface, Fjord gave her a shrug. He hadn’t seen a menu of sorts anywhere, so he assumed the usual was available.

“What’s your specialty?”

Eyes sparking with delight as she tucked the hoodie away beneath the bar, Beau cracked her knuckles and reached for a clean shaker and a bottle of expensive looking vodka. Fjord already had regrets, but he didn’t stop her.

“I didn’t know you could sling drinks,” he offered instead. Fjord watched her with a hint of skepticism as she started mixing in something that looked like soda and lime and…was that a jalapeño? Her hands were deft, like with everything Fjord had ever seen her do. He had a suspicion, based on plenty of exposure, that Beau’s default setting was of a fluttering nature.

“Yeah,” Beau said easily, something in the curve of her lips when she said it looking a touch bitter. “Been doing it for a few years. The Peacock’s just hired a new bartender to replace Orna since she had to move for family reasons. Usually I only step in back here to cover shifts once a week, since I’m mostly out front with Yasha.”

“The lady in the leather jacket with the death glare?”

Beau laughed once, barking and loud as she started to rapidly shake the drink she was mixing. Her eyes shone with mirth as she gave a slight shake of her head.

“Yeah, that’s her. She’s really not that bad, just awkward as far as I can tell. She and I only bounce together on Friday nights when the crowd’s the worst, and I swear Fjord, she’s a challenge to talk to.” Beau looked a little pained and a lot wistful now, pouring out the drink into a glass with ice in it. “She’s got an amazing body and those eyes…mh!”

Fjord watched her clutch a hand to her chest dramatically with only a little judgment coloring his expression. Beau seemed to either not notice or not care, because she carried on as she put the finishing touches on his drink.

“I’ve been bouncing Fridays with her for almost a year now and all I’ve got out of her is that she’s best friends and roommates with the Peacock, her favorite color is black, and that she’s strong enough to pick up three drunk dudes at once.”

Sliding the drink across the counter to Fjord, Beau tossed the shaker into the sink behind the bar and wiped her hands on a dishtowel. Raising an eyebrow at her, Fjord picked up the drink with caution and gave it a quick, curious sniff. He had to try very hard to not recoil at the near overpowering scent of liquor that all but punched him in the face.

“Sounds rough,” Fjord sympathized in a monotonous tone as he stalled, swirling the drink around a little in the glass, the ice clinking against the sides.

“It is,” Beau said around a long-suffering sigh. She gestured to the drink and quickly moved on. “Try it, you wimp. It’s not that strong, just smells like it. It’s the lime that kicks up the scent.”

Giving her a look, Fjord hesitated only another heartbeat before taking a breath and daring to take a sip of whatever Beau had created for him. The liquor hit his tongue first, followed by the sweet zing of carbonation and a hint of the lime and jalapeño she had thrown in. Overall, it wasn’t bad, but Fjord wasn’t much of a drinker. Still, he lowered the glass and gave Beau an impressed look to meet the smugness she was watching him with.

“Not bad,” he granted, setting the glass down as he slid onto the barstool beside him that had been vacated.

“Thanks, man,” she grinned, sharp and proud. She gestured to the crowded floor behind him and spoke over the music with a glint to her eye. “Stick around a while longer and there’ll be some entertainment, too.”

Suspicious, but knowing that she knew he had nowhere else to be, Fjord could only give her a shrug that was basically acceptance. Beau flashed him a dangerous grin and then she was off to serve a rowdy looking trio of half-Elves. Left to his own devices, Fjord continued to slowly work away at his drink, eyes scanning over the various people crowded around the tables throughout the cozy restaurant. Admittedly, Fjord would never have pegged this place as being popular from the outside, but the inside was unique in decoration from what he could tell through the dim lighting.

“Here by yourself, handsome?”

Glancing to the side at the voice by his shoulder, Fjord blinked with surprise as he found himself face to face with a purple Tiefling. Their grin was full of sharp teeth and solid red eyes glimmered with mischief and interest alike. They wore a loose white shirt with a plunging neckline, and Fjord could have sworn there was something about the Tiefling’s chest that gave him pause. But realizing both that the flashing lights weren’t helping, and that he was all but staring at their chest without responding, Fjord was quick to look back at their face.

“Uhm, yeah.”

Stupid.

The Tiefling raised an eyebrow at him but chuckled with mirth, clearly not put off by Fjord’s awkward honesty.

“You’ve never been here before.”

It wasn’t a question, and they said it with far too much conviction that Fjord knew he couldn’t pretend it was, even if he wanted to. So instead, he offered a shrug and took another sip of his drink. He could feel the heat on his cheeks, but he hoped that the dim light and colorful flashes were enough to hide it.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” the Tiefling said, waving a hand dismissively between them. “We’re a close knit community in here, so it’s easy to spot an unfamiliar face. Just wondering if you’ve wandered in or if you actually know what you’re in for.”

“What I’m—?” Fjord started to ask, before the sound of a microphone giving a burst of static over the speakers among the music cut him off.

“Hello everyone!” a cheerful, pitchy tone drawled over the microphone, drawing Fjord’s eyes away from the Tiefling and towards the makeshift stage at the back of the bar. There stood a figure with pale green skin, balancing a wig of obnoxious size on their head and sporting eye make-up so bold, Fjord had no trouble discerning it even from across the bar. He was so preoccupied by taking in the glittering jewels and loud accessories, that the only other words he caught over the music and cheering were drag and performance.

Sliding a look to the Tiefling beside him, Fjord raised an eyebrow their way and asked over the din, “drag performance?”

The Tiefling gave him a look, grin dipping a little as they asked, “you do know you’re in a gay bar, right love?”

Fjord felt like a damn fool.

“I do now.”

The Tiefling laughed, loud and amused, as Fjord caught Beau’s shit-eating grin from down the bar. He spared her enough attention to flip her off before focusing back on the Tiefling who was speaking again.

“I’m Mollymauk, by the way. Mollymauk Tealeaf, but everyone here just calls me Molly. If you don’t mind my asking, how’d you end up in a gay bar without knowing it?”

Fjord reached out and took the hand extended his way, giving it a firm shake before saying, “I’m Fjord. And your bartender Beau over there is my gym buddy. I dropped by to give her something and she somehow roped me into sticking around a while without giving me any details.”

“Yeah, that sounds like her.” Molly’s grin was sharp and dangerous, but their words were laced with the begrudging fondness one often could associate with having a sibling. “She’s good at picking reliable company, but she’s also a little shit.”

“You know her well, then?”

“More than I care to admit most days,” Molly chuckled. “I’m her boss, as well as begrudging friend.”

Fjord had to stop himself from saying ‘you’re the Peacock?’ out loud. Instead he cleared his throat in an attempt to not laugh and averted his gaze.

“If you aren’t comfortable with this kind of atmosphere, you can always come back during our lunch hours,” Molly offered, watching Fjord carefully. They had likely mistaken his surprise with discomfort. “Much more of a chill vibe then, when we aren’t packed in with a bunch of drunks.”

Not bothering to correct Molly, he said, “Is that an invitation or a suggestion?”

“Maybe it’s both,” Molly said, wiggling their brows with a suggestive grin. Fjord felt a little flushed and quietly blamed it on the fact that he was halfway through his drink.

“But in all seriousness, Fjord,” Molly continued, leaning in a little to be heard over the pounding music as a drag queen strut through the crowd. “You’re welcome back anytime. Not every queer individual is a fan of loud music and being absolutely blasted. This is a judgment free zone, safe space only.”

Not bothering to correct Molly and tell them he wasn’t actually queer, Fjord simply smiled at the Tiefling gratefully. Taking another swig of his drink, Fjord bid Molly farewell and waved down the bar to Beau as he slipped out. Pausing just outside the door, closing it carefully behind him, Fjord took a steadying breath of cool night air. The music was duller from outside, mingling a lot more peacefully with the sounds of Queens at night.

He and Yasha exchanged a quiet look, something subtly knowing in her stoic eyes, before Fjord was walking off into the night.

Caleb looked down at the scribbled note that Veth had shoved at him right before his lunch break had ended earlier that day. Her handwriting scrawled and slanted on the crinkled paper, but the address matched the one on the door and the name of the bar and restaurant hanging above it. Tucking the scrap of paper away into one of his many coat pockets, Caleb hefted his bag a little higher on his shoulder and pushed into the warm interior of The Moon and Mirror.

It was cozy, a little on the dim side, and the décor was intricate in its simplicity. A tapestry hung on one wall between two tall windows, a vibrant red backdrop to multicolored symbols and patterns woven into the fabric. Each table had similar red fabric draped across the tops, lacking patterns but vibrant nonetheless. Every tabletop sported its own antique looking lamp that shed light in a homey beacon of warmth. There was one enormous glass window at the front—heavy, rich drapes held back on either side, velvet and violet in their bundles—that let the late Friday afternoon light spill across the worn wooden floor.

Behind the bar, a lavender skinned Tiefling with solid red eyes and wavy hair glanced up at Caleb’s entrance, an eyebrow lifting appraisingly. Intricate, colorful tattoos curled up one side of their neck and continued out from under their sleeve on one side, curving a serpentine trail down to their hand. They seemed to be in the middle of wiping down the surface, cleaning away the evidence of whatever had happened last night to leave such a sticky residue near plastered to the polished wood.

“Can I help you?” the Tiefling asked, voice laced with a light accent and sweet, deceivingly friendly.

“I am uh…here to see Veth?” Caleb was not nervous, but his statement came out like a question. The wound tension he hadn’t recognized in his shoulders released only when a look of recognition flashed across the Tiefling’s features. They turned as if to call back into the kitchen, silver bobbles clinking against pierced horns, before a quiet clatter was followed by hurried footsteps. From around the far end of the bar, a tiny figure slid to a stop, bright eyes latching onto Caleb.

“You made it!” Veth, his rather chaotic but loveable Halfling friend, came trotting over eagerly as Caleb knelt to greet her. Her calloused, sturdy hands cupped his sallow cheeks as Veth leaned up on tiptoes to plant a motherly kiss to Caleb’s forehead. Button bracelets clattered with familiar charm around her wrists as she pat Caleb’s shoulders, taking stock of him and beaming all the while.

“Grab a seat,” Veth instructed, voice giddy. “The chef’s just finishing up some lunch for us, my treat.”

Nodding silently, he watched her scurry back off into the kitchen before standing and glancing once again at the Tiefling at the bar. They were watching with no small degree of curiosity and fondness. Caleb felt mildly warm under the scrutiny and deflected by gesturing to the numerous tables around him.

“Are any of these taken, or may I help myself?”

The Tiefling gave a wide gesture, a flourish to the motion and something a little less deceivingly friendly in the curve of their grin.

“Be my guest, friend.”

Giving the bartender a quiet nod of acknowledgment, Caleb slung the strap of his bag over the back of a chair and tucked himself into the worn seat of the old wooden chair. His gaze roamed around, taking in the eclectic gathering of worn, mismatched chairs and wayward tables. Each piece seemed to have made its way here for the sole purpose of filling this restaurant. It was definitely one of the more interesting places Caleb had found himself in, and that was saying a lot for a person who had been living in New York City for near two years.

A glass of water slid on the table in front of Caleb as a body sunk gracefully into the seat across from him.

“How do you know Veth, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Caleb looked up from the glass of water and met the solid red gaze of the Tiefling bartender. He raised an eyebrow and took a moment to remain silent as he took in whatever this situation was.

“I work with her husband,” Caleb offered, somewhat vaguely.

“Ah,” the Tiefling snapped their fingers, grinning bright and easy. “You must be Caleb. Veth speaks highly of you. She says you’re very intelligent and working on a degree, yes?”

“You know a lot about me, but I know nothing about you,” Caleb shot back smoothly, keeping his hands tucked in his lap. He didn’t like being known without knowing in return. And while it charmed him to know that Veth seemed to brag about him, it was disconcerting to be staring down a stranger and not even have a name to the face.

“Yes, of course,” the Tiefling all but crooned, hand extending smoothly. “My name’s Mollymauk Tealeaf—Molly for short. I’m Mrs. Veth’s new employer.”

Caleb reached out after a brief hesitation, taking Molly’s hand to shake and finding himself concealing his surprise at how cool the Tiefling’s hand was in his own. Caleb had always heard and read that Tieflings ran noticeably warm, but Molly’s hand was rather chilled. He didn’t comment on it, choosing instead to just draw his hand back after the handshake had lasted an appropriate time.

“She’s very talented at bartending, I’m very lucky to have crossed paths with her. We’ve been scrambling a bit recently to fill the position.”

“Ja, she is very good. She’s a quick learner, too.”

“So I’ve noticed,” Molly beamed, polished fingernails tapping a random pattern against a sliver of exposed tabletop not covered by the cloth. Their solid eyes seemed to take Caleb in. Aware and uncomfortable, the human focused his attention on picking at an errant spot of ink staining the pad of his finger. He could be good with conversation when prepared, but he couldn’t be farther from ready for whatever this was. It felt like an interrogation, but read like an awkward attempt at friendly conversation.

“She’s been struggling a little with getting a job,” Caleb said before he could stop himself, overwhelmed by the awkward pressure. He always slipped up a little when he was nervous.

“Yes, well, most places aren’t too keen on hiring people with a record,” Molly said casually, their friendly expression never faltering.

“You are not most places?” Caleb asked, somewhat derisively as he glanced around the interior.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Molly’s grin was a little less friendly again, hands spreading wide as though amicable. “We’re a fine establishment, decent benefits, ordinary people making a mostly honest living. Just like anyone else in this city.”

Caleb’s somewhat suspicious countenance didn’t change and Molly laid their hands flat against the table and studied the human once more. When they spoke again, their tone was no longer that service type cheerful, instead low and intrigued.

“I thought perhaps with the way Veth spoke of you, she was the protective one in your relationship. It seems I’ve found myself mistaken.” Before Caleb could think to ask what they meant by that, Molly was continuing on. “I understand wanting to protect your own, more than you could fathom I reckon, but believe me when I say your friend will be looked after here. Our employees are family, and everyone in this family is a just a little of the right side of dangerous. She’ll fit in just fine.”

It was a few tense seconds later, Caleb scrutinizing every infinitesimal shift in Molly’s face for signs of deception, that Veth came trotting back out from behind the bar. She carried a steaming plate in each hand and placed them carefully on the table before taking a moment to pat Caleb on his knee as she smiled up at him.

Molly seemed to take that as their cue to leave, pushing to their feet and vacating the seat for Veth. Traipsing back behind the bar with a cheerful wave to Veth’s call of thanks, Molly went back to working at the stains on the bar with Caleb inspecting them.

“Caleb?” Veth’s shrill voice pulled the human back to his senses, blinking at the Halfling across from him. “Are you alright?”

“Ja,” Caleb was quick to reassure her, looking down at his food and feeling his stomach rumble. Right…lunch had been hours ago, and the sun was arching to the horizon now. He always was rather shit at keeping to a fixed schedule outside of work.

“How was your afternoon?” Veth asked after a pause in which she inspected him the way a mother would her child when she didn’t quite believe them. “Did you find that book on decoding ancient languages you were searching for?”

“Ah, not quite,” Caleb said, picking up his fork to appease his companion’s motherly stare. “Apparently another student checked it out a week ago. I am willing to wait, just grateful the library has a copy.”

It didn’t take long from there for the two to dissolve into idle chatter between bites of their food. Caleb had to admit to himself that it was rather tasty—warm and seasoned well. He wasn’t much of a cook himself, but he knew a tasty meal when he had one. Veth eagerly divulged details of her new gig within the bar when Caleb finally diverted the conversation away from the events of his day.

“I get to wear a mask!” Caleb blinked at Veth’s excited proclamation, wondering if perhaps he had misheard her. “To hide my identity!”

“Why…would you need to do that?” Caleb asked, glancing with now nervous fervor around the bar. Patrons looking for dinner now occupied a few of the tables, and Caleb wondered if he had missed something. This place didn’t seem intensely shady, but now he worried.

“It’s not like that,” Veth correctly assumed and waved away Caleb’s concerns. “I told Molly that I was worried about being recognized, is all. I’m fine being seen during the day when it’s just a restaurant, but I don’t want people seeing me at night and getting the wrong idea. They might use it against Yeza or Luc, and I don’t want that. Molly was more than understanding and we decided a mask and fake name might work. It’s like I’m a spy!”

Caleb studied her face quietly, eventually sighing and giving his friend a tiny smile. With a quiet consolation of, “as long as you are safe and happy here, I’m happy for you.”

Beaming across the table at him, Veth reached over to pat her tiny hand against his before going back to her food. Caleb took another moment to scan around the interior, taking it all in, committing it all to memory, before resuming his own meal. They kept on with shiftless snippets of conversation until their plates were empty and Molly came to collect Veth for continued training.

As Veth scooped up their plates from the table and left Caleb with a parting kiss on the cheek, Molly leaned their hands against the back of Veth’s vacated seat. Those solid red eyes bore into Caleb again and the human steeled his will against the urge to look away. Whatever Molly was searching for, they seemed appeased by what they found, a broad grin stretching across their lips.

“Well, lovely to meet you, Mr. Caleb,” Molly’s light accent swirled like honeyed whiskey over Caleb. They pushed off the back of the chair and waved a casual hand in a wide gesture around the interior of the bar. Turning their back to walk towards the kitchen after Veth, they called over their shoulder, “stick around a while, if you’d like. We’re open a while longer.”

Caleb had to admit, he wasn’t sure where that invitation had come from, but he had nothing better to do. He could go back to his apartment and read through the books tucked into his bag, but he and his roommate both kept odd hours, and Caleb didn’t quite feel like being entirely alone just yet. The restaurant was fairly empty, and quiet enough for him to concentrate, so he figured there was no harm in waiting around under the guise of wanting to leave with Veth.

With that decided, Caleb settled into his seat and pulled a book at random free from his bag. Nose tucked firmly between the pages, he barely acknowledged the passage of time or events happening around him as he took every word in. It was a great ability for his habits of study, but detrimental at times when he found himself in public places.

He was only reminded of the latter effect when he looked up what must have been a couple hours later. He found himself surrounded by loud music, varying stages of drunk individuals, and—apparently—in the middle of a drag performance.

#cr #critical role #caleb widogast #beauregard lionett #fjord #yasha #yasha nydoorin #veth brenatto #nott the brave #jester lavorre #caduceus clay #mollymauk #mollymauk tealeaf #writing #mine #my writing #beauyasha #teahaw #widomauk

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