AN: Beta-read by
Carbohydratos,
Did I?,
Gaia,
Linedoffice,
Zephyrosis, and
Mizu.
Chapter 113: Steady As He Goes
I kept Megan in the loop, as promised. She gave me the 'You're doing too much' gratitude thing, which I'd expected, but relented when I reassured her—several times—that I had a perfectly functional understanding of boundaries and wouldn't offer more than I was comfortable providing.
I also told her I'd look into magical solutions for Eric's transition and confirmed that Megan hadn't brought him in on the secret. For the latter, she hadn't; for the former, it turned out the answer was as simple as 'send Homura to Moperville to learn the desired spell'. Having a seer around sure was convenient.
Homura was 'convenient' at a lot of things. She even managed to hire a new employee for the store—a woman by the name of Joanna—only a day after she'd suggested it, so I was home when Eric got back from his first school day of the new year.
"How was school, Eric?" I asked when he set his bag down on the kitchen table.
"It sucked, as usual." He dropped into a chair with a thump and propped his head up on one arm, radiating weariness for all he was worth. "A bunch of people made fun of my haircut. Asking if I got gum stuck in it like a toddler, or if the hairdresser had mistaken me for a boy when I got it cut. Petty shit like that."
"Language, Eric."
"It
is, though!"
"Yeah," I admitted, "it is. I still feel obligated to discourage you from
saying so in those words."
He huffed with as much indignation as he could muster, but couldn't quite keep his good humor off his face.
"How do
you feel about your hair?" I asked.
Eric tapped the fingers of his free hand against the table for a moment as he thought.
"It dries a lot faster," he decided.
"That's all?"
"It makes it easier to see all the
other ways I look like a girl," Eric whined, tapping his chest for emphasis.
"Oh. I'm sorry, Eric."
He harrumphed again. "Sucks that I can't just go to school as a guy."
"Do you
want to?"
"If I didn't have to deal with people? Absolutely! But I do, so no." Which was more or less the sentiment I'd expected.
I spent a moment wondering if this counted as 'bringing up transition' enough to segue into 'magical options'.
"Have you thought about transition at all?" I ventured.
Eric groaned. "Can we not talk about this right now?"
"Absolutely! Discussion tabled."
He grunted, unzipped his bag, and started pulling books out.
"How're your friends?" I asked.
"What friends?"
"Surely you have
some friends."
"I 'know' a bunch of people," Eric said, "but they're not really friends, just girls I hang out with so I'm not picked on for being alone."
"Those sound like friends."
"Hard to call them my friends when they'd drop me like garbage if they knew who I really was. All my
real friends are online."
That was unfortunate but not unreasonable.
"Was there any silver lining to going back to school?" I asked. "Or was it misery all the way through?"
He opened his mouth to say so, reconsidered, then said, "Well, I got to play field hockey during PE."
"You like field hockey?"
"I always wanted to play sports, but Dad wouldn't let me—doctor's notes and everything. Said sports like that weren't 'ladylike' and if I hurt my face I'd ruin my 'natural beauty'."
Ire +1. Every time I learned something new about Elwick senior, I liked him even less.
"Well, I'm happy you're having fun," I said. "Do make sure you protect your head, though. Concussions are no joke."
"We're playing field hockey, not rugby."
"Are you wearing pads?"
Eric rolled his eyes. "
Fiiine, I'll be careful. Safety first. Promise."
I grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. "That's what I want to hear. Have as much fun at school as you can, Eric."
"Thanks." He returned my grin, then cracked open a textbook—history, judging from the glimpse I got over his shoulder.
"Homework already, huh?"
"Just reading today, but yeah. Right back to it."
"Well, let me know if you need help or anything."
Eric hummed. "Are you good at physics?"
As long as I can keep Star Trek physics and 'real' physics straight. "I might need a refresher from the textbook," I admitted, "but I can probably help."
"Cool."
Eric finished his first assigned reading in about ten minutes, then closed the textbook with another harrumph.
"I'm not really feeling 'Eric'," he said. "I like it a lot more than 'Rebecca', but… I dunno. It worked for my character, but I don't feel like it's
me."
"Do you have something else you'd like me to call you instead?" I asked. "You can feel free to try as many names as you want."
"Really?"
"Really. I know it can feel like an imposition, but believe me, it's not. Try however many you need to find the right one."
He gave me a searching look, doing his best to gauge my sincerity.
"I mean it," I insisted. "I know what it's like to have to choose a new name, and I'm happy to help you test things out—if you're willing to put up with the occasional error, I mean."
That successfully got me past the 'sincerity' check.
"Well," he said, "I was thinking something totally different. Would you mind calling me 'Dennis', instead?"
"Sure thing, Dennis. Would you like me to tell Akemi?"
Dennis gave me a grateful smile. "If you wouldn't mind."
———X==X==X———
The 'detection arrays' I'd built years earlier had proven mostly academic. The immortal-detecting strings had given me a heads-up that Zero was coming around until I'd exempted her from them, just like I'd done for the extradimensional detector when Zeke had visited for a week, but other than that, they'd remained silent.
That week, they made a sound I'd never heard before.
I hadn't chosen the sounds for the strings; whatever they'd ended up with was either some esoteric consequence of the varying detection enchantments or something magic had chosen on its own. The blue magic-detecting strings sounded like a piano's middle C, the red enchanted-object strings sounded like a guitar's E, the yellow extradimensional strings hummed a cello's G, the green Uryuom-magic strings played a synthesizer chord, and the gray immortal-detecting strings Zero had kept setting off rang like a tuning fork. So when the wide-range array started making sounds like someone was failing to play tabs on a badly-tuned bass, I shouldn't have been terribly surprised to see the purple string glowing.
I
was terribly surprised because that was the 'cursed objects' string, which I had never tested and had hoped never would be.
The town-wide string started sounding first, of course. The medium-range array followed shortly, as expected. I started getting nervous when the smallest array—approximate distance, half a city block—added to the noise, followed by a car with dark-tinted windows pulling up to the curb outside. A man in an outfit that screamed 'government spook' got out of the passenger seat and headed into the shop, which made me
very nervous. Home Sweet Home was empty—the time of day combined with cold weather and holiday fatigue putting our business at an unusual low—so there wasn't anyone else he could be here to talk to.
Indeed, Government Guy headed right up to the counter and flashed his badge. "James Halley, FBI." He pocketed the badge, removed his sunglasses, and grinned at me. "Been a while, huh?"
"Have we met?" I asked.
Elsewhere in the shop, the alarms began to fall silent; I glanced out the window and saw the car had left.
Agent Halley frowned. "Three years ago, over board games? I figured you'd remember that, considering what a scene I made."
"
Jim?" I looked him up and down again, comparing the guy in front of me to the gaunt, sketchy dude I'd caught staring at a knife rack with intent. "You look totally different." If it was just a matter of a haircut and shave, I
might have recognized him, but he'd regained a healthy amount of fat and put on twenty pounds of muscle to boot.
He raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
"Yeah. You scared the crap out of me coming in here like I was about to be arrested."
Jim winced. "Shit. Sorry. I didn't think you'd be… is there a reason you would be 'about to be arrested'?"
"It's a long story." The last curse alarm finally stopped ringing, which reminded me that they'd been ringing at all. "Uh, not that it's not cool to see you, but are you aware that your car is apparently
cursed as hell?"
"Huh? Oh, it's not the car; we're in town to take possession of some cursed items someone found in their inheritance. Since I was in the area anyway, I wanted to stop and thank you and Akemi for sorting me out. Is she around?"
"Yeah, she should be in the back—"
"I'm here," Akemi said, emerging from the door at the far side of the shop from the counter. "I heard the curse detectors start going off."
"Curse detectors?" Jim asked. "There's a proper curse detecting spell?"
"It's not a single spell," I explained. "It's an enchantment that detects a large number of things associated with curses—"
"Ah, yeah, wide-spectrum scanning. That's more or less how the PD trained me to do it."
My pride in my 'detector' dropped a few notches. "I'm not the first to think of that, huh?"
"No. In fact, I spent most of yesterday doing exactly that." He cleared his throat, then said, "Thank you very much, both of you."
Akemi took the lead on accepting his thanks. "Happy to help… Jim, right?" she asked. "You look healthy. What's the suit for?"
"He's a G-man now," I said. "How'd that happen, anyway?"
"Long story," Jim echoed, glancing at his watch. "I'd be happy to tell you another time? I'm gonna be in town for a couple days, but I've only got five minutes or so before I need to start walking."
I smiled. "That'd be great. I get off shift at two, if you're free this afternoon…"
———X==X==X———
Jim was not free that afternoon, so we had to wait until the weekend. Dennis assured me he wasn't about to burn down the apartment in our absence, and Homura and I headed down to the coffee shop not far from our own store.
Roaster's stood out amidst the generally old-fashion Main-Street-Strawfield strip as a distinctly modern glass-and-steel building. The interior tried to walk back that impression, decorated as it was with rustic wooden tables and chairs, a hardwood floor, and diffuse lighting; the result didn't 'clash', per se, but neither was it consistent. Still, I'd heard good things about the coffee, so hopefully Jim wouldn't have any complaints.
Speaking of whom, Jim—still dressed like the platonic ideal of a government agent—had picked a table right up against one of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, fair enough away from the other customers to offer a decent amount of privacy. We swung by the counter to order tea, then joined him, sitting equidistant around the circular table and doing our best to ignore the chill radiating off the glass.
"So what are you doing here, anyway?" I asked him. "I mean, why stick around after you sent the stuff off to wherever it's going?"
"Drudge work," Jim replied with good humor. "Sniffing around, making sure we didn't miss anything. Interviewing people who might've been exposed, stuff like that. I'm still the new guy, and this is supposed to be good practice. Besides, I may be new to all this, but Ed—my boss—he says my eyes are as good as anyone he's ever met. Uh, metaphorically."
"Your spells focus on detecting things," Homura guessed.
"Yeah. I'm pretty good at finding stuff, if I do say so myself."
I took a sip of my tea—nowhere near as good as the stuff Home Sweet Home served; taken alongside Roaster's typical-for-a-coffee-shop barely-average-pastries-languishing-in-a-small-case offerings, it was no wonder we drew a larger crowd—then returned to my line of questioning with, "How long are you going to be in town?"
"Another agent is going to pick me up tomorrow afternoon," Jim replied. "Well, me and any other magical contraband I turn up, but I've only got two more people to check out, and they're the least likely to actually have anything. If Ed didn't have someone like me to send after them, I'm not sure he'd bother; their connection to the site is so tenuous it probably isn't worth more experienced agents' time."
"So they're wasting yours?" Homura asked.
He shrugged. "I wouldn't call it a waste. It's low priority work, but it's not worthless."
"How
did you end up with the FBI?" I asked. "That's a pretty big career change, isn't it?"
Jim grinned as he sipped from his paper cup. "Yeah. Not what I thought I'd be doing with my life back when I was in college, but sometimes the job finds you. Even if I was hiding under the bed at the time," he added with a nod towards Homura.
"I appreciate your trust," she deadpanned.
"Yeah, yeah. Look, all I had to go on at that point was a run in with a creepy spider thing and too many college sessions of World of Darkness. I wasn't going to believe everything was fine and dandy because someone hanging out with a vampire told me so."
"What about the FBI office?" I asked. "She gave you their number, right?"
"She gave me a number she
told me was an FBI office."
"You must've called them eventually."
"I called the main office number listed on their website," Jim countered. "I half-expected the receptionist to laugh me off the line when I asked for the 'paranormal division', but they routed me right through. I didn't even know there
was a paranormal division."
"It's not listed anywhere," Homura said, "but it's official and on the books."
"Clearly. What's your connection to them, anyway?"
"Have you met an Agent Vahn?" I asked.
"We're coworkers, so, yes. Friend of yours?"
"Family, actually. Our cousin."
"Oh. Huh." Jim studied my face for a moment. "I can… sort of see the resemblance?"
"Liar."
"Okay, yeah, you don't look much alike at all." He paused to frown at his half-finished coffee. "You heard about her kid disappearing, I bet."
"Yeah."
"Scary shit." He set the coffee cup down and leaned back with a sigh. "Creepy to think people can just disappear like that. I mean, people disappear 'like that' every day, often for perfectly mundane reasons, but I'd never had to think about it before."
"The FBI does missing persons too, doesn't it?" I asked.
"Yeah. Err, not our department unless we suspect paranormal weirdness, but the FBI in general, yeah. Why?"
"'Cause that's why I was alarmed when you walked into the shop. No, there aren't any bodies under the floorboards," I added when Jim made a face. "I'm sheltering a runaway, is all."
"A kid?"
"Yeah. Abusive parents."
"They know he is staying with us and thus far have been content to wait for him to return on his own," Homura clarified.
"Yeah, but when I saw him"—I nodded at Jim—"walk in, I was worried they'd gotten fed up and gone straight to reporting a kidnapping out of spite."
For his part, Jim looked positively nonplussed. "I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to say about that," he said, "so I'm just going to say I'm glad it's not my problem and leave it at that."
"Fair enough. Uh, back to your story: you called the FBI and…?"
"And they asked me to come in right away for an interview," Jim continued, picking up the narrative again. "Spooked me pretty bad, to be honest. Felt way too easy, like I was walking into a trap or something. I went anyway; figured if I was gonna get locked up, I'd rather get locked up by people who know what's going on than people who think I'm crazy. Assuming they didn't just shoot me or something, but I was already involved, so how much worse could it get?"
I chuckled. "What were you expecting, Delta Green?"
"Maybe a little, yeah. Turned out to be a surprisingly friendly meeting."
"How did you go from that to working for the PD yourself?" Homura asked.
Jim shrugged and took another sip of coffee. "It was a gradual thing. One of the guys I work with now came over to check on me a few months later, follow up, whatever. Brought the case file for the abomination I'd run into, let me look through it—I knew half of it already, so it wasn't a huge secret at that point. Then we got to talking, and after a while I went ahead and asked, hey, if I can find these things, can I help protect people? Two years of training later, I got my badge."
"How does that work, exactly?" I asked. "I was under the impression abominations were hard to detect, or they'd have been hunted down already."
"You'd be right; it's not as simple as just sweeping a town for 'em. What my original spell did, in layman's terms, is scan for 'magical biology'—it looks for living things that have magic as part of their, uh, 'natural processes' for lack of a better word. The important thing is that enchantments and magical items didn't trigger it, which makes it more useful than something that'd go off for just about anything."
"You keep using the past tense," Homura noted.
Jim tutted. "Yeah, the weird magic shake-up made things more complicated. The spell can still do that, but it can also detect a whole bunch of other things, too. Barely seems like the same spell, which is why I keep saying 'did'."
"Ah," I said.
"But, hey, flexibility is great. Now I
can detect enchantments and magical items if I need to, which is exactly what I'm here to do. But I don't get to just cast spells willy-nilly; sweeping with those sorts of spells is considered a 'search', so I'd need a warrant if I wanted to cast a net wide enough to cover more than some cooperative citizen's attic."
"And that stops you? I mean, no offense, but"—I waved my hand at his 'government agent' getup—"cop."
Jim fixed me with a frown. "'No offense' isn't a magic shield against offending people," he noted. "Err… I could have phrased that better. Point is, actually, yes, I am a little offended."
"Oh." Well, now I felt like a heel; the Moperville FBI's Paranormal Division probably didn't deserve the brunt of my anti-establishment sentiments no matter how well-founded they may be in the general case. I said, "Sorry," and meant it.
Jim shrugged the apology (and original offense) away before picking up where he'd left off. "Anyway, to answer your question, if we
know there's something spooky in the area and can make a half-assed case for 'hot pursuit', they'll let me 'off leash' to track them, but otherwise it's just not worth opening ourselves to liability. Say, speaking of which,"—he leaned forward and gave me a sly smile—"I never did find out
why you set off my detection spell."
"She's a kitsune," Homura told him before I could get a word in.
"What? No I'm not." I shot her a glare before turning back to Jim. "Don't listen to her. She's having you on."
"She's a kitsune," Homura repeated, sipping her tea smugly.
Jim chuckled. "This is some sort of taxonomic argument, isn't it? Like, 'If a werewolf's transformation is a voluntary ability rather than a curse, are they still a werewolf?'"
I gave in. "I have the
physical characteristics of a kitsune," I grumbled. "I am not out to bewitch and/or devour anyone."
"Kitsune legends are a lot more varied than that," he informed me. "The ones that frame them as monsters are just a convenient jumping on point for western audiences who are already familiar with vampires and werewolves. Foxes have a definite 'trickster' motif in folklore, but some kitsune stories have them as guides or guardian spirits, or just people with strange powers."
"You fit the bill better than you think," Homura added.
"Yay." I used a facepalm to hide the act of transforming my face, then glanced up to grin across the table with amber eyes and pointed teeth.
Jim recoiled. Not a lot, but he did.
"Warn someone when you're going to do that," he scolded me. "Jump-scares are cheap shots."
"I thought I was supposed to be a trickster." I daintily picked up and sipped at my tea, my poise and posture the perfect picture of innocence. The partial transformation's changes to my sense of smell brought out some of the subtle tastes missing from the low-quality tea, but they also made it impossible to ignore that the entire cafe
reeked of coffee, especially the cup across from me.
Aw well, you win some, you lose some.
"Also," I added as I returned to 'normal', "past experience indicates that warning someone doesn't help as much as I'd hope."
Jim raised an eyebrow. "Oh? What happened?"
"I would rather not talk about it."
"Oh. My bad." He paused, then decided to dare another question. "Is it just the face?"
"The ears and tail are a bit too noticeable to show off here."
"Ah. How often do you have to deal with 'foxy lady' puns?"
"Less than you might think, but mostly because no one knows it'd be relevant."
Having reached a natural stopping point in the conversation, we paused to sip at our drinks for a few moments before starting a new topic—or returning to an old one, as the case may be.
"How have your friends and family reacted to your new career?" Homura asked.
Jim scoffed. "Oh, that's been a laugh. Most of my friends see 'Paranormal Division' and figure I've become some sort of crackpot consultant."
"Would that be a consultant
on crackpots or a consultant who
is a crackpot?" I quipped.
"Depends who you ask. The former think I'm just along to offer a folkloristic perspective on claims of paranormal activity…"
"That isn't a terrible guess why someone in graduate school for folkloristics would end up in the 'Paranormal Division' of the FBI," Homura observed.
"Yeah," Jim agreed, "which is probably why they think that. The
larger group lump me in with police psychics—you know, people who are either delusional or outright lying. My friends think well enough of me not to think I've become a con-man, but that just means they think I'm crazy instead."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I told him.
"Thanks. It's no one's fault, but it still sucks." He drained the last of his coffee and pushed the cup to the side. "At least they mean well."
"Hmm?"
"My friends. They're just trying to look out for me, which would be great if it didn't manifest as treating me like a schizophrenic. Rob's been particularly bad about it, which is… fair? I was a mess that night, obviously, so he's seen me at my worst, and then I went and dropped out of grad school and didn't come around as much… it's sketchy, I get it, but that's kinda how urban fantasy works with the masquerade and stuff, right? But there are still times I want to just say to someone, dude, I have a badge! I am
literally an FBI agent now. Give me a little credit." Jim paused to sigh out his annoyance before adding, "I probably don't need to say it, but I don't talk to a lot of the people I knew in school much anymore."
"Not even about folklore?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Folklore stopped being fun after I got 'mugged'; I only stuck with it because I didn't know what else to do with my life. Knowing there's 'truth' out there that no one will believe took all the fun out of it."
"That's too bad."
"It's not all bad. I'm doing a lot better now, even compared to my undergrad days. I cleaned myself up, got in shape, started a good career. Besides, Moperville's got a whole community of weirdos, so it's not like I don't have anyone to talk to. I'm still involved at the university, even, 'cause they have their own paranormal science department tucked away behind the furniture, figuratively speaking."
"I've heard."
"Should've figured."
"What about your family?" Homura asked.
Jim shrugged. "They're all up in Minnesota, so they only got the normal parts of the story. My parents are thrilled; they weren't really on board with the folkloristics thing and think I 'wised up' and got a 'real' job." He picked up his coffee cup, remembered it was empty, and put it back with a frown. "Hey, enough about me. What have
you been doing for the last few years?"
"Baking," she deadpanned.
———X==X==X———
Since Lizzie still covered the first couple hours of each day, I had plenty of time to help Dennis get ready for school each morning, which mostly consisted of making sure he woke up at all and making us breakfast. I didn't enjoy cooking as much as baking—and I mostly enjoyed
that because I did it with Homura—but as a chore, it was more fun than standing behind the bakery counter. I was even pretty good at it by this point, if I did say so myself.
And speaking of 'the counter', the biggest change to my
work day was that it was now shorter, so I was home when Dennis got back. He'd spend half an hour or so decompressing from the day, then start on his homework; I hovered about in case he needed help and texted people—usually Lizzie, Paul, or Zero, though Tina, Megan, Jenn, and Max were also in my contacts—when he didn't. I cooked dinner every other night, with leftovers covering the other days, and then came some family time in front of the television before it was time for bed.
I say 'Dennis' because that's what he was using at the time, but that name didn't stick either. He tried Lyle, which only lasted one day, then David (or Dave, for short). I didn't mind—something I repeated every time he decided to try a new name on for size. Half the stress I'd felt over picking a name had been the fear that if it didn't work for me, no one would appreciate me changing names
again. I couldn't speak for anyone else, but for me it wasn't a bother at all, and I encouraged him to use the opportunity to find a name that felt 'right'.
Slowly—ever so slowly—things became normal. So of course it couldn't be that easy; the Monday after school restarted, a letter arrived for Dave from the Elwicks. I strongly considered opening it the moment I saw it in among the junkmail; I had low expectations for anything they might decide to say to their evicted son and didn't want to hand him a letter full of hateful rhetoric. On the other hand, I
also wanted to respect Dave's privacy and agency.
In the end, I decided to ask permission rather than forgiveness.
"Your parents sent you a letter," I told Dave when he walked into the living area after school.
He quirked an eyebrow. "What'd it say?"
"I didn't open it yet. I will if you want me to; it might not be anything you want to read."
"Nah. If it's for me, it's for me." Dave set his bag on the table and sat down as usual, then held out his hand; I handed over the envelope and watched as he dragged a fingernail through the top fold and extracted the letter.
He frowned, then blinked in surprise, grimaced, cringed, paled, scowled, and—finally—slumped. The cavalcade of reactions made me wish I'd just opened it myself and not let him deal with whatever the fuck that was.
"It's nothing I haven't heard before," he said, reading my thoughts from my face. "More of the same shit he always says at home. Though I guess it's not 'home' anymore since he wants you to, quote, 'take all necessary steps to ensure that I am no longer his problem', end quote."
I made a sound that could best be transcribed as "???", so Dave shrugged and pushed the page across the table so I could read it for myself. It was about as bad as I expected; Mr. Elwick spent several paragraphs dwelling on how difficult Dave was making things for
them in a letter addressed, often and conspicuously, to his son's deadname. Even after several hundred words of malignant narcissism and the warning from Dave himself, the conclusion still caught me off-guard: an ultimatum for him to return home this weekend, or else we—that is, Homura and I—would be expected to, as Dave had quoted, 'take all necessary steps to ensure that you [Dave] are no longer our [the Elwicks'] problem'—which was well within the realm of what I was willing to do, but for fuck's sake, man, the reaction to your son running away to live with another family shouldn't be 'Good riddance!'
At the bottom of the page was a short message written in another hand—one matching Mrs. Elwick's signature. It said only
Please come home, sweetie. I miss my daughter. ♥
The fact that it followed everything
else about the letter might well have made it the worst part of the message.
Most of the responses I was coming up with involved some amount of swearing, so I held my tongue because I'd told Dave off for cursing as recently as the day before and wasn't going to make myself (more of) a hypocrite for the Elwicks' sake.
"Well?" Dave asked.
"Well, it's, uh… it's as bad as you made it sound, I guess."
"The letter or the parenting?"
"Well… yes."
"Pfft," he tittered. "Yeah, that's about right."
I looked back at the letter again, trying to think of something,
anything, to say that might brighten the mood.
"You ever see
Matilda?" Dave asked, apropos of nothing. It took me a second to place the name.
"The movie?"
"Yeah. You know how at the end, she gets a happily ever after with that one teacher? I used to fantasize about something like that—like, you know, running away to get adopted by people who didn't hate me. I always imagined Mom would at least
try to win me back. She was a crappy parent, but at least she went through the motions—before I decided I was a boy, anyway. But now they're daring me to try it—well, Dad is, but she signed it too."
She more than 'signed' it, I kept myself from complaining aloud. What I said was, "What do you want to do now?"
"I don't know. I don't want to talk about it."
"We don't have to talk about it now, but we
do have to talk about it."
"Yeah. I--" Dave's breath caught, and he dragged his arm across his face to wipe away his tears. "I don't know what to do."
"…can I hug you?"
"Don't you dare!"
"Okay. No hugging." I raised my hands to show him they weren't going anywhere. "Do you want company right now? Or would you rather be alone?"
"Alone."
"Sure?"
He picked up his bag and slung its strap over his shoulder. "Yeah. I'm gonna… I'll be in my room, 'kay?"
"Okay." I realized I was still holding the letter and added, "Uh, mind if I borrow this?"
Dave didn't look back. "Keep it."
I waited until I heard his door close, then headed down the hallway to Homura's office and showed her the message.
"I can't say I'm surprised," she said after reading it herself.
"Really? Even after the whole 'expecting him to come home' thing?"
"He
is expecting him to come home. That's the point of the letter."
"Then what about us making sure it's not his problem anymore?" I asked. "Is he trying to call our bluff or something?"
"It's not calling a bluff, it's emotional blackmail." Homura tapped the closing paragraph. "If you read between the lines, the message is, 'If you really love me, you'll come home; if not, it's your fault we're not a family anymore.' If anyone is bluffing, it's him."
I took the letter back and scanned it again. "Hmm. Yeah, I guess I missed that."
"Maybe you're too mentally healthy for that trick."
"Ha ha."
"I wasn't joking."
"Well, I wasn't really laughing."
It took three deep breaths for the hand holding the letter to stop shaking. I would like to say I was angry, but mostly I was just 'upset' in a way that left me feeling sick.
At least I didn't jump too badly when Homura reached out and put a hand on my shoulder.
"Hey," she said. "We'll handle this."
"How?"
"We could call
his bluff."
I cocked my head, so she released me and headed back around the desk to retrieve a manila folder. "I already have the paperwork for changing guardianship right here," she said as she laid the papers out on the desk. "Shall I fill it out?"
"Shouldn't we ask first?"
"I'm not going to
do anything with it beyond getting it ready."
"That still seems premature."
She
hmm'd. "I thought we could present him with the filled-but-unsigned paperwork to express that we were serious about it, but it might put pressure on him to accept when he otherwise wouldn't."
"How are you even supposed to broach the topic?" I whined. "'Hey, kid, sick of your parents? Give
us a try!'"
"Would you like me to do it? I may not be the most personable person around, but I'm sure I can be more tactful than
that."
I moved from my position hovering near the middle of the room to directly in front of the desk so Homura and I were looking eye to eye.
"Are you really okay with this?" I asked. "Are you really okay with taking in a kid? I appreciate that you want to support me, but this isn't just my apartment, it's
ours. I don't want you to just go along with whatever I want."
"Of course I'm okay with it. I'm not a doormat, Cass; if I had a problem with all this I'd say so." She stood up straight and folded her arms, though the smile on her face made it clear she was projecting confidence, not confrontation. "I don't use the bedroom, so that's not an issue. We have more than enough money, so that's not an issue. He's been a perfectly behaved guest for the last week, and we still have all the same 'security' as always—magic, superpowers, and so on—so there's nothing to worry about inviting a stranger into our home, if 'stranger' is even the right term for someone you've been acquainted with for years. I'm not 'going along with what you want', I'm suggesting the approach I think will work best for all of us."
Homura's smile evolved into a smirk. "Besides, you've been considering this ever since you heard about what his parents have been putting him through, haven't you?"
"…yeah."
"So have I."
"Oh."
She glanced down at the desk, then began to gather the paperwork back into a single pile. "Let me worry about this. How about you find something to take his mind off his parents?"
Like what? I almost asked.
…
"I think I have an idea."
———X==X==X———
