Chapter Text
Sunday, February 14th, 2021
Balloch, West Dunbartonshire, Scotland
“Twilight. Really, Rayla? Twilight?”
“Yes!” Rayla crossed her arms, glaring, looking cuter than anyone should be allowed to, all pouty and grumpy-face, lit up by the blue light of the least romantic male lead in the history of ever. “You wanted a movie that wasn’t romantic! That’s it! It’s the least romantic movie I know!”
Well. That was true.
“And there’s a drinking game that goes with it!” Rayla continued, presenting a bottle of… something… with a flourish. “Every time Edward does something objectively creepy, you drink!”
Well, he had said he wanted to get drunk and forget that he was a chronically single art school drop out with no prospects, romantic or otherwise.
He hadn’t said that watching a movie, even if it was Twilight, with Rayla in their cottage was… pretty much his ideal way of spending any evening, including Valentine’s Day.
“Not whisky?” he asked. Rayla usually took every opportunity to give him shit about his baby-palate when it came to the Scottish way of hard liquor. He had been here for years and somehow his tastebuds had yet to acquire the taste for liquid campfire. He looked dubiously at the lime green and fuchsia bottle. “Pomegranate… licorice… liqueur.” Yeaaah, that sounded like another one of those acquired tastes he was unlikely to acquire.
“Yeah, some Scandinavian exchange students left it. And you don’t do shots of whisky, you heathen. You sip it, so you can pass out in the gutter secure in your own civility and grace.”
“No last-minute plans upgrade?” he asked. Unlike him, Rayla’s jobs brought her into frequent contact with people under 75. And she was amazingly beautiful and funny… surely someone had asked her.
“Yeeah, because my dream Valentine’s Day is spent having to entertain a drunk, hopefully-18-year-old in a stolen balmoral bonnet and ‘Thug Life’ t-shirt while my uterus tearing itself apart. Behold, Callum, the current state of my body and dating life.”
Rayla turned to the snack selection, surveying the impressive array she had brought home, seeming to settle on nachos.
“No… last-minute plans upgrade for you either?” Rayla asked, dumping an entire bag of cheese on the nachos with as much grace as anyone had ever performed such an action.
Callum snorted. “The last person who flirted with me was 84 years old, and I’m pretty sure it was at least half motivated by the prospect of extra gravy. You signed up for a sure thing, when you offered to spend Valentine’s Day getting drunk and watching… Twillight, apparently… with me.”
“Sure thing, eh?” She waggled her eyebrows exaggeratedly.
“I mean, unless Agnes stops by and wants gravy-”
It was not going well. Or… it was. Depended on your success criteria.
It was 11pm, and so far they had failed at both the ‘getting drunk’ part and the ‘watching Twilight’ part of their ‘4Eva-Alone-No Romance-Allowed-Valentine’s-Shindig’, which was how Rayla had written it on their chalkboard schedule right under a memo to buy toilet paper.
Twilight was… what? 10 minutes in? They got to the first time Edward made a smoldering gaze type thing, and Rayla had insisted that that alone counted as creepy, so they had done their first, and emphatically last shot of the pomegranate-licorice monstrosity that Rayla had had such faith in she had procured no other alcohol.
So the getting-drunk had stalled, and they had never gotten around to restarting the movie either, because watching Twilight sober might just actually be… too sad a way to spend Valentine’s Day, so now it was just perma-paused on a close-up of vampire smoldering.
Pfft.
Talking to Rayla beat pretty much any movie, anyway.
Even if it was a pretty depressing conversation, because they had somehow ended up on the topic of the future and things, and she was only a few months away from being done with her thesis and getting a responsible-adult job and he was… not.
“I thought you liked your job?” Rayla asked, a bit baffled. The unspoken bit was clear to him… he had come here in the first place to attend Glasgow School of Arts, but why had he not gone back to Canada after he dropped out, if he didn’t even like his job here? Back to his family and his old friends and… his old life, where he hadn’t been all that happy, or ever really felt like he belonged.
Callum shrugged. His job was… he couldn’t really complain, he got off at 1.30pm every day, and it was not strenuous or stressful, and considering his complete lack of marketable skills, it even paid decently. “No one grows up wanting to deliver food to the elderly, Rayla. That’s literally no-one’s fantasy.”
“What did you want to be when you were little?” Rayla asked, leaning her chin on her hands. Her big, grey eyes were luminous in the creeper-face light.
“A wizard,” he snickered. “So not really helpful, that.”
“I wanted to be an assassin.” What, really? Rayla was so sweet. Of course she could probably kill a man with her pinky, but she wouldn’t. “What do you want now, Callum?” She wasn’t judging. Pretty much the first time someone had asked him that question without some kind of… expectation.
“I don’t think I want to be an artist. I want to… make art, sure. I want to draw and fill my garden with sculptures and shape my kids’ rice balls into funny shapes and-” He breathed deeply. This was such a terrible thing to say to the girl of your dreams, just put it out there how boring and unambitious you were. But… she was the girl of his dreams in the first place because of how unfailingly kind she was, under the snark and the questionable taste in alcohol. “And I didn’t… I wasn’t happy, Rayla. In art school. I thought I would be, I worked really hard to get in and then when I got there… I wasn’t cut out for it at all.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve seen your drawings, they’re amazing-”
“Yeah, my drawings are fine. Good enough for first and second year of art school, at least. It was… everything else. The weird competitive vibe. The having to crack some code to figure out what was meaningful and worthwhile and what was pointless grasping at symbolism-straws. And the life that would come after. Artists don’t often get regular jobs. I would have to worry all the time about getting enough work and have to always try to figure out how to make the kinds of things people want and market it the right way and sell it… and myself…” He sank forward, his head in his hands. “I’m not cut out for that.”
“No,” Rayla said thoughtfully. “That doesn’t really sound like you.”
“Aren’t you supposed to cheer me up and assure me I can do it?” he smirked half-heartedly.
“You have met me?” Yeah, he had. And Rayla didn’t wrap things up all pretty to make him feel better. She made him feel better because he never doubted her compliments or her friendship.
And because he loved her, but that was a whole nother thing.
It had been quiet for a while, in the now-familiar blue light of vampire-boy-face.
“Callum?” Rayla’s voice was soft now. “Do you need to be cut out for that stuff?”
“To make a living as an artist… yeah. A little bit.”
“No. Do you need it to be happy?”
Well.
No.
He had been as happy as he had ever been the past few years. He hadn’t worried about anything much. He had been as good at his job as it was possible to be and his boss was fond of him and the local pensioners were always happy to see him… very happy, in a few cases. And he came home every day just early afternoon and wasn’t too tired to get some drawing or sculpting in before dinner, and he had just made what he felt like because he wasn’t trying to accomplish anything.
And he’d come home every day to cottage he shared with the girl he was madly in love with, and… well, obviously she didn’t like him like that but she liked him and he got to spend time with her and know her, and spend Valentine’s Day with her not-getting-drunk and not-watching-Twilight.
“I just thought… I would know what I wanted by now,” he said. “You knew what you wanted since you were 7 years old.”
“I’m not all that… sure. And I’m… afraid. Of the future.” It was so quiet he could barely hear her. So quiet she could easily deny having said it at all.
“You might feel better about things in a few days,” Callum said diplomatically, rubbing between her shoulder blades in comfort. She had apologized (needlessly) before, for her period occasionally coming with a side of existential angst.
She put her head down in his lap.
“Yeah, I know… that time of the month. Probably just that good ol’ side dish of existential angst that comes with that.”
She curled around herself.
She could easily claim it was just cramps.
He wound his fingers through her hair until she unwound, her shoulders relaxing under his hands.
He laid back against the couch, but kept his hand in her soft hair.
He knew one thing he wanted, at least. He couldn’t quite say that though. She might not be all the way asleep.
“I know I want love,” he said, into the quiet darkness. “A family. Kids, maybe… probably. But mostly love. People around me I care about, who care about me.”
“Me too,” Rayla muttered.
So quietly she could easily deny it.
But she didn’t.