Chapter Text
SIMON
It feels lame to still be sad and all fucked up after life has obviously gotten better. But I guess even a shitty past won’t make being a line chef at a chain that doesn’t give a fuck about you look like a bed of roses.
I had never been good at school, or planning for my future. I mean, I could have left care at sixteen, but I just sat around at the care home till they kicked me out to a hostel when I turned eighteen - or when they guessed I did, I suppose. I’d kept my head down, never really sunk into any of the places I was shipped off to. I couldn’t try for anything more, I just couldn’t, each new day was hard enough. I could have gone to uni and lived somewhere better. It’s not a football star dad and a model mum but it could have been something. I could have been something. Not that anyone ever expected me to be, some fucking chosen one academic genius footy star or anything.
I don’t have dumb dreams like that anymore. I wish I did. Instead what I want is so startlingly little it’s humiliating. A mum, or dad, a fucking uncle, someone who’d care if I come home from work. A friend. I never was good at talking to people. A flat I’d share with them instead of with strangers. Maybe even a pet, or a job I like, if I’m feeling especially ambitious with wanting that day.
People say your twenties suck, it gets better.
And the TVs fun I suppose. And at least I have a job. And sometimes late at night I read articles by other care leavers and they say the odds are stacked against us. It makes me feel less alone but it also makes me feel like my insides are rotting. Like I’m going to be sick with all the rage and doom, all the shit that was handed us all.
PENNY
I was clicking unsubscribe on the latest email from Yale when it happened. I was up late, back at my parents house for the first time in months, sat on that same old corduroy chair of my dad’s that I shoved into my room when he and mum were making plans to throw it out to free up some space in the lounge (quickly consumed again by piles of books and notes and dissertations) back when I was fourteen. I was about to start at uni in London in a few weeks and I needed to move on from those two years in the U.S. with Micah.
It was like a bomb went off, but undeniably magical. Like someone had messed up with Up, up, and away and ripped my lungs up out of my body. Like a lanternfish brought up to sea level too rapidly and expanding, exploding with the sudden pressure change. My ears popped. My ring glowed. The world seemed to tip upside down for a moment, and then I was on the floor, the frame of the armchair snapped nastily. Upstairs I heard my dad fall over too.
BAZ
I threw up blood. In front of the guests.
It’s a lovely evening in late July, the party just winding down. Father is making small talk about magical animal husbandry and Daphne is discussing tennis with a friend from the Club. Dev and Niall have already left but I haven’t gone to bed yet, still some strange desire tethers me to this boring party, sipping another glass of champagne (okay mainly elderflower cordial) in the shadow of the marquee, silently watching, judging. Wondering where the fairytale these events used to seem to hold when I was Mordelia’s age has gone.
Then it hits me.
Well, it hits the lot of us, lights up the magic that connects us all. But please forgive me for being self centered, I am the only one who nearly outed himself as a vampire by vomiting up the squirrel blood from that morning. I can only thank Morgana that Rhys wasn’t there that evening. My overinfatuation during our first year out of Watford, desperately missing our old on-again-off-again relationship turmoil, had been embarrassing enough.
I fled the scene.
Call me overdramatic, but being drilled from a young age on vampire hunts has an effect on a ‘person’.
Father found me a few minutes later, hiding in the lounge we never use. “Your mother has distracted the guests.” He said and paused, staring at the bloodstain on my shirt as I raised my wand to it. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Here, Basil,” He moved my arms out of the way “Out, out, damned spot.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead I tried to focus on the warm feeling in my palms: in the aftermath of the shock the strange magic felt warm in me, almost like it had given me something. Something loving, warm, like a hug.
PENNY
The next day my dad was holed up in his office from dawn to dusk. The data from the tracking spells around the dead spots he studies had gone crazy. Most of the spots all across Britain expanded overnight, the two in Glasgow even connected to form a bigger hole. Then, around a week into August my dad gets word of a giant dead spot in Wales. Its borders are yawning, sucking, raw and angry. New. We pour over the maps and excel sheets together over endless cups of tea. The attic in the summer is brutally hot, and after America I miss air conditioning enough to distract me from missing my ex-boyfriend.
Nevertheless it makes me sure I made the right decision coming home.