Chapter Text
Fabian is twenty years old when his mother falls off the wagon.
At least, he’s pretty sure that’s what’s happening. He’ll get the Ball to look into it. She’s been acting shifty ever since he got home for winter break, stepping out, slipping away to her sensory deprivation egg, which he hasn’t seen her use since his freshman year of high school. It worries him.
He’s also not surprised.
Hallariel Seacaster (she hasn’t changed any of her official documents to Faeth, so he won’t be calling her that until such time as she does, thank you very much) is a creature of habit. She orders the same crab rangoons from the same takeout place every single Thursday night, and has for as long as Fabian can remember. She cleans her blades methodically with the same patience and the same oil every week. And she drinks until she can’t remember all the little life things stressing her out.
Or, she used to.
She managed to put a pause on it for five years, but Fabian was always a little on edge, always alert, ready for the day to come when he’d smell wine on his mother’s breath again, when he’d hear her words with the slightest slur, trying to hide it. So when he comes home midway through his sophomore year of college and notices Mama acting strangely, he’s not shocked.
He watches her flounce out the doorway of the house, off to “run errands,” and he pulls out his crystal to text the Ball.
He taps his feet anxiously as he paces across his foyer, needing Riz to get here now. He’s worried about his mother. He keeps expecting to feel angry, too, that she would fuck up like this, that she’d trash all her progress, but— the anger isn’t coming. Parents are people too is a lesson Fabian’s had to learn time and again, but it seems to have stuck. He himself has fucked up plenty, and he’s always been met with support and enduring love from the people who care about him.
It’s what he wants to give Mama, now. Support. Maybe he’s not angry because he knows getting angry at her won’t fix anything. He’s going to help her.
The moment he arrives, Riz clambers up into his arms, snuggling into the crook of Fabian’s neck. “I missed your smell,” he announces.
“Alright, well, soak it in, the Ball,” Fabian sighs. It’s been over a month since they last saw each other in person, and he’s been pining, too. They talked a big game after high school about how brave and secure they were, knowing they could maintain their friendship while going to separate colleges, but fuck, being away from his best friend is a bitch. Fabian drinks in his the Ball cuddles, and then he sets him back down on the floor. “I need your help getting rid of all the alcohol in the house,” he says.
Riz lets out a long sigh. “Of course,” he says. “Let’s get to work.”
There’s not much, just a few bottles of vodka in the kitchen— probably leftover from senior year of high school— and some bourbon Gilear likes. “Mordred Manor?” Riz suggests, holding up the stash. “Doesn’t have to go to waste.”
“Sure,” Fabian says. He looks and looks, but he can’t find any bottles of wine. He even traipses down to the sensory deprivation egg to see if there’s some cabernet or pinot noir hiding in there, but he finds nothing, just a board that looks a lot like one of the Ball’s clueboards, except it’s all in Elvish. Little silver ribbons crisscross over it, connecting pictures and Post-Its in a baffling array— a gift card to Lids, a Yoplait ad, season one of ABC’s Castle. Was this from when she was spying on Gilear? He puts it back and returns to the kitchen.
His little sister is up from her nap, and she’s hungry.
“I’m getting it, I’m getting it, hold your horses,” Riz is saying as she tugs on his hair.
“I don’t have any horses!” Celeste screeches from her perch on his shoulders. The Ball loves having someone smaller than he is that he can actually pick up and carry. Celeste loves bossing her big brother’s friends around.
Riz grabs a yogurt cup from the fridge and goes to deposit her at the kitchen table with her yogurt and her kiddie spoon. “Milady.”
“I’m not a lady, I’m a kid!” she corrects him.
“My apologies, my liege.”
“Nooooo.” She looks up when she realizes Fabian is there, and her exasperation with the Ball vanishes in an instant. “FABANIN!” She shoves away from the table, leaps down and comes rocketing toward him.
“Hey, starshine,” Fabian says, scooping her up and spinning her around once before setting her back down. “You got smaller.”
“I did not,” she screams. “I got bigger! See?” She grabs his hand and drags him over to the entryway to the kitchen, where three little lines denote her height over the past two years, dates and measurements recorded in pencil in Gilear’s handwriting.
(His own pencil markings, the ones Cathilda made, got painted over a long time ago.)
Fabian swallows. “I don’t know,” he says, forcing a big grin. “I still think you're shrinking. Soon I’ll be able to dunk you in a cup of milk like a cookie.”
“Noooo,” she wails. “You are.”
“I’m shrinking?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s got a point, man,” Riz says. “Every time you come back from college you look smaller. Pretty soon I’ll be able to put you in my backpack.”
“Stoppp,” he whines, making Celeste giggle. He takes her hands and dances her back toward the table so she can eat her yogurt.
For all the bitching and moaning he engaged in prior to Celeste’s birth, Fabian can’t help but adore her. She’s headstrong and relentless and goofy, all the best parts of his mother and Gilear, plus an attitude and demeanor entirely her own. He treasures her. It’s nice to be back home and getting to see her in person instead of just over a crystal.
He’s trying not to think about how important it is that he shields Celeste from whatever hell Hallariel is bringing home when the inevitable fallout from her breaking her sobriety comes crashing down.
Fabian snatches a tin of kippers from the pantry and listens to the Ball explain his disguises class, and how he’s learning some basic illusory magic to conceal his features for investigative purposes, and how his classmates all love his Fig stories.
“Literally, people will track me down at a party and ask me to tell the Leviathan dwarf story,” Riz says. “That, or Hilda Hilda.”
“Who’s Hilda Hilda?” Celeste asks.
“She’s a scary witch who eats little kids that don’t brush their teeth,” Fabian says.
Celeste squeals. Riz rolls his eyes at him.
They’re still in the kitchen when Hallariel comes home, laden with bags, a chunky pair of sunglasses hiding her eyes.
“Let me help you with those,” Fabian says, rushing to grab at the bags she’s carrying. As he does, he peers closely at her, looking for clues— a slur to her speech, a wobble to her step. She gives nothing away, which just makes him wonder how long she’s been hiding it, how much she’s managed to slip under the radar.
“No, no, darling, I’m fine,” she promises, clutching her shopping bags closer to herself. “Don’t you worry about a thing. You’re on break! Enjoy yourself!”
“Right.” Fabian steps back from her, heart in his throat, and his hands. He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to relax when his mother is slipping further away from him once again.
Except this time it’s not just him, it’s him and Celeste and, hell, and Gilear, and that’s something he can’t accept.
“Don’t look so dour, Fabian,” Mama says, planting a kiss on his forehead and bustling past him, bright and loud in her billowing kimono. She’s like a magician, sometimes— always so distractingly obvious and flashy, with the deception happening quietly where it can’t be seen. “Riz! How are you, darling?”
Riz plasters on a fake grin. “I’m great, Mrs. Seacaster,” he says. “School’s going well.”
“Oh, that’s good to hear,” she says. “You were always such a smart cookie. Alright, I’m missing my little moonbeam.”
“Right here, Mama!” Celeste chirps, running out from behind the table leg where she’s absconded with her yogurt. She runs over and thunks against Hallariel’s legs, wrapping her arms around her mother’s knees.
“Oh, sweetling, there you are,” Hallariel dotes, bending down to tuck a curl behind Celeste’s ear.
Fabian watches from the entryway between the kitchen and the foyer, coiled tight like he’s ready to strike.
(Riz has nice stories about his mother and alcohol. It used to be that she’d only really cut loose about her issues with the police force when she had a glass or two of wine in her. The occasional drink was like a release valve for her. The night after Riz graduated from Aguefort, his mother had poured him a tumbler of the whiskey that Pok preferred, the same bottle still tucked away in a cabinet in the kitchen. They’d each drank and toasted to Riz’s dad, and to Riz, and to Sklonda, and to being badasses. It sounded beautiful. Fabian’s family isn’t like that.)
“I’ll see you boys later tonight!” Hallariel announces. “Seven o’clock. Don’t be late.”
“For what?” Fabian asks, baffled.
Her eyes narrow. “Don’t even joke,” she warns him. And she tosses her hair over one shoulder. “Alright, well, I’m off to my sensory deprivation egg.”
“Right,” Fabian says, trying and failing to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Have fun.”
The Ball, because he is the smartest and best person in the world, suggests that he and Fabian take Celeste and go chill at Basrar’s until they have to be back at Seacaster Manor for whatever the fuck Hallariel is doing at seven.
Two scoops of rum and raisin ice cream can’t fix his problems, but it’s a start. “Do you think it’d help if we got my mom’s help?” Riz suggests, having already devoured his cookie dough ice cream cone.
Fabian leans across the table to wipe the strawberry ice cream off of Celeste’s nose. “Your mom doesn’t really like my mom,” he points out. Or me, he doesn’t say. One problem at a time.
“Well, yeah, but she’d want to help if your mom is… struggling,” the Ball says, glancing down at Celeste. “Like, if we need to have an intervention or something… ?”
“No, I don’t know,” Fabian says, licking ice cream off his hand where it’s started to melt and run. “I intervened. I did that already. I shouldn’t have to walk on— fricking— eggshells just to have a relationship with my mother.” Little ears. He’s got to remember to censor himself. “Sometimes I just want to be her son and not her… keeper.”
The little frown lines appear between Riz’s eyes. Fabian wants to smooth them out. This is his problem, not the Ball’s. It’s his winter break, too. He should get to enjoy it instead of being bogged down in Fabian’s family drama.
“Would you want to reach out to your dad?” he suggests.
Fabian bursts out laughing, and Riz joins in a moment later.
Trying to de-escalate a situation by bringing Bill Seacaster into it will always be a terrible fucking idea.
“Will you just… stick close to me tonight?” Fabian asks, pushing back the old flare of self-hate in his chest at showing any kind of vulnerability. This is allowed. He’s allowed to lean on his friends. “Whatever happens. I need to keep it together for…” His eye drifts to Celeste, happily munching on her waffle cone. “And if you can help me keep it together, the Ball… it would mean a lot.”
“Hey. Anything,” Riz says, reaching across the table to squeeze Fabian’s hand. “I believe in you.”
When they get back to the manor, just in time for whatever shitshow Hallariel has planned, Fabian watches his mother dash across the darkened foyer, loudly shushing him and Riz and Celeste. “Hide, darling, hide,” she insists, dragging him behind a curtain. What the fuck is going on? Is she having some kind of manic episode?
Riz completely vanishes into the shadows, but Fabian can feel a hand on his elbow. Even if he can’t see the Ball, he knows he’s not alone. Hallariel scoops up Celeste into her arms, holding a finger to her lips. Celeste beams and mimics Mama, finger to her lips, staying quiet.
A moment later, a key turns in the lock and the front door swings open.
Fig walks in. Fabian didn’t even realize she was on this plane and not down in hell, working on her latest EP. “I guess you’re right,” Fig is saying loudly, striding inside. “No one’s here. Maybe she did forget.”
“It happens,” Gilear says, walking in behind her, looking as glum as he usually looks but otherwise unbothered. “Oh, well. It was sweet of you to treat me to Krom’s, daughter. I suppose you have to go back to your recording studio now?”
“Yeah, I probably should,” Fig says, scuffing the toe of her boot on the hardwood floor. “Or I could stick around for the surprise.”
“The what?”
“SURPRISE!”
Hallariel jumps out from her hiding place and flashes the lights on as she yells. In her arms, Celeste blows a noisemaker. Prestidigitated confetti and ribbons dance across the foyer. More people spill out from hiding— the rest of the Bad Kids, Jawbone and Sandra Lynn, Sklonda and Gorthalax, the Thistlesprings, Ayda and her dad, Henry Hopclap, Lucilla Lullaby, Terpsichore Skullcleaver, Cathilda.
It’s like watching a clown car unload. Fabian had no idea the front room of the manor could conceal so many people.
A banner Fig and Hallariel quickly hoist over the entryway reads HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GILEAR!
Oh.
Oh.
“Happy birthday, my love,” Hallariel trills, passing Celeste to Fig so she can sweep Gilear into a dip and kiss him deeply. “Were you surprised?”
“I think,” Gilear says breathlessly, “the shock may have taken some years off my life.”
“I was ready with the diamonds if I needed to revivify you,” Kristen confirms, walking up to them. She bumps up against Fabian’s shoulder companionably. “Welcome back from college, girlie.”
“You all knew about this?” Fabian says, his eyes sweeping over the frankly ludicrous amount of people amassed here to celebrate Gilear.
“Well, sure,” Kristen says. “Your mom planned the whole thing. She said she told you!”
“She did not,” Fabian says.
Adaine squints at Riz, who has slipped back to a spot beside Fabian, no longer concealed. “And you didn’t know either?” she says. “What are they teaching you at rogue college?”
Riz flips her off. She doubles it and gives it back to him.
“Mama,” Fabian says, once Hallariel is done kissing Gilear, which, frankly, gross. “You planned a surprise party for Gilear?”
She blinks at him. “Did I not fill you in?”
“No!”
“Oh, darling, I’m so sorry, I got so caught up in the planning,” she sighs. “I just wanted to make tonight special for my beloved husband.” She musses Gilear’s combover, and he blushes. “Fabian, sweetheart, I’m sorry I forgot to tell you. It just slipped my mind.”
The rapidity with which what felt like a dire situation has decayed into something as mundane as a surprise birthday party is making him seasick.
It’s good, though. It’s good that the worst-case scenario he convinced himself was true isn’t actually happening.
“No, it’s fine,” he says, something weird and sharp bristling within him, like a thorn embedded in his skin. He was so prepared to be dealing with some terrible fallout, so prepared for her to have let him down. So prepared to protect Celeste, who’s now gleefully riding around on Fig’s shoulders and gnawing on her horns. “This is actually… a relief, to be honest,” he tells his mother. “I actually— it feels stupid to say, now. I was worried you were drinking again.”
“Darling, I’m sober as a priest,” she says, eyes crinkling up in a smile, like she’s laughing, like it’s all so funny. And then, more serious— “I promise you. I would never do that to your sister.”
It’s like he’s been knocked on the head, like there’s a ringing in his ears, his mouth full of cotton.
I would never do that to your sister.
“Just to me, then,” he says, remembering back on too many of his own birthday parties, his mother drunkenly falling into the massive cake Cathilda baked, loudly flirting with Papa’s friends, while Uncle Ray whirled around, trying and failing to distract him.
Out the corner of his eye, he can see Kristen scoop Celeste off Fig’s shoulders and usher her out of the room.
His mother stares at him blankly.
“You never visited me in prison,” he says, which isn’t exactly what he expected to come out of his mouth. Once it’s out, though, it’s real. It’s really what he means. “In freshman year of high school. I was in there for months and the only one who came to see me was Papa, and he slammed me down onto the floor, he hurt me, and you didn’t even come to check on me.”
Her perfect face falters. “Fabian—”
“I was ready,” he says, “I was ready for you to fall. I was ready for you to fail, because it’s hard, I get it, unlearning old habits is hard, and you’re a person, too, you’re allowed to be a complex person, I understand that,” he goes on, too much air in his lungs. Is he his father’s son now, truly, always too much to say? “I was ready to help you get sober again. I didn’t want to have to do it, but I would have! I would have done it. But now, I guess, what? You don’t need my help? All you needed was a child you actually cared about staying sober for?” His voice breaks infuriatingly on the last word, and he heaves in a deep breath, trying to recover, trying to keep from looking like a pathetic little kid who needs a mom.
He feels Fig’s hand on his shoulder, and he’s sure she’s going to tell him to go cool off, to rein himself in before he says something he regrets. But when he turns and meets her gaze, he sees nothing but unwavering support. Even though this is her dad’s birthday party. Even though he’s making a complete fool of himself, embarrassing his mother.
Fig mouths, Go off.
“I didn’t just forget how I grew up,” Fabian says. “It doesn’t just go away, just because you’re better now. Just because you get to try again with a new husband and a new baby.” And oh, fuck, he wants to shut himself up, and he hopes his baby sister can’t hear any of this.
Almost as soon as he has the thought, he feels Kristen Message him. I casted Silence. We’re playing the quiet game, she says. Go off.
(Were they all just waiting for him to break like this?)
“What does it say about you, Mama, that you were acting a little secretive and my mind immediately went to you drinking again? Why would you put a kid through that?” He’s yelling, he realizes too late. Fig is still at his side. He feels, again, Riz’s hand on his elbow.
His mother looks deeply hurt.
No one is jumping forward to defend her, not even herself.
Fabian can’t tell if Gilear’s reluctance to step in is a sign of cowardice on his part, or if it speaks to the respect he has for Fabian and his mother’s relationship.
“I,” Hallariel says finally, after a tense silence, “am trying. All I can do is try.” Her voice is even, measured.
“You took your damn time fucking around before you decided to try,” he snaps. He wishes he had something, a rage crystal in his chest, the Nightmare King in his head, something to explain why he’s being so vicious.
(It’s just him, isn’t it? All this resentment and poison, it’s just him.)
“I know,” Hallariel says, tears sliding down her face. “I’m sorry.” She sniffs. “You have every right to be angry with me for how you grew up,” she says. “But please don’t take it out on Gilear. This is his night—”
“My love—” Gilear starts, stepping forward to interrupt her.
“No, it’s fine, it’s fine,” Fabian says, wrenching himself away from Fig and Riz to stomp upstairs, away from his mother, away from the big happy party, away from the living room where Mama once peered into his eyes and said to him, breath reeking of pinot grigio, that he was going to die so, so long before she did. He was eight.
Up in his bedroom— or what used to be his bedroom— he shoves some books and daggers off the bed and curls up in the center of the mattress, suddenly achingly homesick even as he curls up in his childhood bed. How many times did he stomp upstairs after a fight with Papa?
How many times did he appease or straight-up ignore his mom when he should have been having a fight with her?
Maybe he’ll just stay up here all night. Everyone downstairs can celebrate Gilear’s birthday and have a good time without him mucking it up by yelling and getting overly emotional. Mama is right, it’s not fair to Gilear to make a scene. It wasn’t fair to Celeste.
In his time away at school, his room has been gradually turning into a home gym. There’s an elliptical machine in the corner and a treadmill in front of his balcony window.
It makes sense. Easier to ignore and erase the kid you messed up on.
Fuck, no, he’s being mopey and annoying. He’s better than that. He’s supposed to be better than that.
There’s a knock on the door.
If it’s his mother trying to apologize, he’s going to shut the door in her face. He doesn’t care if it’s unfair, or if he’s acting immaturely. He just doesn’t care.
Fabian marches across the room and opens the door.
At this point in the writing process, I couldn’t decide who should come and talk to Fabian so I decided to leave it up to a die roll. And then I realized I could let y’all do the same. Roll a D20. You reroll 1s and 2s. Whichever number you roll is the ending you get!