NOTES: This takes place early 2011, when Alex would be seven-going-on-eight and Doug six. Information on the characters can be found at my website. For general reference, Alex's mother died of the Legacy Virus when he was around two or three.
"You take care of yourself, kiddo, okay?" His Aunt Kitty asked in a voice that was a little too cheerful to be real. He nodded, understanding that he wasn't the only sad one, though her little boy (whose name was Doug, but inwardly, he preferred Moron far more) certainly seemed to be glad that they were leaving.
Alex Wagner wasn't hurt by that happiness to be gone -- he liked the stupid little boy about as much as Doug did him, which translated to not at all. He stopped glaring at Doug (Moron) to give Kitty one last desperate hug -- stay, please stay, leave your dumb kid behind, just stay with me -- but since he never said what he was thinking out loud, she didn't. Alex watched them cruise off into the Californian afternoon, his week's worth of joy disappearing in a fire engine red Thunderbird.
When they were out of sight, long gone from the suburban block, he slowly trudged up the driveway and into his house. It was his house, of course, because he was the one that lived in it most often. Grownups came and went, Alex figured, and with the divine logic of a seven year-old, he'd claimed the house as his. He had, however, promised to share it with Aunt Kitty, if she left her stupid kid in New York next time she came to visit. She'd said that he shouldn't be mean just because he was older than Doug , and that she would most assur -- as-sure-ed-ly -- put some thought into the matter. Then she'd smiled and offered him a piece of gum, and that had patched up any bad feelings.
Inside, Alex could hear Dad and Raven arguing (She wouldn't let him call her Grandmother, she liked to say, because that made her feel old, and did she look old to him? She didn't, so Alex thought that calling her Raven made lots of sense.). Actually, Raven did most of the yelling like always, though sometimes she mentioned a witch named Amanda that Alex had recently been informed was his mother, who was dead. It had scared him at first that his mother had been a witch -- witches were mean and evil, after all -- but after Dad showed him a picture of a pretty blonde woman, he didn't mind so much.
It was the usual fight, Alex picked up after a few seconds worth of listening. Dad didn't like that Raven was letting him act, which was fun, and Raven laughed a lot before getting angry and telling Dad that "if you were here more than two months a year, perhaps you would have an actual say in the welfare of your child. He's mine."
He'd learned at school that no one belonged to anybody, but sometimes Alex thought that maybe Raven was right. She could make him do anything she wanted and he couldn't say no, just like Nick with his dog Bogart down the street, so it made sense that maybe be was Raven's, after all.
The fighting was usually boring, so Alex went to the kitchen in hunt of Sugar Bombs, which Dad let him eat whenever he wanted, and Raven only if he was very good, which was hard. Since Dad was home the same time as Raven, he'd decided that eating his favorite cereal was okay, but only sometimes. Still, he would have given a million boxes of Sugar Bombs up if Aunt Kitty had stayed for another week and continued to cook him breakfast. She said that she could burn a salad without trying (which didn't make any sense to Alex... how can you burn a salad?), but he thought that what she made was lots better than the pate and caviar Raven liked (she had taught him how to say both the right way, after he had made her friends laugh at his own pronunciation).
It had been great to go to the fast food restaurants with Aunt Kitty and Dad, even if they had to take the stupid little boy along, too. When Dad was off on his walkabouts, Raven only took him out to the restaurants where he had to dress up. That started out as fun, but after the gazillionth time wasn't very exciting at all, especially when Raven gave him her angry look, the one that said "Look at me! I'm dining out with a seven year-old boy when I could be out with someone who doesn't insist on watching the Sword in the Stone every morning. I hope you're happy!"
He never was, but that didn't seem to help Raven any, so he always made sure to try to sit straight and eat with the right fork -- there were a lot of them. Alex hoped that he would grow up fast. That way Raven could still take him to dinner -- it could be fun sometimes, when she was in a good mood -- and she could sit with a grownup instead of him. He was very sure that if he was at least sixteen (and wasn't that awfully far away!), Raven wouldn't mind going out in public with him. Then, if nothing else, he wouldn't have to put up with all the dates she brought him. He had to admit that it was pretty neat when your grandmother (he called her that privately, never out loud) brought Pierce Brosnan home. Alex had really liked the James Bond movies.
Right now he was on a soap opera, which was better than commercials, but Raven said that if you wanted to be big, you had to be on during prime time, or in movies. The soap opera always made him tired, so he had decided that if he was going to be big (and he was, because Raven said so), he would do movies instead. If he was in good movies, then he would be popular and everyone would like him. That wasn't the case now. There were lots of nice people at school, but almost as many mean ones, people that made fun of him because his dad looked different, though they used other words.
The first time it had happened, he'd gone home crying, and Dad had hugged him tight, made them popcorn and put on an Errol Flynn film (old movies, his soap opera's director always said, were films, which made them special). Then he had pointed out all the swordfighting scenes, and jumped up on the back of the couch with one of his old sabres from when he was with Excalibur, acting them out just like on the tv. Dad had said that the other kids were just jealous because their dads couldn't do "spectacular feats of debonair daring and debauchery!"
After that, he had taken out the dictionary so they could look up debonair and daring, though Dad wouldn't let him read what debauchery meant. Dad was "very big on education," because "not everyone should grow up in a gypsy caravan." Alex thought the idea of Dad and a bunch of gypsies growing up in a van was very amusing.
The second time Alex had come home, upset courtesy more taunting gibes from his classmates, Dad took him to the San Diego zoo. It had been just as fun as watching old films, especially when a few "middle aged menopause machines" as Raven called them, or "housewives" like his agent said, asked him for autographs, and when Dad took him to a gorilla exhibit, pointing out that supposedly they'd all descended from animals like those (which had horrified Alex for a moment, until he saw one gorilla hugging her baby just like Dad did with him when Dad was happy or Alex was sad).
Things like that always made Alex sorry to see his father go at the beginning of the year, when he felt that his religion called for him to seclude himself from the rest of the world. Dad had always left him with Raven ever since Aunt Kitty got Doug (Alex liked to think that she'd adopted the stupid little boy from an animal shelter or found him on a streetcorner in a cardboard box, because nothing so vile -- a word he'd learned from Raven -- could have ever be really related to his Aunt Kitty). It didn't bother him too much since most of the time Raven made him feel grown up, but she also wouldn't let him do kid things. Alex was amazed at the wealth of cartoons that Aunt Kitty had introduced him to, and how she'd let him join the other kids at the McDonald's playground, so long as he took off his shoes and didn't get in trouble.
It was why he was so sorry to see Aunt Kitty go, even if she had brought along her dumb kid on this trip. Sitting at the kitchen table with an overflowing bowl of Sugar Bombs, Alex figured that Aunt Kitty loved him like he was a kid, and she was a mom, a position, while unfamiliar to him, he'd seen at school with his friends' mothers. Alternatively, Dad loved him like... well, a dad, which made just as much sense. But with Raven, he was always confused.
Did she love him like a grownup? No, that couldn't be true. He'd seen the grownups Raven loved, and she never hugged him or gave him what Aunt Kitty called butterfly kisses. She certainly didn't love him like a grandchild, because she wouldn't let him call her Grandmother, though on birthdays and like this Christmas, her toys were always some of the best.
Alex scowled into his cereal bowl, brow creased in thought while he kicked his legs against the air -- he still wasn't tall enough to reach the floor, unfortunately. Maybe Raven loved him because he was going to be an adult, eventually. It explained why she wouldn't let him act his age (secretly, Alex thought that seven was quite an accomplishment, though Raven had been around, as Dad said, for more than a hundred years, so she couldn't have the same opinion as him -- a hundred was a lot, almost higher than he could count).
It never occurred to him that perhaps Raven didn't love him. The thought alone wasn't even possible. Dad loved him, Aunt Kitty loved him. Total strangers ran up to him on the street and said they loved him. Sure, Aunt Kitty's stupid little boy and the kids at school might not have, but it was equally feasible -- he'd learned that word from Dad, too, though sometimes he forgot what it meant -- that they did and were just also jealous of him.
In the background house noises, Alex heard the arguing stop. Dad had probably gone to pray, which meant he needed quiet time, almost as boring as nap time, and knowing Raven, she would go and get herself a drink of the nasty tasting clear stuff she liked that looked like water, but definitely wasn't.
He counted down the seconds until she came into the kitchen, keeping his gaze firmly set on his Sugar Bombs.
"Alexander!"
Drat. Off by two seconds.
"What in God's name are you doing with those?"
Alex shrugged, watching her feet go by. She was wearing her blue face. Normally he found it pretty -- it looked a lot like Dad, and had hair that was the same color as his favorite actresses's -- but after her fights with Dad, he always thought it looked witchy. Not the good type of witch, either, not like his mother.
"Aunt Kitty said I could have some for breakfast, and I didn't finish before she left and I didn't want to waste food like you said I shouldn't, so I'm finishing now." He made sure to look at her then, and they both saw that the other was wearing their acting face.
Raven smiled when she saw that he was lying to her, and went to get her drink. "She's gone now, so you'd better finish that bowl in the next ten minutes. Your father's leaving, and you know how I feel about putting that garbage into your system."
Alex nodded and started to eat faster. "Raven?"
"What?"
"You love me, right?"
He didn't look up at her face then, because he knew that if it seemed witchy before, it would only look worse after he asked. Just because he was a kid didn't mean he was stupid. He wasn't going to cross all the boundaries.
"I cannot even fathom why you're asking me that silly question, Alexander. If you don't know for yourself, maybe I should leave after your father does."
Alex winced. He didn't want his Sugar Bombs anymore -- they were making his stomach hurt and his teeth ache -- but he knew that if he didn't want to get Raven even angrier, he had to finish. He was sorry that he asked, now. When she got really upset, she threatened to leave Alex alone, and that was the worst thing in the world, to be alone. Especially now, with Aunt Kitty gone and Dad leaving soon. He was always afraid that they would leave like his mother did, who Raven said had left only because she didn't want her silly little son. She'd made herself sick and died because he had been an awful child, and if he didn't want to lose anyone else he should listen to her.
Alex knew that sometimes Raven lied to him, just like he did to her, but that had seemed very truthful. Whenever he asked Dad about his mother, he would get sad and go to pray. Once he had asked Aunt Kitty, but she hadn't been able to answer because her dumb kid started to whine. So it just made sense that Raven wasn't lying about him being a horrible son -- just because everyone loved him didn't mean that he never made people angry -- and how his mother had died to get away from him. That made him sad like Dad got, but he knew that unless he wanted Raven to get mean, he should just apologize and be quiet.
"I'm sorry, Raven. That was a dumb question. I won't ask again."
"Good. Do you know all your lines for next week's show?"
He nodded, ready to recite on cue until his father walked into the kitchen. His face was cheerful, just like Aunt Kitty's had been before she left, but Alex could see that he wasn't happy from the way his tail almost touched the ground. "Alexander..." "It's okay, Dad." He put on his acting face again, this time with a matching smile. Except because Alex was an actor, he did a better job of it than Dad did. He knew this because it was the same smile he used to get his part as Brian Geller on Days of Our Lives. "I know you've gotta go." He corrected himself after catching a look from Raven, like she did when he was practicing lines. Sometimes it seemed as though it was all the same. "Got to go. It's okay, Raven will take care of me. And you'll call, right?" He couldn't help adding that last part in -- he really did want him to call for once. "You know that I can't--" "You're right. I know. I'm sorry." Raven had her angry look again, and Alex thought maybe it would be smart if he got Dad out of his house before another argument started. Alex was always afraid that if he bothered his father too much or if Raven got too angry, then his dad would never come back. He loved Raven in that funny way they had, but he didn't want to live with just her for the rest of his life, even if Dad only came home for three months in the year. "I'll be sure to write all about school and the show, and then when you come home I won't have forgotten anything, so we can catch up better than last time. Is that okay?" When Dad nodded and knelt on the ground, Alex hopped down from his chair. They hugged tightly in a ritual that happened only twice annually, and as always, before he knew it, Dad was gone. Suddenly glad for the Bamf doll Aunt Kitty gave him for Christmas, the one that he'd hidden away from Raven, Alex started for his room and his Bamf. "Alexander. Cereal." What was the line from one of the cartoons he'd seen? "Curses! Foiled again!" He hadn't really gotten it until hearing the tone of Raven's voice, but now it clicked into place. Not speaking -- that wouldn't be a smart thing to do right now -- Alex went back to the kitchen table and his remaining Sugar Bombs. One day he would have his own house where nobody else lived, and then he wouldn't have to get bossed around. He'd be rich and famous and everyone would love him and Dad and Aunt Kitty would never leave him again. That part sounded good, although he was pretty sure that he didn't want to be a grownup. Grownups were confusing and did stupid things, stupider than any kid could do. When he had all those good things, maybe he would be able to understand why. Contenting himself with the thought, Alex sat and ate in silence, accompanied by Raven and her drink.