Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 64th cycle. Now cycle 65!

"And What If I Cared"
(Beiste &) Ewan (AU; Damian McGinty), Glenn & Kathleen (OC)
Beiste & Ewan series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

Sugar had driven him back to his aunt's house, where she'd stared at the building and confessed she had this weird idea of seeing where teachers lived, and after she'd gone, Ewan had gone in to find his parents.

His aunt wasn't around, only his parents. His mother was folding laundry, and his father was playing a guitar he had brought along, from what he recalled of earlier in the dream. When they looked up at him, it was strange, but he knew the dream had changed. All along, there had been very little for him to look at that would tell him anyone else knew this wasn't real, but his mother and father had looked at him practically at the same time, and there was a serenity in their smiles like… like they weren't these dream versions of Glenn and Kathleen Healy; they were his parents who had died in that crash, and now…

"Mom? Dad?" he looked to each of them. His mother had put the laundry basket down, walking up to hold him. A moment later, Ewan could feel his father embracing him as well. He was stuck in between them, only he wasn't stuck at all. He could have stayed here forever.

"We thought you might come back."

"This isn't real, is it?"

"No, son," Glenn told him, and Ewan shut his eyes tighter, held by his father and mother.

"I shouldn't have been out there with them, I should have been here, with you."

"Of course you should be with them," his mother told him. "They're your family, too. They're the family you have with you. Your father and I, we may not be with you, there in your life every day, but we know you haven't forgotten. You live your life, you get to know your aunt, you love that girl, and you be with your friends. It's normal to miss what we had, but you shouldn't miss your life at the same time."

"I won't," Ewan promised. "But I wish…"

"So do we," Glenn promised back. "You're going to wake up now." He'd started to get the smell of chlorine, and he remembered now. He remembered why he kept seeing that boy, and Puck… He remembered how he had ended up here, and he knew he had to go back.

"Wait, no… Can't I stay longer?" he looked to both of them.

"We'll see each other again, in another dream," his mother smiled, cupping his cheek. "Just remember," she pressed a kiss to his forehead.

"Ewan, wake up, dude. Come on, don't die on me."

X

"Breathe, damn it!" was the first thing he heard just before coughing up a lungful of water, and probably his lung, too. "You're okay, he's okay!"

When he opened his eyes, the sun was blinding, only partially obscured by Puck's face swimming overhead. He was dripping like he'd dived in, later he figured it was due to his coming to fish him out.

"This stays between us, got it?" Puck pointed at him, and Ewan was too confused to know what on Earth he was going on about.

He managed to sit up, looking around. Their client was standing on the patio, coming down from her shrieks of distress, while her young son stood by, clueless to what was happening. Ewan didn't have much of a clue either.

"Maybe we should take you to the hospital, make sure you didn't hit your head or something. I saw this show once, these two guys got in an accident, and the one guy was just messed up, they had to operate on him for hours and hours, and then the other guy was just like, no problem, not a scratch, but then he went down and collapsed and died and the first one lived, so…"

"Yeah, sure, hospital," he mumbled, maybe so he would stop talking.

The woman, perhaps afraid she might get sued, had told them to stay there and that she was going to call for an ambulance. When they'd arrived, the paramedics had checked him out, decided it was best they took him in to run some tests.

At the hospital, his aunt had come in, with Rich by her side, beside herself with concern for her nephew, and she wasn't alone. On the way she had picked up Sugar, who'd come and hugged Ewan as soon as they said it was alright.

"You're okay, right? You're not going to die?" she asked.

"No, I'll be fine," he promised, smiling to himself. They weren't going to be that different from one another, he guessed, his Sugar and the one from his dream, but from all he knew, he preferred the one who now held on to him. This was the one he had fallen for, the one who had been with him almost from the very beginning of his time in Ohio. She was the one he wanted.

He hadn't told his aunt about the dream, or anyone else for that matter. Maybe he would, later, but for now he wanted to keep it for himself. It had been several months since his parents had died, more than he could ever believe, but it still hurt a lot to know they were gone, and this dream, as realistic as it had been, had left him with fresh pains, like a scab had been ripped away to hurt anew. Now he knew he had to go back to Ireland, to see his old home. More than ever, that was what he needed. He was getting closer, too, with his money. He had his shoe store job, and his secret pool job… That wasn't going to be a secret anymore though, not after today. He wasn't going to stop doing it. He'd be more careful from now on, but he had to remember what it was for.

When he got home that night, exhausted and with a clean bill of health, he went to his room, sitting on his bed and looking at the picture next to him. It was just as he'd seen it in his dream. He didn't know if he would go back to them when he fell asleep. He might just have a dreamless sleep, after everything that had happened. The next time he saw them though, he would take every last second he could get and cherish each one.

THE END

A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.
In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are
always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!