AN: Okay, I was asked to write more of these, and since I've hid a minor wall on Journey, here's another! I'll probably get past the Journey block within a few days, but in the meantime, I'll keep cranking these out. The idea for this one was given to me by my friend Rue Bladesinger, so Rue, thanks a ton, this one's for you, girlfriend!

Love and hugs,
Maggie

Disclaimer: I don't own Warm Bodies. I DO, however, own a t-shirt with R on it, a tank top that says "Cold Body, Warm Heart," and six Warm Bodies Valentine's Day cards, all of which are tacked up on my bedroom wall. AIN'T NOBODY GETTIN' DEM CARDS, NO SIREE! XD

"Dad, Uncle Marcus said that you and him used to be Dead. Did you really, or is he just making stuff up again?"

This comes from the bedroom while I am in the bathroom drying my hair after having just gotten out of the shower. I grab the change of clothes that I brought in with me, navy blue flannel PJ pants and a plain gray t-shirt, and put them on before heading into the bedroom, where Diane is perched on mine and Julie's bed, her blue eyes wide and expectant. I brush some damp hair out of my eyes and grin at her. "What do you think?" I ask. Diane shrugs. She seems to do that a lot. Julie likes to joke that it must run in my family or something. "I dunno," Diane says. "I guess I think that he's just being silly, but I dunno. Seriously, though, were you Dead or not?"

"Did I just hear her ask if you were Dead?" Julie says as she enters the room. Diane and I both turn to look at her, and I nod in response to her question. "Where on earth did you hear that, baby?" she asks, turning to our daughter. "Uncle Marcus told me," Diane replies. "So, is it true or not? Was Dad really a Corpse, or wasn't he?" Julie and I look at each other. Her eyes are wide with—What, shock? Anxiety? I can't really tell for sure. I respond by giving her a look that, to my facial muscles, anyway, feels sort of helpless. "We knew this would happen eventually," I say. "I mean, it's not like we were deluding ourselves into thinking we could keep it from her forever, we've always known it was going to happen sooner or later, it was always just a question of when, and how it would come up."

Julie sighs. "Yeah, I guess you're right," she says. She sighs again, then comes and sits down on the bed with me and Diane. "Sweetheart, the thing you need to understand is that your dad has always been different. He's special in a way that I can't really explain. He just...is. That's how he's always been, ever since I first met him."

"You mean like how his first name is just a letter?" Diane asks. Julie and I look at each other. "Kind of," Julie says.
"But...you still haven't told me if he was Dead or not."

Again, Julie and I look at each other. I give her a single nod, just a quick bob of my head, and she returns it.

"Once upon a time," Julie says, "in a not-so-far-away land, there lived a girl named Julie Cabernet..."

"...And everybody lived happily ever after. The end."
"So...So Uncle Marcus wasn't just messing with me? He was telling the truth? He was actually Dead? You were actually Dead? And Mom brought you back to Life by kissing you?"

I shrug. "Maybe it was the kiss, maybe it wasn't," I say. "We may never know for sure. But what we do know is that if it hadn't been for that kiss, I might not be married to your mom, and you might not be here right now." Diane's eyes light up suddenly and she turns to look at Julie. "Mom, what was it like when Dad asked you to marry him? Did he get down on one knee like they do in the movies, or was it more like a Beauty and the Beast type thing? I think that would've kind of made sense, don't you? I mean, since he used to be Dead and everything, you know?"

Julie laughs and shakes her head. "No, it wasn't like Beauty and the Beast," she says, "but he didn't exactly get down on one knee, either." Diane shoots me one of her famous looks. "Dad," she says. "What is wrong with you? Don't you understand romance at all? I mean, hello, all the guys in the movies get down on one knee, that's like the ultimate way to do it, everybody knows that!" I stretch out on the bed behind the girls, propping myself up on one elbow.

"Alright," I say, "here's what happened; you've seen our wedding rings, how your mom's has the moon and mine has the sun, and it's like an eclipse if we put them together. Well, those were our engagement rings before they were our wedding rings, and there's a reason I picked the ring I did for your mom. I saw the stars on it, and my brain just sort of connected them to your mom, and the logic behind that connection was that finding her was almost like I had been wandering around in the middle of the night with no stars, no moon, nothing to give me any light, and then all of a sudden, there she was, a star had appeared out of nowhere, and even though it was only the one little star, it was still there, and it was giving me light." Julie smiles at me, and I smile back.

"So one night, we were up in the baseball stadium, just the two of us, and we were chasing each other around through the stands, and we eventually wore ourselves out and sat down together. We were just sitting there, looking up at the stars, and it was so beautiful. Remember, Julie?"

She nods. "I remember," she says. "We found a few constellations that night. The Ursas and the Dippers, I think, right?"
"Yeah, and you also found the North Star," I say. She sighs happily. "Oh, I'd forgotten about that," she breathes. "God, it was so gorgeous."

"And then what happened?" Diane asks, laying down on her stomach and looking at me with wide eyes.
"Then," I say, "I noticed that your mom was shivering because she was cold, and she climbed into my lap, and I hugged her real tight to warm her up, and she started kissing me. Then she brushed some hair out of my eyes and told me that she loved my eyes, and she wished she could just spend all day staring at them." I look at Julie. "You wanna tell the next part?" I ask. She smiles. "Sure," she says, "why not?" Diane flips over to look at her mother with those wide, eager eyes of hers. "What happened after that, Mom?" she asks. Julie bites her lower lip as she smiles.

"Then," she says, "he said, 'I love you, Julie. I have loved you since I met you, and I will love you until the very momen I stop breathing, and there is nothing that anybody will ever be able to do or say that will change that. You are literally the reason that my heart is beating, and you are literally the reason I am alive. There was a time when I thought we would never be able to be together, and yet, here we are, three years later, sitting here kissing each other. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm going to lose you, and I don't ever want that to happen.' And then he told me to reach into his jacket pocket and take out what was inside, and I did, and it was a box, and when I opened it, my ring was inside."

"And you know what she said?" I cut in.
"What?" Diane asks. I smirk at Julie and laugh. "She said, 'Is this what I think it is?'" I say. Diane laughs. "What did you tell her?" she asks. Julie giggles, tilting her head back to look at the ceiling. "He told me, 'Julie, I don't remember a thing about my old life, and at this rate, I probably never will, but I really don't care as much as I probably should, because this is my life now, and I might not know much, but what I do know is that I don't ever wanna have to leave your side, and I am absolutely determined to be with you forever, so Julie, will you marry me?'"

"And less than a year later, she did," I say. Diane grins, showing off the gaps in her teeth. "And then you had me," she says. Julie and I laugh. "That's right," I say, mussing her hair. "About two-and-a-half years later, you were born, and we loved you to pieces as soon as you started crying."

"Dad?"
"Mm-hm?"
"Do you have any pictures from when you were Dead?"

"As a matter of fact," Julie says, getting up and going over to the desk. "We do have one. The polaroid I took the night we spent in that abandoned house on our way back here from the airport. It should be in the desk drawer somewhere...Ah, here it is!" She brings it back over to the bed and hands it to Diane. I look at it over her shoulder. A Dead man stares out at me. He is wearing a dirty gray t-shirt and red hoodie, both of them with holes. He has dark hair, and his eyebrows are up in surprise, his pale, cloudy blue eyes wide as he leans away from the camera. His slightly parted lips are tinted with blue, and past the lips, part of his front teeth are visible, and they also have blue on them.

He is me. I am looking at myself as I once was; pale and gray-skinned, with cloudy eyes and lips blue from lack of circulation, a network of blue veins spiderwebbing up and down one side of my neck, emerging from beneath the collar of my shirt, the color making them stand out against my otherwise completely colorless skin. My hair is matted and dirty and dripping wet from the storm that Julie and I had been in just before entering the house where she found the camera that took the picture.

Diane is staring at the picture, the look on her face completely entranced. "Wow," she breathes. "Dad...that's really you?" I nod slowly, just as hypnotized as she is by the image. I can hardly believe that this gray, colorless, cloudy-eyed, blue-lipped Corpse staring out at me from the polaroid in my daughter's hand is actually me. It feels so far away from anything that's happened to me. Since this picture was taken, I have been chased by soldiers, fought Boneys, been shot in the shoulder by my wife's father, fought more Boneys, re-learned how to read and write (among other things), had a three year long relationship with Julie, proposed to and married her, and had a daughter with her. Looking at the picture now, twelve-and-a-half years after it was taken, the man staring out at me is almost a total stranger. I look up at Julie. Her expression mirrors mine.

"Twelve years," I say quietly. "Has it really only been that much? It feels longer, like decades ago."
"Centuries, more like," she says. I nod slowly. "Yeah," I say, "definitely centuries. Hundreds and hundreds of years."

I feel something against the side of my face and realize that it's the picture. Diane is holding it up, probably to compare me to the Dead man in the image. I hold still and just watch her face as her eyes flicker from the polaroid to me, then back again. Then, placing her thumb on the bottom one and her forefinger on the top, she gently and ever so slightly pushes my lips apart, and when she lowers her hand, I keep them that way for whatever purpose she has. She takes another look at the polaroid, then her eyes move back to my face and again, she touches my upper lip with the tip of her index finger, this time tracing the outline of my mouth. Her small hand slowly moves across my entire face bit by bit as she traces my features with her fingers. I close my eyes as she does this, then slowly open them again when I no longer feel her hand on my face. I am met with the sight of her staring at me with eyes that are identical to my own, her head just barely tilted to one side.

"Your eyes were so pale, Daddy," she says quietly. I nod. "Yeah," I say, "I know. But they're not now. And I promise you, they never will be again." Her eyes move down to my neck, to the place where that web of veins used to stand out so clearly and visibly against my skin. I gently take her hand in mine and place it on top of that spot, right above where the fabric of my shirt ends and the skin of my neck begins, the place where that network of veins once disappeared beneath my t-shirt and hoodie. Diane's fingers curl, the tips trailing along the skin in the area where the veins used to be. I suspect that she is probably trying to locate those veins, find them for herself in order to make even more of a connection in her mind between the Corpse in the polaroid and the man that she knows me as, the father she has grown up with for the entiriety of all seven years of her life.

"I can't find them," she whispers. Julie kisses the top of her head. "Maybe they're just not supposed to be found," she says. "Like the hoodie that Dad's wearing in this picture. He got rid of it a long time ago because it reminded him of a time that he wanted to forget. Maybe the veins are kind of like the hoodie. They were there once, but now that that time is over, they're gone."

"Do you think they'll ever come back?" Diane asks. Julie and I look at each other, then back at Diane, and Julie shakes her head. "No," she says, "I don't. Think of it this way; as long as his eyes aren't cloudy, those veins won't be on his neck."

"And like I said before, I promise that my eyes won't ever be like that again," I say. Diane throws her arms around my neck. "Good," she says. "I like them better like this." I return the hug, smiling at Julie over the top of Diane's head. "So do I, kiddo," I say.

AN: OMG, so I now own my first pair of high heels! AND I'M SIXTEEN, SO IT'S ABOUT TIME! XD

Not much else to say right now, except that I'm gonna go see the movie again, hopefully sometime over the weekend, so yay for that! Otherwise...

Catch ya'll on the flipside, peeps! XD

—Maggie