[And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Sorry. It's my first time writing something like an autobiography/diary/memoir sort of shit, and my mind just sort of wanders. I'd get an editor, but come on. Who besides the fucking internet would believe me?]

Afterwards she took a shower. I just shucked some jeans on and pulled a Triforce T down over my head. Smeared on a bit of lipstick and dabbed in some mascara. I pulled out my phone—figured my mom out in Minneanapolis at least ought to hear it straight from me before finding out on facebook of all places that we'd gotten engaged. I'd call Scott, too, but it just wasn't his sort of thing. He and Vanessa had been together seven years now, and he always said love was way more than just a shitty piece of paper.

[It's not like he wouldn't celebrate with us…he just wouldn't care.]

I dialed. Paced the floor.

The line picked up. "Mom?" I asked.

"What's wrong?" I was greeted with Dan's gravelly, disapproving tone instead. Guy always sounded as happy as the fucking lovechild of Marvin the Paranoid Android and Albi the Racist Dragon*.

"Shit," I said in awkward surprise. "I thought this was mom's phone—"

"Marlene can't talk right now."

Bullshit. He saw the number and decided to screen me first. I'd been clean for thirty-seven months straight* by then, but once the druggie step-daughter, always the druggie step-daughter.

And before you go thinking Mary Angst Sue or Tragic Backstory or Insert Family Drama or Fucking Tropetown, Tropecainia*, let me preface that: Dan's a good guy. Good but gruff, especially with me. And I couldn't blame him—Dan might've acted like an asshole to me on more than one occasion, but he was the good sort of asshole—a classhole*. He only did it because he wanted to protect my mom…even and especially from me if necessary. I was her little girl, and she did what most parents did and looked the other way and enabled me. I lied. I stole. I got in a shit ton of trouble. I hurt a bunch of people, and most of all her. Dan came into our lives during a time when I couldn't be trusted, and those first impressions are hard to shake. They'd met at a NA support group about eleven years ago, him for a sleaze-bag of a soon-to-be-ex-wife…and well, you can guess whose court-mandated participation brought my mother in.

So he's all right for the step-dad your mom starts seeing when you're already in your mid teens. It was a tough time in all our lives, and we never really had a chance to get along or be a family. But I'm happy for them, happy for her—between me in and out of the system and Scott over in Afghanistan she needed a guy like Dan in her life. The only thing you've really got to know about Dan is he's much better husband than he is a dad. He doesn't cheat, keeps a steady job and brings home flowers and shit and buys her jewelry every holiday, so for a guy you don't know or like very well who's fucking your mother, there's not much more you can ask than that.

[See that's the thing about fanfiction: your hero's family is either already dead, killed off early, or only serves as some sort of emotional backdrop to make the hero more likable (Bard the Bowman's wife? Fridged. Kids? Adorable ornamentation to give our antihero a soul.). But that's the thing: the family is dead, abusive, or perfect. There's not one single goddamned story like real life, where people have pasts and tastes and likes and dislikes or skeletons that just won't stay in the fucking closet. That's the difference between fiction and real life: just like sex always ends with glorious music and orgasm but never that awkward, well-what-the-fuck-now sort of feeling, or those cringe-worthy walks of shame, in fiction we never see consequences and/or everyone always learns their lesson and rides off into the sunset. But fiction isn't real, because in real life the estranging, abusive, angry one isn't always the parent, ex-lover or antagonist. Sometimes it's the protagonist. Sometimes it's you.]

"What do you want, kiddo?" Dan asked in an eternally long-suffering sigh.

"I just want to talk to Marlene."

"You never call."

"I don't want anything," I collapsed into a rather shabby looking Toad beanbag, the fingers of my left hand toying absently with the beans of stuffing pressing through the seams. [I'd had the thing since I was nineteen, and just couldn't let it go.] "Promise. I won't beg you guys for money and I don't need you to post bond or anything. I just want to talk to her."

"Anything you have to say to her you can say to me."

"Godfuckingdamnit, Dan," I rolled onto my stomach in annoyance, kicking the air. "Is it too much to imagine I've just gotten engaged and I just wanted my own mother to be the first person to know?"

"Don't take that tone, kiddo," it's for you, I heard him say as an aside.

"Ida?" my mom's voice rang. "Honey, what's wrong?"

[For once in my life, nothing! For the last time in my life, nothing!

…Thanks, Legs.]

"Don't panic," I prefaced. "but you might need to sit down."

Have you ever seen Chicken Run? …Yeah. I could hear the feathers fly. My mom launched into a panicked monologue that even Christopher Nolan couldn't derail*.

"—and I can call Scott sweetie and he can be there in less than half and hour I promise we'll get through this no matter what it takes and I can fly up this weekend and—"

"MOM!" I finally shouted. "Would. You. Just. LISTEN!"

There was silence on the other end.

"I'm calling because I. Got. Engaged."

"Y-you—" she stammered, unable to process.

[Picture the swirling beach ball of death on your Macbook.]

"Y-you—"

"I—" I prompted her.

"You're getting married?"

"Yes, yes, I know it's unexpected life-changing news—"

"You're getting married? Dan, Ida's getting married!" That last half was squealed shrilly at two million decibels and right into the receiver.

My head was ringing. "…to—?" she was prompting when I could hear again and she was making intelligible sentences instead of random spurts of "my baby girl!"s and "all grown up!"s and hysterical sobbing and "you're going to be a bride!"s and "I'm so proud of you"s and "oh, Ida!"s.

"Prerna, mom," I said in exasperation. "Remember, you met her—"

Split second pause. "Is that the adorable little brown girl you brought out for Christmas?" she asked brightly.

"Mother!" I shot straight up. That's my mom. More inadvertently racist than J.R.R. Tolkien himself.

I could hear her flush through the phone line. "Well I only met her the once and I couldn't really remember if she was Puerto Rican or Pakistani—"

"Indian," I groaned, with a furtive glance to the bathroom door. "Prerna's Indian." [With three living Hindu grandparents who aren't big fans of the whole Pakistan thing, apparently*.] She's better than Scott, at least. He still calls everything South of the Rio Grand Mexico. In his mind, there's North America (Canada), America (us), Mexico, and South Mexico. He used to be serious, now I'm pretty sure he does it just to fuck with me and Vanessa. She gets absolutely furious about his non-PC*.

"Hate to bother you or stress you out," I apologized. "But it's up on facebook and I wanted you to hear it from me first, alright?"

"Oh, Ida!" she said again. "I'm so excited for you! I can get on Pinterest and Etsy—"

"Gotta go, mom," I lied to her. I love my mom, but I really can't stand her for long lengths of time, and I've never been really good at the whole talk gushy, girlish nonsense over the phone thing, and I was NOT about to start planning a wedding less than six hours post-proposal or via social media. A girl's got to have some standards. "We're getting ready to head out to dinner."

"I love you, sweetie!"

"I love you, too—"

"—and here's Dan!" Rick-rolled, by my own mother now less!

"Congratulations, kiddo," he told me. "You two let us know when the date is, you hear?"

"You're so not walking me down the aisle," I warned him, more rudely than I would have liked. Damnit, Ida!
"Didn't figure," he grunted. "Take care."

"Yeah," I affirmed, trying to sound cheery. "You too."

My phone rang the second the call dropped. It startled the shit out of me, and sent the phone flying from my fingers, cracking the case and skidding to rest under the couch.

Shit. Our engagement video and the majority of today's pics were on there. Oh no you don't, I told the universe, jamming my hand under the couch and through a year's worth of dust bunnies. Not today. I also resolved to back it up on the hard drive, iCloud, and a USB in the fireproof safe where Prerna kept her birth certificate and passport the second I found it.

Luckily it'd fallen face-up, and with a bit of creative maneuvering I was able to see the lit screen. Gotcha.

I withdrew my hand, and was met with the following:

incoming call

PETER PARKER

THE DAILY BUGLE

At that point, most people would've probably questioned their sanity. I just questioned my taste in friends (not to mention the adequacy of my password*) and picked up.

"Fuck you," Pedro "Peter Parker" Morales told me.

"Yep."

"You two got engaged and didn't even tell me!"

"Chill the fuck out, Yenta*," I laughed. "There's no way in hell I could've told you, Spiderman. You couldn't keep a secret if it danced naked in front of you wearing Dobby's tea-cozy." His transparency also makes him an absolutely terrible wingman.

"I had to find out through facebook—facebook!" he ranted in his rich baritone voice. "This is the fucking twenty-teens, the least you could've done was put it someplace socially relevant like Tumblr!" here he paused. "…She does know those pics are public, right?"

"Yep."

"…is that a problem?"

"Not yet."

"Is that going to be a problem?"

Outing yourself to your family on facebook? Problem doesn't even begin to cover it. "Oh, fuck yes," I told him.

"Oookay," Spiderman said in awkward awe. "Alrighty then."

"Yep."

"Is that all you're going to say?"

"Yep."

"Alright, alright. I can take a hint. Spidey out."

"DFTBA."

"You keep using that initialism. I don't think it means what you think it means," and with that he was gone. Dude always had to have the last word…

I snapped the iphone back into its crap plastic case. I still the my old 3s, by the way. I kept meaning to update, but things like ComicCon and Prerna's ring kept coming up, and I've always hated spending money on myself if it wasn't for an experience of some sort. But the screen read already past seven, so I knew we were cutting it close to losing our table if we stayed much longer. I rapped my knuckles against the grain of the bathroom door and tried to barge in, but Prerna just squealed and shoved her weight against it.

Now that was amusing. "What are you doing in there—masturbating?"

There was an indignant "Ida!" followed by the clatter of her curlers falling off the sink.

I laughed and leaned against the door. "Seriously, how long can it take for a girl to get dressed?"

"I want to look nice!"

"You always look nice." No lie. She had that almost Elven ability to roll out of bed looking immaculate. Not that she'd believe you. Girl was the poster child of the lipstick lesbian.

"You always say that!"

"And I always mean it," I promised her. "Five minutes?"

"Ten minutes!" she wheedled, and I could smell hairspray and the tang of her fresh fingernail polish.

"Alright. Ten, and then I'm going to dinner without you!" Yeah, right. My threats were worthless. Truth be told she'd had me around her little finger from the day we met, and now that she had my ring around her fourth, things were only going to intensify.

Ten minutes. Plenty of time. I wandered to the office/spare bedroom ["my bedroom" when her parents came to visit] and woke up the slumbering desktop. Plugged a USB cord into my phone, and started downloading.

Yes, iTunes you moron, I want to keep the pictures.

No, I don't want to install any software updates.

I logged into iCloud and sent the photographic evidences from iphoto permanently into the data cloud, then fished for the key to the safe.

…and done. The drive was tucked safety back in it's Smaug-proof home, the video was now saved on Apple's servers somewhere in the soul of the internet, and I had copies on my phone and the desktop [Prerna disapproves of laptops and tablets. Says they're "bad for your posture" and they "disrupt social interactions integral to society". My Xbox and the Super Nintendo are stored out in the living room with the tv, yeah, but the poor computer remains firmly ostracized.] It might seem like overkill, but what do you do when you have The One Ring, or the irreplaceable Pearl of Great Price*? You backup the shit out of that thing so you'll always have a copy.

I heard the bathroom door open, and saw her streak to the bedroom in nothing but her towel.

"Two minutes!" I called. Yeah, like that was going to happen…

"Ten minutes!"

"You said that eight minutes ago!" I sighed, creating a separate folder for Comic Con and Engagement pics. I'm not the 'entire desktop has to be alphabetically ordered" sort of girl, but Prerna appreciates not having to deal with my mess. I had the time. Figured what the hell, I'd save her some work.

"Ten minutes!"

"Fine. Ten minutes!"

…Ten minutes was beginning to become our Always*.

Spiderman's Klingon cosplay, Kelly and Clark as Luke and Leia, the Doctor Who panel, me getting my picture with a kickass Captain Jack Harkness and Gwen Cooper couple, a few dozen close-ups of a bunch of girls wearing MLP tails (the sort of photographic journalism my friendly neighborhood Spiderman was famous for. I would just fucking murder him.) random people in cosplay, random people in cosplay…this was going to take fucking forever. I had to have at least thousand pictures of the weekend on this thing. And there! Our first selfie of the morning, her half-way into her Tauriel dress, hair already elaborately braided. I scrolled more slowly now—

…Legolas. Standing in front of the MCU Stage 2 display, almost lost against the dark blue/grey backdrop.

That couldn't be right. I squinted, leaned closer into the screen to examine this mysterious, hooded figure that my eyes insisted was our cosplaying prince from this afternoon. All I could make out was the bottom of his chin, the very point of his slender nose, and the tips of his iridescent blond hair, but he was there, alright. Call it premonition, call it tachyons, call it converging time lines or déjà vu, but it terrified me. I felt a bit sick.

I scrolled on, and that fucking creep just kept following my camera. Legolas standing shadowed by the Hulk poster, that cloak now a vibrant, violent green. Legolas and Gimli beneath the Black Widow montage, silver-black as twilight. Their twin silhouettes against the harsh golds and reds of the Iron man display, like two falling leaves.

There they were again, waiting for us outside of the Women in Comics panel, the fabric of the cloaks a muted, dirty white like the wall behind them, fading into the rich patterns of the carpet below.

The cloaks had changed color.

…Fuck. The cloaks had changed color.

Holy fucking fuck of Fucktown, Fuckania their fucking cloaks had fucking changed color—*!

Surrounded by the mill of a couple thousand fans pressing to enter and/or leave, and not a single person saw them or stopped them. Not a face was turned.

It was like they'd been invisible. No one had seen them. Not even me.

I kept clicking, mesmerized. I just couldn't look away. Sometimes the two of them, sometimes just Legolas' taller frame, but in every picture and in every angle, there was a shadow and a threat. Who hunts in the middle of a crowd? I heard Benedict Cumberbatch's dulcet tones with just a trace of terrifying sneer. The invisible man with the invisible knife…

I slid my leather-bound hardcover copy of the Red Book of Westmarch* from the bookshelf, frantically flipping to Moria and beyond. I passed the pages with Legolas singing the Lay of Nimrodel with sudden dread.

At last, the lembas bread. My eyes scanned the page. There, in Tolkien's—or Frodo's—own words:

For each they had provided a hood and cloak, made according to his size…it was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars…

"Are these magic cloaks?" asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder.

"But they should serve you well…you will find them a great aid in keeping out the sight of unfriendly eyes, whether you walk among the stones or the trees."

That's when I realized the patent absurdity of it all. I had—we had—a potential set of homicidal stalkers on our hands and my first instinct was to look for the exact wording of an obscure passage in a fictional book published July 24, 1954. That's it, girl, my brain told me. One trip too many. I told you when you were fifteen that the drugs would fuck you up…

I shook my head. Resumed my work with the book still open across my lap. I scrolled through all of them, feeling sick. My suspicions were right. The Legs was in every single goddamned picture…and he was staring straight at me.

Well, fuck.

*Guys, guys…Figwit/Lindir has a band. New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo, or whatever the fuck they're calling themselves these days. [And am I the only one having a complete nerdgasm that Lindir means 'singer' in Sindarin?]

*It would've been five years. But Lareina and I had a messy, mid-holidays break-up and I needed a fix and needed it bad. I felt so damned shitty after three days of shooting up I called Scott to come take my ass straight back to rehab.

And that's the thing about being the addict little sister. You call a guy, shit all over his Christmas, make him book his ass back up here from Florida and he's all "happy you called me". You can't hate a guy who'd die [or kill] for you or who'd drop everything in his life at any time for anything you needed, but is it too much to ask him to be just a little bit pissed or angry? …Ever? No matter how old you get, you'll always be a fucking child.

*Yeah, I'm looking at you, Professor. Let's count: Frodo Baggins: parents died in tragic boating accident. Samwise Gamgee: mother never mentioned. Bilbo Baggins: both parents dead by the time the events of The Hobbit took place. Aragorn: father died when he was two, dick of a foster dad failed to mention he was heir of Númeanor until age twenty, mother "lost the will to live [wtfuck, Padme, I mean Gilraen?]". Arwen: dad fails to mention adopted fosterbrother whose destiny is to reunite the sundered lines of the half-Elven, dooms her to death; mother gets waylaid by orcs, poisoned, and sails off to Valinor. Faramir and Boromir: deranged dad, mother dead. Éomer and Éowyn: parents died in their childhood, uncle was absent father figure, husband dresses her in dead mother's dresses (um, yuck?). Theodred: who the fuck was his mother? Gimli: father leaves on important quest during developmental years, mother never mentioned. Legolas: mother never mentioned, dad is questionably insane insular redneck racist and rumored member of Nazi party. Elrond and Elros: father sails off to find gramma and grandpa, mother is attacked by angry Noldorin and chucks herself off of cliff. Eldarion: only child; dad commits suicide, mom commits suicide within the same year. Tuor: father dies gloriously in battle, mom chucks him to the Elves and then…wait for it!... commits suicide. And don't get me fucking started on Galadriel or the Children of Húrin.

I'm telling you, the dysfunctional family was this guy's modus operandi. Then again, he had a shit childhood and early adult life himself.

*xkcd, I'm telling you.

*What is with that man and terrible train metaphors? Batman Begins and Inception? Don't let that man anywhere near an Anna Karenina adaptation. [And yes. Of course it's one of Prerna's favorite books. Did you think high Russian literature was a past time of mine—? Although personally, any excuse to see Kiera Knightley mostly naked is a good excuse to see Kiera Knightley mostly naked. ]

*It's filed in my mind palace under 'Sore Subjects: Avoid at All Costs'.

*insert terrible Erectile Dysfunction joke here. NPC? Get it?

…nevermind.

*SHER was probably an obvious choice, in hindsight. Cumberbatch is to the twenty-teens what poor Legsie was to the twenty-aughts.

*Spiderman'd been trying to set me up since he met me through his sister Emilia. His constant interference usually went something like "Hate your hair. Not likely. Yikes. Yikes. Yikes. Let me guess, you have a great personality." My exact reaction to seeing his new facebook friend Prerna Prashad was 'Freida Pinto is great, who is that?'

Yeah. He kept the text. I have the terrible suspicion it'll find its way into his best man speech…

*You like Silmarils? Want some more? SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER! …sorry, sorry. I've seen The Emperor's New Groove at least a thousand times too many, the only Disney movie, btw, to star a pregnant or married woman as the love interest or have the fat, bumbling sidekick be the romantic lead. Or have the moral of the story be something other than "true romantic heterosexual love conquers all!" We need more mainstream stories like that. Thank God for Mulan and Frozen.

*Ah. See I was actually thinking tfios, but the whole Snape/Lily might work here too.

*Well that certainly demonstrates the diversity of the word. If his Elf eyes could stomach the ridiculously slow slide projection that is our standard 24 or even 48 fps, I think Legolas would've enjoyed that one. But Boondock Saints or no, television not only confuses the shit out of him it also gives him headaches.

…what, you thought immortality didn't have any side effects? Just because the species is humanoid doesn't mean their biology is anything close to human. You'd think you'd learn that from Doctor Who or Star Trek: DS9 (all hail the mighty Roddenberry, Creator of Mpreg). The guy's like a fucking Time Lord.

*Of course I call it that. Couldn't resist.