AN~ This is one of my favorite Daphne ships actually, and I had a hard time breaking them up. One more chapter and then the epilogue!
The truth is that there's no getting over losing someone, ever. But life goes on, and people learn how to deal with the hole in their life. Daphne restructures her life around the space where Peter used to be. It hurts, and she's a mess (Lauren puts up with her through it, and she's kind of amazed), but eventually she can be okay again. It's slow and uncomfortable and so, so hard, but doable.
She doesn't date seriously for a while, though. It takes her a long time to even work up to practice dates.
She gets out fairly often, and after a while, she starts saying yes. None of it feels right, though, and she breaks it off after the first couple of dates, every time.
One of the boys she dates is named Bradley O'Connor, and he's really nice but also really not her type, and she pans him off to Sabrina (who's been single far longer than Daphne and needs to start getting over Puck because the boy is not coming back, Sabrina, get that through your head). They hit it off.
And then they're engaged and Daphne's still trying to figure out why she doesn't like any of the boys who ask her out because she knows there's nothing wrong with them which means there must be something wrong with her but then her big sister's getting married and it's too soon too fast she's losing Sabrina too.
But she's a big girl and she can handle it so she sucks it up and smiles and talks to Red and deals. And it's good. Sabrina's happy. That's what matters. Even if Daphne sends messages out to Puck in every way she can possibly think to do it to tell him it's his last chance. (Even if he hurt Sabrina, he's still like Daphne's brother, and she wants to think that maybe not all blonde boys who don't want to grow up and have contagious smiles have to leave forever.)
And at the wedding- Puck's there.
Holy freaking shiznits, Puck comes back.
It's almost enough to distract Daphne from the way Bradley's heart is obviously breaking up there, because even though Sabrina's yelling at Puck, screaming at him for doing something so awful, it's obvious that she loves him still. And Bradley knows it.
Daphne gets distracted from this, though, by Pinocchio.
It's been years since Daphne's seen him, since he was big enough to pass himself off as college-age. He applied, got in with some huge scholarship that Daphne kind of envies considering how much college costs (even though she got a pretty good deal herself), and was off halfway across the world. He didn't do nearly as good a job staying in touch as she did. She tried, and he responded, at first, but it was pretty obvious that he was really caught up in his studies.
And he's... oh lord, he's gotten gorgeous.
He's still got the big nose and kind of the buck teeth, but now they add character to his face. Otherwise it would be too perfect. Buck teeth don't look bad on him (overbites don't look bad on a lot of people, and his aren't too noticeable. He's got the chin to balance them out), and the nose is interesting. Daphne's own nose is flat and pretty small, so she appreciates large ones. His hair's nearly as dark as hers, straight and shining and thick. She could stare at his eyes for days, and he's fit. Daphne never really imagined Pinocchio would be in shape. He's always been a skinny thing, and then a beanpole, more interested in books than food.
"Japan's been good for you," Daphne says, smiling at him.
A number of people are at the reception anyway, even though Bradley's called off the wedding. They paid for the food, after all. And Bradley, Sabrina, and Puck are certainly taking advantage of the open bar. It's... very tense, but Daphne's determined to at least enjoy the hors d'ouvres. And the mancake.
Pinocchio smiles back. "Thank you. And how has college been treating you?"
"It's been interesting," Daphne says vaguely.
Pinocchio raises an eyebrow at her and asks, "That sounds like you've got some tales to tell."
Daphne smiles a little. "How about we start with your stories before we move on to mine? Japan's got to be fascinating."
"It certainly is much better when one looks old enough to buy an apartment," Pinocchio agrees.
Daphne laughs and leads him over to a chair. "So tell me about it, and I'll tell you all about the fascinating land of Arizona."
"You know, I've actually never been to Arizona," Pinocchio says. "So I will be awed by anything you have to say."
They trade stories for a while. Pinocchio has had a great time at school, and spent all his free time exploring the country. Daphne can kind of forgive him for not keeping in touch, all things considered. She might forget to call home once a week if she were climbing mountains and learning everything there is to know about Kabuki theater.
She stays away from the Peter thing for a while, not because she's keeping it a secret, but because it's hard to talk about. He comes up casually, 'I was dating this boy,' and 'Peter and I-' as little references. And it turns out she's had quite an exciting time in Arizona. Maybe not as exciting as Japan, but pretty fun.
"You make it sound fascinating," Pinocchio says. "I may have to come visit."
"You should," Daphne says.
"Very well, then, I shall," Pinocchio agrees. "I have plenty of time on my hands now, and my exploration of the world has been sorely lacking in the Americas. Perhaps I shall start with you and then move on to other places. Mexico, perhaps. Alaska."
"Or you could, you know, stay for a while," Daphne suggests. "I mean, you don't have to, but it's a pretty cool place, and I haven't really gotten to spend much time with you. I've missed you. It'd be nice to be able to get caught up before you go running off to be a grown-up again."
"Perhaps," Pinocchio says, but it sounds like an agreement, and he smiles.
Sabrina and Puck don't get together before Daphne has to go back to school, but then again she wasn't expecting them to. They've always been difficult, and Daphne's found that it's best to leave them to work their problems out themselves. Getting involved just makes them more stubborn. Bradley, though, Bradley's told Sabrina that he's leaving her for some reason (Sabrina didn't want to share details), and he's gone.
Daphne's a senior and very busy with school work, but she and Lauren still find time to have fun, along with their other friends at school. She's in the middle of midterms, with fun (and anything that isn't related to developmental psychology) so far out of her mind that she's almost forgotten what they're like, when Pinocchio shows up.
She's in the library, and Lauren calls her and says, "There's a guy here, says he's your cousin or something?"
Daphne apologizes for the lack of warning and explains (Lauren already knows about Daphne's odd family situation and her grandmother's penchant for adopting people, so the fact that she'll probably stare at her 'cousin' like he's a Calvin Klein ad won't throw her for too much of a loop. Then she heads back to the apartment she and Lauren have been renting, facts about younger sons being five percent more likely to be gay than oldest sons unless they're left handed closer to the forefront of her brain than getting to see a friend.
She wonders how that applies to magical children. If Ghepetto and the blue fairy had made a second puppet-son, would he be more likely to like boys than Pinocchio?
It's frustrating when her magical life interferes with her school life, because she's just stressed enough that she might write an essay about something like that, and it wouldn't come out nearly as hypothetical as she'd like it to. One time she actually wrote an essay about the effects of prolonged childhood on an adult's ability to function. Her teacher had enjoyed it, but her grade had suffered because of a lack of concrete sources.
Apparently, six case studies whose existence she couldn't actually prove didn't count. Who knew?
Pinocchio looks even hotter, if possible. It might just be that she hasn't looked at a boy outside of her chemistry lab partner in weeks (her chemistry partner is not pretty) and her libido is getting pretty frustrated, even though she hasn't paid much attention to it. It could also be that he's gotten a tan from somewhere. Or the way his face lights up with a smile when she walks in the door.
It's probably the smile. He should smile more often.
"Hi!" she says, giving him a hug and a smile just as bright as his own. "It's great to see you, I've missed you, I have midterms, I'll be in my room."
Pinocchio stares after her and asks, "Is she often like this about schoolwork?"
"Well, kinda yeah," Lauren says with a small laugh. "Wasn't she in high school?"
Daphne wasn't, and she peeks her head back into the main room to say as much: "I didn't give a crap about what I was learning in high school. This is important."
"Would you, um," Pinocchio starts, "Would you like help? Studying? I know a number of useful techniques."
"Of course you do," Daphne says. "Come on, smartypants. Bestow your wisdom on me." She nods at her room, and Pinocchio follows her in.
She leaves the door open, ignores the waggle of eyebrows Lauren gives her, and settles on the floor to get her books out. Pinocchio sits next to her, criss-cross applesauce counterpoint to her open lounge across the floor (the library chairs aren't comfortable by a long shot), and begins looking at her books.
Once Lauren's gotten distracted from giving Daphne some very creative gestures about how nice to look at Pinocchio is and Daphne's decided she's earned a break from studying, she asks, "So... what did you tell her your name is? Just so I don't slip up and call you pincushion in front of the normal people."
"Pino," Pinocchio says. "It's Italian. The root of my name."
Daphne raises an eyebrow at him. "Subtle."
Pinocchio shrugs and says, "You try coming up with a good name to cover up the fact that you're a storybook character."
"Hopefully Daphne will always be a common enough name that I won't have to," Daphne says, pushing her book away from her with her foot, distastefully. "Pinocchio can't have been common even when you were... born? Engendered? Created?"
"Engendered," Pinocchio agrees, then shrugs. "It was the beginning of my sentiment that the world was against me, I suppose. Glad to have outgrown that."
Daphne gives a little laugh. She's glad, too. He mellowed out a lot as he grew up, and even though he still kind of talks like he atea dictionary for breakfast, he's fun now.
She wants to kiss him.
Okay, back to studying!
Daphne dives back into her work with gusto, because Pinocchio hasn't been giving off signals for anything more than friendship (hasn't been giving off any signals that anything's changed since they were kids) and she doesn't want to push something like this on him.
Until she's finished with her midterms, she doesn't really have much time to spare to show him around. She leads him to the library and he's perfectly happy to putter around in there until she does have time. They get dinner together and he sleeps on the futon in their living room. Things are nice, if hectic.
Finally, all her big tests are over and she has time to spare. She takes him on a hike in the middle of nowhere to look at the mesas.
The plan actually isn't to climb one of the things, but there's a trail, and she and Peter went up it pretty easily, and it's such a nice day, and an even nicer view from the top, so up they go. They sit on the edge, the wind in their hair, the blue sky all around them, and the red rocks below. Daphne's ancestors lived around here, on her mother's side at least. She feels as home here as anywhere else, comfortable and guileless.
Which is probably why she says, "I came here with my last boyfriend. Before he died." She hasn't told him that Peter died, not yet.
For a few minutes, Pinocchio doesn't say anything. Then he says, "I'd like to despise him for loving you while I was gone. Instead, I find that I'm simply sorry you've been hurt."
Daphne gives him a tight, confused smile. She leans back on her elbows, looking up at the wispy clouds. "He never said he loved me. I never told him I loved him either, though, so it's only fair."
"He must have loved you," Pinocchio says.
Daphne looks at him without turning her face from the sky above her. She raises her eyebrows in a silent question. If she moves too much, something will break, and this moment of honesty will end.
"I believe it is impossible not to love you," Pinocchio says softly. He isn't moving either, propped up on one elbow with his face towards the ground far below. "I know I have never been able to manage it since we first became closer to friends than rivals."
Daphne does the math in her head, and her eyes go wide. That's nearly a decade. "And you never said," she says. It's only a whisper, pulled out of her mouth by the wind and blown away, but he hears it.
He shrugs. "I wanted to, at times. So many times. But you never seemed interested, and I would have rather had you in my life as a friend than out of my life knowing my feelings."
"Very grown-up of you," Daphne says approvingly.
He gives her a small, tight smile. She returns the smile, wider and less nervous, and twines their fingers together.
They take it slow, this change in their relationship. It's odd, feeling out new ground like this with someone she's known intimately since she was eight years old. They're happy, even if they bicker as much as they always have. It's a friendly kind of bickering. And Pinocchio fits into her life with Lauren nicely. The three of them get a nice rhythm going. It's a rhythm full of discussions about linguistics, something all three of them (particularly Lauren, who's studying to be a speech pathologist) have a strong interest in.
Sabrina and Puck get married in April, and the three of them go together. This wedding's about as different from Sabrina's last, failed wedding as it possibly can. It's outside, far less formal, and with a different color scheme. Daphne's still just happy her sister's happy, even if a spring wedding in the middle of her final semester of college meant that she couldn't be the maid of honor this time around.
Daphne notices Pinocchio starting to get antsy right around when she starts her thesis project. She's not surprised. He's stayed still longer than he has in years, and he's been talking about wanting to go see South America since he got back from Japan. She understands. She wants him to go off and study the dialects of Spanish spoken outside of Spain like he's been wanting to. She wants him to write some scholarly essay about the fall of the great cultures south of the border.
She just can't go with him.
See, Daphne's got grad school coming up, or she'd better, if she wants to be able to do much with her degree. And she wants to be able to help kids who are in situations like the one where she grew up. She can't do like Granny and adopt everyone she comes in contact with who doesn't have a family (it's probably smart for an Everafter to not adopt humans as much as possible), but she's going to help kids. And she needs to go to school for that.
More than that, she needs a job to get through school. Because her undergrad's leaving her pretty much debt-free, but she hasn't been able to get enough money to get herself through the next few years of school without working. Especially not if she wants to keep her apartment. So job and school and real life it is. And she's not upset. She's got eternity to see things and explore. She hasn't been putting this off for nearly as long as Pinocchio has.
She'll miss him, though, and she doesn't have a good history with long-distance relationships.
But this is his life, and it's more important to her than keeping him with her. Especially since he won't be happy if he stays here.
"You should go," she tells him, because he's been talking about staying here to keep her company. "I'll be here if you want to come back, but... I can't hold you back."
Pinocchio gives her a sorrowful look, but he agrees. She never really expected anything different. He's not the type of person to mold his life around someone else; he never has been. And she loves that about him, most of the time.
Daphne graduates. Pinocchio stays for that, and for two weeks after. Then her increased hours pick up and he heads for Guatemala. Lauren's visiting her family in Tai Pei, and if Daphne had time to spare, she'd be lonely. She doesn't have the time, though. And then her parents bring Basil down for a visit, and she wouldn't be lonely anyway.
The summer goes one visit after another: after Henry, Veronica, and Basil leave, Red drags Mr. Canis down for their own vacation. Pinocchio comes back up for a little while before he heads off to northern Canada. Puck and Sabrina come by, announce that Sabrina's pregnant, and stay for a while. Lauren comes back before Sabrina and Puck leave again, dragging her family with her. Lauren's grandparents leave just in time for Daphne and Lauren to start grad school. The weather turns cold, and Pinocchio comes back.
He leaves again soon after, this time bound for Venezuela, and Lauren goes with him on an independent study for her linguistics master's degree. Daphne's kind of swamped with work to be too lonely, but she's glad when Red comes for another visit, this time alone, and stays for a while.
This long-distance relationship is working out a lot better than the last two. Daphne and Pinocchio talk whenever he has wifi or cell phone connection, and when he doesn't, he sends her letters. They're long and verbose and very like him, and they just make her miss him more.
Sometimes it strikes her as weird that he's the one off exploring the world and she's the one staying still and studying. It's kind of a switch from what she'd have expected ten years ago. Most of the time she just is happy for the pictures he's sending her. Someday she'll see these things herself.
Pinocchio and Lauren come back together in the spring, and something's changed. Daphne expected them to be close. After all, they were always friends, and they've just spent four months traveling together. But this...
She's not surprised when Pinocchio tells her he thinks he's in love with Lauren. She's watched them for the few days since they came back, and she can see it. So it hurts, but it's not a shock.
"Okay, then," she agrees. "I... I'll miss you, but I want you both to be happy."
"You're not angry?" he asks.
Daphne shakes her head. "You're two of my closest friends. And you can't help your emotions."
Pinocchio gives her a small, sad smile. "You'll always be my first love."
He and Lauren leave again soon after. Daphne's kind of glad. She's happy for them, but it's a lot easier to be happy for them when they're not around.