A/N: Man, no matter how much better Veser's existence is in this AU, it's still tinged with utter suck. I really loved writing this chapter, hope you like it too~

Oh god Lee. Leeeeeeeeeee. …The second stage of grief is anger, by the by.

OH and in case anybody's confused, Mr Hatch was the 'asshole' mentioned last chapter who raped Ves' mom and then subsequently got his 'head bitten off or some shit'. Basically, this AU twist is how the family would have functioned if Mr Hatch hadn't been the tyrannical driving force of it.

Warnings: language, mentionings of sexual activities, Severe Selkie Sadness and a Bad Made-Up Name for Mrs. Hatch ERRR Mrs. Falun ERRRR Veser's Mom Yay

Second Stage of Grief

"Hey, Lee. M'home."

Veser's keys crashed down on the counter, hoodie sloughed to the side like an oily skin as he kicked the door shut. Moonlight streamed in the un-shuttered window, lighting the kitchen a haunting under-sea blue. He chewed on his lower lip in the careful sideways way he'd learned to, bee-lining for the fridge. He was starving.

He opened the door and, yes. Tilapia from last night. Boss.

"Hey, Sharkbait. Where'd you go?" Lee called from the office, with some kind of soft rock playing in the background. Maybe that was the reason he sounded so far away. Weird. Veser scooped off a handful of the flaky white fish and sucked it down cold, snapping the Tupperware closed and tossing it back on the shelf.

"Y'know. Out."

Closing the fridge, he licked his fingers then his lips and fingered the wad of cash in his pocket. Nice haul, if he said so himself. His left hand hung at his side, bandaged up to the fingertips but he'd made it look like a simple band-aid with a bit of glamour. He didn't need Lee asking questions about all the weird injuries he got, since he wasn't technically supposed to be selling his magic. Or doing it at all. Within sight of other people, at least.

"You, uh… could've called."

Veser's mouth twisted, expression abruptly turning surly. Leave it to Lee to trash his good mood. And in the way only he could, of course.

It wasn't you should have, but you could have. Veser hated it when the older man pulled that hazy you're-a-responsible-adult-and-I-trust-you-so-why-haven't-you-rewarded-my-faith guilt trip on him, probably because it actually worked. Lee didn't usually care where he went or how late he stayed out, but every so often he got soppy. Worried. Sad.

The thought of Lee watching the door while he was gone always made Veser feel at least a slight pang of regret, even if it was buried in a prickly nest of irritation. He was pretty much doomed by his own conscience to stay in the following night, which would find him kicking around and watching TV just to subliminally assure his guardian that he didn't belong to a gang or whatever. Christ. The hoola-hoops he jumped through for Lee.

Veser looked up when he heard the squeak of a computer chair and heavy footsteps in the hallway. A moment later Lee walked into the silent kitchen, pushing his lank light hair out of his eyes. The look on his handsome face, bedraggled and miserable and white, did not bode well.

"I thought maybe you…" His raspy, destroyed voice wasn't good either. The older man took a deep breath, like pulling the very air into his aching chest cost him something dear. His hands were shaking. "It's only been a few days and I thought—"

Shit, shit, shit. This. Already, Veser wanted to demand, but the truth of it was at least he waited this long.

"You thought wrong. I'm okay. Seriously," the half-selkie grit out, then locked eyes with the defeated man standing in the doorway and sighed, scrubbing at his pinched face. "I got homework."

He dragged his feet into his room and threw down his backpack and, not bothering to turn on the light, collapsed in his old swivel-chair. He scowled.

It was his mom.

It had always been his mom, really, but that meant something completely different after the midnight visit from the police a week ago. When he said 'she died' to the guy and his pet zombie, what he meant was that she had been found washed up on the docks with her pelt wrapped around her neck like a noose. It hadn't disturbed Veser near as much as he thought it would, which really wasn't saying much, but Lee… Lee was another story. The empty vodka bottle under the counter was proof enough of that, because the man never drank. Lee was also pretty determined to foist his grief on him, which Veser really didn't find fucking kosher, especially considering his history with his mom.

Half-breeds weren't popular, never had been. Iena had made a science experiment out of how much water he could stand when he was like three days old. When it became pretty fucking obvious that she couldn't drown him but he was going to be landlocked for most of his life, she — or any other selkie really — wouldn't make the sacrifice. She found a way to keep him within arms-reach, on land, with a few selkie love-charms. What the seal-folk did best, really.

Pretty shitty of his mom, to enslave a random guy on the beach into being his nanny. Not to say she couldn't have heartlessly and non-partisan-ly picked a better guy to be his fake dad, even forgetting the whole cushy job and the extra bedroom because selkies didn't think about that money shit. But Lee was cool. Like, seriously cool. The best person in Veser's life, even if that category boasted a whopping three people.

His bedroom door opened behind him, slow and creaky and tender. Veser grit his sharp teeth. He kept his mouth shut until Lee was inside and had stared at him for a good minute, trying not to imagine the man's kind blue eyes watering like some kind of fucking Hallmark Moments poster-boy.

"Are you?" Veser heard the squeak as Lee sat down on his bed. The half-selkie kept staring at the wall, unimpressed. Lee clasped his hands over his knees and clarified hesitantly, "Okay?"

"Lee, seriously, don't start this shit with me," Veser said flatly, wheeling the chair around and kicking his feet against the desk, trying to look the picture of unconcerned. "Have I ever lied to you?"

"Maybe you've never had a reason to. Maybe nothing's been important enough before now," Lee said with a quietness that for some reason made Veser snap into a rage that was as loud and ragged as Lee was pale and quiet.

"Maybe nothing. Yeah, nothing, 'cos that's what it is! Nothing."

Nonsensical though it was, it was all he could grit out, voice raspy. All at once, he was digging his nails into his palms and aching to slam into something, but this wasn't the blustering rage that dissolved into tears. This was just anger. Just fucking anger, plain and simple, cavernous and hot and awfully clean. He hated the anguish on the older man's face because it was that cold bitch's fault and she was ruining shit from behind the scenes again, killing Lee in the way only she could.

The she-selkie was the source of his freak-teeth and a cold tutor in the ways of the spooky sparkly Beyond, and here Lee was implying he should be crying his eyes out over her like he'd obviously been doing for the past day? The past week? The thought made him curl up inside with rage, made him go a little insane, especially with the slow, mournful way Lee was rubbing at that fucking sealing mark on his left ring-finger.

"You know what, I'm glad she's dead!"

"Don't say that. Please," Lee said, voice quivering. One hand came up to rub at his closed eyes. "I know how it was. I know. I just… thought…"

Then his hands were back in his lap, long fingers worrying at the tattoo. It went all the way around, lacy and vaguely gaelic, like a wedding ring. In reality, it was a magical tracking device and a physical mark of his mom's charm-hold on Lee. It was so strong, she could even stop his heart through that same mark and answered unflinchingly when her son asked about it. No one ever said his mother wasn't an outrageous bitch, but Veser always found it convenient to have indisputable proof right under his nose.

Seeing Lee push at his shackles like that with his thin body bowed around it, like it was his lifeline to something beautiful that had gone too soon, made something lock up inside the half-selkie. Veser's skin went cold. His chest got colder yet. This was the moment that had been hovering for years — for as long as it took him to realize that the look on Lee's face when Iena went back into the ocean wasn't just the result of a really boss stomachache — and it finally crested with a silent roar.

"Dude," Veser said evenly, clearly, flatly. His green eyes — his mother's eyes — bored into Lee's. "She never loved you."

Lee ducked his head.

"She never loved you and she was never gonna love you. You were an easy lay and the only one stupid enough to go near a naked chick with a kid on the beach and take it when she said so. I mean, who the fuck does that?"

"Ves."

"She witched you. I fucking saw her witch you," the half-selkie said, louder, accusing the dead woman even as he tried to get through to the best friend he'd ever had.

Not the first time, no, but he'd seen her put varnish on the spell every single fucking time she came to the surface and they suddenly converged and became this creepy family with Lee. They went for walks and movies and kept up the whole 'separated parents' act to the city, as if everyone was watching. They took him to ice-cream parlors and laughed together, fingers laced like the frilly seam of a clam-shell, when he bit clear through the cone with one snap of his needle-teeth and sent the stuff slopping down the front of his overalls. The blond man had spent a handful of precious afternoons strolling down the street with his arm around Iena and his hand on Veser's head, and he always looked like he was orgasming constantly. Just, like, bliss.

Half of it was probably the spell at work, but Lee had always wanted a family. He had just never found the right woman… a fact that didn't change when Iena found him. Veser could easily imagine the original scenario: the awed, helpless, devoted look on Lee's handsome all-American-boy face as he crested the top of the hill. He could see the sea-grass waving, see Lee as the tall man pushed it aside and stared in wonder at the naked silver-haired goddess on the beach, holding a small child with razor-sharp teeth in her arms.

She probably smiled at him, and that was all it took. He was gone. Gone Lee-on.

She came in from the sea four times a year, when the moon was full and the tide was high. Dragged her son and successor to the table. Made him learn shit. Gave him homework for the months she was going to ignore him and Lee.

The two of them, Iena and Lee, fucked after attending the music festival or the baseball game or the parade. Of course they fucked. Lots of selkie magic hinged on that carnal pact and had for hundreds of years and they were no exception.

So, for Veser, that meant lots of nights of plugging his ears and sinking into his fluffy mattress and wishing she would just fucking go away. Let him go back to the life he'd managed to carve out past the dirty frigid tide-pools of the bay, anchored among the sooty bricks and the weed-cracked cement sidewalks. The almost-friends he'd made, even if he just smoked pot with them.

Every time she came, she messed stuff up. She messed Lee up. She left him pining for her for weeks, left him sullen and not wanting to do the stupid shit that meant so much to him at that age, like tossing balls and bowling and other lame kid stuff. Those dry spells of two-fold abandonment let Veser know loud and clear which of the mother-son pair was more important to Lee. Right about the time he started to forget about his mom and the stinging feeling she left him with, she was back again, spell-book in hand.

Veser didn't want to learn magic, in the beginning. Maybe because he hadn't really realized that it was the only thing he was legitimately talented at. In the end, he only picked up voodoo because he knew how much it would piss her off. Never got a chance to make his grand reveal.

She died — was murdered and laid out on the docks – before he could. Happy fucking day, right?

"This is all a fucking spell, because she never loved you and you never loved her. She made you into her fucking slave, used you like a sex toy, tagged you like some animal and you're going to sit around and drag ass when you got a chance to actually get out of the spell and get a real life? Find someone who actually puts up with you and doesn't go for a swim every time you want to talk shop? How can you fucking do that?"

For a moment, Veser's dark bedroom was saturated with bitter silence: the breathlessness before a dropped weight, embodied in the tenseness of Veser's foot on his desk, his clenched hands. He had been waiting to hear Lee's answer to this for years, equal parts harshness and desperation in his bright green eyes as he looked at his father. His guidance, his pillar, his teacher, his friend.

A bar of light from his bedroom window hit Lee across the face, paling him into a blue-washed ghost.

"Some things start with magic and go past them," Lee said at last, quietly, miserably. He looked up and in the lines of his face was a sorrow and a resignation so complete it dissolved the strength of his jaw and the warmth in his eyes. He was lost inside of himself and he'd burned the ladder. "I'm sorry, Ves. I can't help it."

For a moment, it was all Veser could do just to stare at him. Then he turned the chair with a disgusted shake of his head, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

"Fuck you, man. Seriously."

He meant to turn away and be done with it, closing off whatever hurt and fuck did it hurt, but this time his anger broke, sudden and choppy like grey arctic waves on shore. Veser took a deep breath, but when it came out, his throat was squeezed shut and he was crying. He jerked and bowed over and hissed into his sleeve and before he knew it, Lee was on his knees, warm arms wrapped around him, and he cried like a sissy but it wasn't because his mommy was dead.

He never had one to begin with, and now his dad was staring at an empty picture frame.