Silence.

Gary's eyes widened; his hand clapped over his face. He looked like he'd have given anything to take the words back. Meanwhile, I was just utterly, completely, totally confused, my jaw dumbly slack. Somehow I recovered sooner, though I was still processing what he'd admitted.

"I...I'm sorry, and the whole drinking blood thing was for kicks and giggles?"

"No, I mean…" He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. "Fuck." That summarized it pretty well, I figured. "I'm a dhampir."

That certainly didn't clear anything up. I gestured for him to elaborate.

"Half-vampire, half-human. One of the reasons I'm so messy. My teeth aren't exactly right." He lifted his top lip to show his teeth which, now that I had a closer look, didn't include the row of pointed teeth that the others had boasted. Instead, he had what one might have considered the "traditional" vampire fangs: a pair of prominent canines, smaller than Isobel's had been, but otherwise normal, human teeth. "Contrary to popular belief, these suck. Literally."

"And the blood drinking?"

"It's an acquired taste," he said. "...which I have acquired."

Yet another twist to the history of the boy I'd called my best friend since kindergarten. At this point, I should have been expecting him to confess he was actually from Zebulon-6 in the X98H galaxy.

I'd known Gary's mother, a long time ago, and any memories of her were sparse but pleasant. The most vivid memory I had was of her funeral eight years ago. Sometimes I wondered how Gary would have turned out had she never left.

His father, on the other hand, was a mystery to me. I'd never met him, Gary had never talked about him.

Until now, that is.

My mom was working later today, so my house was the most private place to talk. We settled ourselves on the sofa, leaning against opposite cushioned arms.

"My mother, she was a human," Gary began. "You met her."

I nodded. I suddenly felt the emptiness of my hands and twisted them into the blanket I sat on. He looked over at the television, brow tense.

"My father left when I was three," he said. "He was an Old World one, like Herriot. I don't remember much of him. All I know is that my mom was absolutely devastated when he left, and I haven't forgiven him since."

"Have you heard anything from him, at all?"

"Nothing," he said. "And it doesn't matter. I never want to see him or hear from him again."

Coming from a single-mother household myself, I understood the feeling. My own dad had left before I was in high school. My mom preferred not to talk about him, and I was okay with that arrangement, to be honest. It was a quick, clean separation, but it had stung. An underlying current of guilt that couldn't be reasoned or logicked away lingered.

I reached over to take his hands in mine, and his frown lifted.

SEVEN YEARS LATER

"Did you get groceries?" I called into the house after I'd shut the door, relishing a bit in the warmth that buzzed in my rouged cheeks. Gary was home; his job as a writer offered him a luxury mine as a high school teacher did not.

I hung my keys on one of the pegs of our shelf and slipped off my snow-dusted coat as Gary emerged from the kitchen, a mug of tea in hand. Over time, he'd come to actually like the taste, despite his usual preference for beverages.

He made that little clicking-sucking sound with his tongue he always made when he knew he was in deep shit and was deliberating the quickest way out of it.

"You know how much I love you," he offered.

"You know how much I love having food in the house," I retorted, sweetly as ever, as I passed his leaning figure in the doorway into the kitchen and nabbed his tea on the way. I took a liberal sip to find he'd gone with raspberry today. Maybe he was just more adept at steeping than I was, but stealing his tea always tasted better than making my own.

"I thought you'd be satisfied with just little old me, Mrs Oak," he said from behind me.

It'd been almost a year already, but he still managed to fluster me when he called me that. Although I was getting better at hiding it, he could still tell—at least judging by the incorrigible smirk that met me when I glanced over my shoulder at him.

"You're lucky I've got enough for dinner tonight, buster," I said as I set the mug down on the kitchen island, but I couldn't put as much force behind the words as I'd wanted to, especially when he chose that moment to wrap his arms around me from behind and press a kiss to my hair.

"I know what I want for dessert," he whispered into my ear, sending a pleasant chill down my spine.

"Oh, knock it off." But a giggle invaded my words as he tickled my sides until I squirmed about to face him. We kissed in that way newlyweds did, like there was no one else in the world, Gary playfully patting my backside and my hands caressing his face.

"Hold on," I said between clinging kisses, and I needed to take him by the chin to stop him from going in for another. "When was the last time you shaved?" I asked, turning his head left and right, and he looked confused.

"A couple days ago, I think?" he guessed. His hand came up to settle over mine. "What? Are you suggesting I need to shave again?"

"No, I'm suggesting that your skin is as soft as a baby's bottom." I frowned at him. "You stopped ageing, didn't you?"

As a dhampir, Gary had once explained to me, he would grow at a normal—to wit, human—rate until maturity. Now that we were in our mid-twenties, this wasn't an unfounded accusation.

"Can we talk about this later, Leaf?" he asked against my collarbone, and his hands felt their way up my back, under my sweater and blouse. I indulged him for a bit, letting his lips trail up to mine to capture them in a kiss that made a moan rise in my throat and his fingers dig into my skin. I was suddenly seized with a burning curiosity, and my tongue carefully traced along his teeth to feel the sharpness of his fangs. He swiftly pulled away, much to my disappointment, and frowned at me.

"Gary, please," I said. A whine was seeping into my voice. "I've been patient for years. You're not ageing any more. Soon enough I'll be an old lady. We got married, we've settled down, what are you waiting for?"

He didn't seem to have an answer to that, or at least if he did, he wasn't telling.

Plenty had changed in the past seven years. We'd graduated high school at the top of our class, the Rossignols watching from the audience as we gave our final speeches. I'd gotten my degree in education, following in the footsteps of a certain high school biology teacher, while Gary discovered a hidden passion for writing. Gary and I had gotten married and had had more sex than my teenage self could have ever dreamed of.

And, most importantly, Grégoire Herriot had simply...disappeared.

My only hope for transformation had vanished into thin air. The Rossignol crew had long since gone over the details of the vampiric race with me, which included three species: dhampirs, like Gary; Old World vampires, like Herriot; and those with the shark teeth, affectionately called "Jaws", like all the others. Old World vampires, direct imports from that little breeding-ground corner of Kalos, were the only ones capable of transforming humans into vampires.

The best option at the moment seemed to be flying out to the backwaters of Kalos, slathering myself with A1 steak sauce, and waiting until nightfall.

I waited patiently until later that evening to bring it up again, once we were settled in bed. Gary was reading, as usual, beside me.

"We should go to Kalos," I said to the ceiling. "It can't be that hard to find a vampire willing to bite me, right?"

He didn't say anything.

"Look, Gary, I'm sure my mom would be thrilled," I coaxed. "And what could go wrong? We'll be a happy little vampire family. Maybe we can even hang out with Dawn and Paul and Drew some more. I know you guys always felt weird around me, what with my being human and all."

"That's not true," Gary said, finally laying the book down and looking at me. "We all like you just the way you are."

I placed a hand on the blanket over his leg. "That's sweet of you. I don't get why you're so against it, though. I hope you're not trying to heroically save me from a fate worse than death. Worse than death, my foot. You know what's worse than death? Grey hairs."

I was kidding, kind of. Now he bookmarked the book and set it aside.

"Are you really willing to trade your humanity for that?" he asked. "You'd feed like some kind of monster on the blood of the living. You'd constantly be on the move to avoid suspicion. You'd outlive everyone you ever loved and cared about."

I considered it. He did make some fair points.

"So why are you still here," I asked, "if it's such a terrible existence?" I didn't mean for the question to be facetious, and thankfully he didn't take it that way.

"I'm not going to kill myself, Leaf," he said. "I'm lucky enough to have friends I can rely on. And you, of course."

"You won't have me for much longer," I mumbled into the pillow. He rubbed my shoulder. I heard the familiar click of the light switch, and he shifted under the covers beside me.

"Good night, sweetheart."

—

For months I wheedled, whined, and wore him down with a one-sided war of attrition. Not one of my most mature moments, I'll admit, but the usual negotiations clearly weren't working. Summer break for my students was a week away now, and I was still no closer. I felt my biological clock ticking away more incessantly than ever before. Every advertisement for cosmetics felt like a personal attack. The age difference between my students and me felt like a thousand years. I confessed that much in the teachers' lounge to Mrs Mendoza, who had been something of a mentor to me at the school in Pewter City, and she laughed. It was strange to peer into the life of someone untouched by the reality I had to confront every day when I looked at my husband.

"Hell Week, huh," he said when I collapsed onto the sofa after school. It was already seven in the evening.

"You'll never understand," I said into my briefcase bag. I looked up at him, propping myself up on my elbows. "You could never understand my problems."

He just smiled benignly and took a seat beside me with his tea. He rubbed my leg cajolingly. "It's only one week, right? You'll make it, you've done it before. Soon it'll be over."

"You're right," I said. "Soon it'll be over. Don't you get it?" He had that expression on his face, that oh jeez not this again expression. "Don't you get what it's like knowing that people will confuse me for your grandmother one day?"

"A small price to pay," he said. "Leaf, if I could choose to live a normal, human life with you, I would do it in a heartbeat."

"That's such a lie!" I cried. "You don't have a real reason why I can't. All this soapboxing about my 'humanity' and how great it is to be some slimy little human being is nonsense. It's objectively much better to be a vampire, and you can't deny that!"

He exhaled and took the longest sip of tea in history.

"Look," he said finally, "the only way you can turn into a vampire is if you're bitten by one, right?" I nodded. "And when a vampire bites you, the odds are very high that you'll imprint on him." I nodded. "So…"

It clicked. "So you're worried I'll get goo-goo eyes for some Kalosian hottie and ditch you?"

"You've always had such a way with words, Leaf," he said scathingly. I took his hand in mine, our wedding bands beside each other.

"Gary, I love you very much," I said. "I'm not going to imprint on anyone."

"You say that now. Love is an unbelievably weak force compared to imprinting." He looked toward the window. "You won't even remember that I exist."

In the mournful silence his words left behind, a question came to me. "But Silver didn't imprint on Isobel, did he? Or Yellow?"

"No," Gary agreed. "It's not guaranteed it'll happen, just very likely. And I don't want to take that risk," he said, anticipating my response.

—

That Friday was our one-year anniversary. I wasn't expecting anything extravagant. In fact, I'd almost forgotten it entirely until I stepped in, late again on the last day of Pewter Public High School, to the aroma of duck à l'orange and braised vegetables. Gary appeared to help me out of my coat, taking the opportunity to steal a few kisses and offering me a glass of Riesling in return.

He led me to the table, already set. He'd certainly made an effort on the atmosphere. The candles set around the kitchen bathed us in a flickering, orange light, and something low and swingy played from a speaker he'd hidden. The kitchen had never felt so romantic.

"To us," I said, raising my glass toward him.

"And to many more years together," he said. Just before his glass clinked against mine, I hesitated. It couldn't have been more than a fraction of a second, but he noticed, and his smile fell. He cleared his throat. "I hope the duck isn't dry."

"It's perfect," I said, although I'd hardly cut into it yet. The duck was great. Fantastic actually. I'd probably never in my life figure out how to cook it so well.

"Leaf, I—"

"You use the Dutch oven?"

He frowned. "I did."

I tried some of the vegetables next. Perfect. Of course.

"Leaf, I know we've been having disagreements lately," he said, "but I'd really like to set that aside for tonight."

Wine was perfect. Great pairing. Flowery top note. I didn't know what top note meant exactly. I figured I ought to get into wine tasting. Fun, pretentious. Get wasted.

"Leaf," he said again, a gentle warning.

I drained the glass.

"I love you tremendously," he said. "When I say it's a bad idea, I mean it, and I need you to trust me on that. Now can we please have a pleasant evening together?"

The wine buzzed in my nose already. "Fine," I said, trying my best to keep the edge out of my voice. "Thank you for putting this together."

"You're welcome." He took a bite of duck. His brow twitched only barely at this point; he'd eventually readjusted to a human diet, although there had been plenty of relapses. He still preferred his steak bleu. "How was school?"

"'S fine," I said. "Still have some loose ends to tie up. I'll probably be working tomorrow."

His expression fell. "I was thinking we could do something this weekend. We haven't gone camping in years, and the weather's supposed to be great."

"Sorry."

"You can't push it off until Monday?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I want to get it done."

I could hear him put his utensils down on his plate. I looked up from my duck, which I'd mutilated by now.

"Talk to me," he said.

I forged ahead. I'd honestly already ruined the night anyway.

"Gary, I've gone over the pros and cons a thousand times," I said. He knew exactly what I was referring to. "It is objectively better for me to be turned, even taking the risks into account. Relatively few risks, I might add. Letting me slog through the suffering that is the universal human experience when I know an alternative exists and I'm just out of reach of it is the most unbelievably selfish thing you could possibly do to me. And if you aren't going to help, I'll go to Kalos myself, alone, and get it done."

Get it done. Like it was some cosmetic procedure.

"You're not bluffing," he said. It wasn't a question, and I wasn't. He looked into his glass, nearly untouched, as if he could divine in its golden depths the solution we were looking for. After a moment, Gary looked back at me. He exhaled.

"We still have Yellow's number, right?"

A/N: It's still Monday.

I have opened a can of worms that should not have been touched with that goddamn cliffhanger conclusion to Chapter 5. Now we all must live with the consequences.

Going to put this on the back burner for now, however, and move on to publishing things in the order I intended. There's a lot left to unpack there, so it remains to be seen when I'll post another chapter here. Ideally this story will be done by the end of this year, perpetuated by sporadic updates.

P.S. Yes, a dhampir (pr. DAHM-peer) is a real thing.