Sneaky!update while girlfriend is in the shower! So far I've gotten some really lovely feedback on this fic and I'd like to take the time to thank everyone who sent me their kind words of support, you guys are beautiful and wonderful.
This chapter has a character who for the purposes of this fic has been developed a bit more than in cannon, who is a Muslim (which, if anyone had a problem with, politely GTFO now because I do not tolerate discrimination of any kind), who will be fairly important to the plot and who uses a fair chunk of artistic licence. He just needed some extra development to become human and I had a really nice time researching his culture. Anyway, don't hate on him, he's a sweetie really and I am very protective of him.
Content Warning: people from cultures that may be different to your own (or the same as yours, in which case yaay representation is beautiful), some bad language, a minor OC because (character) needed a mother, transboy problems, slight medication abuse. Do not take anyone else's medication, irrespective of if you read about it happening on the internet, because this is fiction and your life is not.
"...And when you speak, angels sing from above
Everyday words seem to turn into love songs.
Give your heart and soul to me
And life will always be,
La Vie En Rose."
"Oh the crowd goes wild for the girl!" Mo yelled when the last note died away, waving his arms and cheering loudly. Marceline slid off the arm of the sofa she'd been balanced on as gracefully as a ballerina and folded forward into a demure bow with her ukulele raised like a trophy above her head
"Thank you thank you, I humbly accept your adulation." she replied with a shy smile.
Mo quirked one heavy dark eyebrow.
"Yo, remember how English is not my first language?"
"Sorry, man. Adulation means, like, praise and applause and stuff."
"Oh, right. Cool, yeah, I totally adulate you."
"...I'm not sure it can be used as a verb, but whatevs. Thanks man."
The boy scratched his head with an uncharacteristically thoughtful look on his heavy features.
"It is a bit... unusual though. You know, for playing at a pub gig. Like, do they know you are bringing a ukulele as well as all your other instruments and stuff? Will not everyone be expecting you to play new wave punk?" he asked with a frown.
"I love a ton of different musical styles and I really like that song. I want to open my set with it so they'll just have to deal with it being a bit different. Besides, it reminds me of my Mum." Marceline added quietly.
Mo stood and wrapped his long arms around her shoulders in a hug. He squeezed a little harder than was really comfortable to cover his awkward teenaged embarrassment at being around a potentially emotional female. Marceline winced at the extra pressure his enthusiastic hug put on her tattooed back and left shoulder but by the time he'd pulled away she'd wiped any trace of discomfort from her face and was smiling at him gently.
"I am sorry, chick." he replied in as soft a voice as he could manage, bopping her on the shoulder when he let her go. "It is really pretty and you sing it well, actually."
Just then a heavily accented voice drifted through from outside the apartment door followed by a loud knocking.
"Baseem Mohammed Al Omiri you get yourself downstairs and clean that pit you call a bedroom before your father gets home or there will be no music and no video games for the rest of the month!"
"Off you run, B-Mo, before your Mum breaks my door down." Marceline grinned at him. Mo sighed heavily and grabbed his school bag from where he'd slung it on the couch.
"Thanks for helping me with the sheet music. Can I come over again tomorrow after school?" he asked her hopefully.
"Sure, so long as your Mum doesn't mind." she replied with a laugh.
She opened the door for him while he was still struggling to balance his bag, coat and the huge strong case containing the second hand bass guitar she'd given him. Mrs al-Ahmad, Mo's mother, smiled when she saw Marceline and shook her hand. It was an affectation she'd always had when greeting people she liked even if she'd known them for years.
"Marceline, thank you so much for helping Baseem Mohammed with his music. I hope he has not been a problem for you?" she enquired over the top of her thick glasses.
"Not at all, Mrs al-Ahmad. He'd been an angel like always." Marceline replied.
"Mum, can I go watch Marceline play this weekend at The Fox and Hounds? They are having a live music night and she said I can be her roadie and help the band set up!" Mo said brightly, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement at the prospect. His mother frowned at him.
"The Fox and Hounds? That is the public house next to the underground station on the high street, yes? You will not be drinking any alcohol, Baseem!" she warned him with a heavy frown.
"No, Mum. Alcohol is poison. Besides, Marceline does not drink alcohol either and she will be there to look after me." B-Mo replied with his most appealing smile, the one he knew his mother couldn't resist.
Mrs al-Ahmad sighed and nodded. As reluctant as she was to let Mo go to a pub and be tempted by alcohol Marceline going with him sealed the deal for her. Ever since their friendly upstairs neighbour and her eccentric uncle had taken her eldest son under their wing when he'd been struggling in school Mrs al-Ahmad regarded Marceline as some kind of living saint. Especially when she found out the girl was only nineteen and a full time carer for Simon. Despite appearances Mrs al-Ahmad had always had a good opinion of Marceline; she was surprisingly open to a heavily tattooed punk tutoring her son in bass guitar and buying him video games consoles. If she was going to be there then Mo's mother could rest easy that nothing awful would happen to him and no poison alcohol would enter his system.
"Yes, you may go and help at the concert, Baseem. So long as your bedroom is clean. Come on now, your dinner will be ready soon. Marceline, will you join us? There is plenty to go around." Mrs al-Ahmad asked her with a fond smile.
"No, thank you for your kind offer but I already ate. See you later, Mo. Ma'a as-salaama." she replied to Mrs al-Ahmad, making the older woman smile again and squeeze her hand before taking her leave.
The lanky boy and his mother walked off towards the stairwell together. Mo waved over his shoulder at Marceline with a huge grin in place. They were talking rapidly in a dialect of Arabic too quick for Marceline to follow, she'd been trying to learn to speak it for a while and was pretty ok with the basics. But the way Mo and his Mum talked made her despair she'd ever be good enough to hold a full conversation in it. It was thoughtful of them that they always switched to speaking in English when she was around even if they were talking to each other. She'd had a hard enough time just trying to understand how Muslim family names worked, at first Marcy had been calling Mo by his father's name by accident and it had stuck. Now he was forever B-Mo to her and his younger brothers A-Mo and H-Mo loved their nicknames, too. Their father was possibly not so happy about it but he was very rarely home anyway. He ran a small grocery store on the high street and he only came home to sleep and eat before running back to watch the shop; he was one of the hardest working people Marceline had ever met.
Marceline closed the door to her apartment, still humming cheerfully to herself, and wandered down the hall into her neat little kitchen. She'd not been entirely truthful about having already eaten but Mo's mum had never quite been able to wrap her head around a vegan diet. Last time she'd cooked for Marceline she'd made a dish that was laced with samna which Mo had quietly informed her halfway through the meal was made from milk. She'd had the most appalling stomach ache for days after politely finishing her dinner with the family and wasn't keen to repeat the experience.
Marcy grabbed a handful of assorted fruits and quickly sliced them into a bowl then took them through to the cluttered lounge. She curled up comfortably on the sofa with the bowl balanced on her stomach, intending to switch Simon's old and much repaired radio on and enjoy her fruit salad and perhaps read something interesting on her laptop. She had a mouthful of apple and kiwi when her phone started buzzing on the coffee table and she groped for it carefully, not wanting to spill the fruit everywhere.
"Mm, eyp?" she asked around the mouthful, grabbing the phone and answering the call without even glancing at the screen. An unfamiliar voice spoke and that was the only warning that she had.
"Hello, Miss Abadeer?"
She froze, swallowing her half chewed food hard because it was either that or choke on it. Nobody had caller her by that name in years. She'd changed it as soon as legally possible; she'd gone with Simon and done it on the morning of her sixteenth birthday. The whole world knew her as Marceline Petrikova. Just hearing her old name again sent shivers of ancient terror down her spine and caused her shoulder to flare with a fierce aching pain.
"Who the fuck is this?" she hissed, sitting bolt upright in shock.
"Well now, you're a hard woman to track down, Marceline! My name is Frank Davidson from the Sunday Sun newspaper and I heard from a contact that you might be interested in putting forward your side of the story. What with your father's upcoming-"
She hit the cancel call button before he'd even finished his sentence and leapt up from the sof with her stomach suddenly churning angrily and old agony jolting across her skin.
"How did you get my number you bastard?" she growled at the now silent phone. The bowl of fruit had spilled right across the floor and she'd have to clean it up later. She'd lost her appetite anyway and she was suddenly too furious to care. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. It was about the only thing happening in her head because it felt like all her thoughts had been frozen solid with shock and terror.
Marcy hesitated for less than a second before giving in to instinct and fleeing the room completely.
Without a backwards glance Marceline grabbed her jacket and keys and ran out of the door, slamming it shut a lot harder than she needed to on her way out. She was halfway down the stairwell before she winced in apologetic guilt because that must have been entirely too loud for the Al Omiris sitting at the dinner table below. They'd probably just gotten little Mahtab down to sleep, likely she'd be screaming the house down again now.
But Marceline didn't stop running and she didn't knock on their door to apologise. She just kept on sprinting along the pavement away from the apartment block and down the crowded street towards the underground station. She was taking the well-worn route back to somewhere she knew she at least wouldn't be harassed by journalists.
...
Kingdom Road was not in the flashiest corner of London but it was quiet and leafy, pretty in its way. It was full of old houses with interesting architecture and neat miniature gardens that faced the pavement. They lent the whole neighbourhood an air of faded grandeur and old world charm. It was definitely the sort of place Simon would have enjoyed before his illness took hold. Six months ago when she'd first moved him into Whitehills Care Home he'd still had lots of good days when he remembered her and he'd asked repeatedly to come home. He'd told her he was better and he could look after himself; that she was sweet to worry but he didn't need full time care. That didn't happen so much anymore and Marceline wasn't sure if she was glad of it or not. Simon was having another bad day though. He'd hugged her back carefully when she arrived but the confusion in his eyes told her he really wasn't sure if she was his niece or his half-sister or somebody else entirely.
"They got hold of my number again, Simon." she told him quietly. Marcy twisted the wing of the stuffed parrot she'd bought him for Christmas two years ago around and around between restless fingers. "How do they do it? I change my phone number every six months and I've made it quite clear I don't want them to contact me ever again every time they try. Why won't they just leave me alone? And they used my old name, that bastard's name. I hate him so much."
"Gunther loves sunflower seeds." Simon replied bewilderedly, nodding towards the stuffed parrot. The real Gunther had died before she'd even moved in with him. Marceline barely remembered the old harlequin macaw that Simon had kept when she was very small. All she knew was that he'd been the most evil bird she'd ever had the misfortune to meet. He'd never been pleasant with anyone but her uncle. She probably still had scars from his talons under her hair.
"Yeah, I know. Can I just stay here with you for a while? I don't want to go home right now. We can watch some TV; I bet there's some cricket on one of the sports channels."
Simon nodded and smiled and for a bittersweet second he looked just like he was perfectly lucid and understood every word she'd spoken to him.
"Oh, I like cricket!"
"I know you do, Uncle Simon. I don't but I always had fun watching the cricket with you anyway. Do you remember when you bought me an autographed Sachin Tendulkar bat in Mumbai? It was for you really but I pretended to know who he was anyway. Still got it, it's somewhere with your stuff." she replied with a sad smile.
"I bought a special cricket bat for Marcy. That's my niece. We went to India together when she was ten, you know. Her Mum was half Indian, my baby sister. My Dad never would admit which affair Claudia came out of but my mother loved her just the same anyway and she was never left out of the family. I wanted Marcy to connect with her heritage after she lost Claudia." Simon replied proudly. She hugged him just because she could, because he'd been the most thoughtful uncle she could have wished for when she was a child and she still loved him dearly.
They watched the highlights of an Indian domestic Twenty20 test match between the Rajasthan Royals and the Kolkata Knight Riders. Simon talked and talked, telling her over and over that each team could only bat for a maximum of twenty overs. Every time she asked him to explain what an over was he beamed and launched into a detailed description of the basics of the game. By the time she'd been twelve Marceline could have written a book about the rules of cricket despite not really being a fan. But Simon was so happy every time she asked him about it that she couldn't help keeping up a low murmur of conversational questions.
"Do you remember when you came to see little Marcy's school play, Uncle Simon?"
"She was really good in her play. Marcy's my niece." he told her again with a nod. "My half-sister's daughter. Claudia was my sister and she died. She's a good girl, and so smart. Have you seen Betty today?"
"Not today, Uncle Simon."
"Oh. Have you seen Claudia?"
He'd asked her more and more recently if she'd seen her long dead mother but it was still a shock to hear it. Before his early dementia had set in he'd not spoken her mother's name in more years than Marceline could remember. She shook her head sadly.
"No, Uncle Simon. Claudia died. Don't you remember? And you got custody of her daughter because you were the closest family she had left. She was only seven when she came to live with you. Do you remember any of that? You held her hand at the funeral."
"Marcy?"
"Yes."
"My niece. She... she got hurt. But I saved her, I kept her safe."
"You were so brave. She's still prouder of you than she can say, you know."
"Marceline."
"That's right, that's me. I'm Marceline, I'm your niece. Don't you recognise me, Simon? I still play the guitar you bought me. I'm a professional musician now like you always told me I could be."
"You're Hunson's daughter?"
"Yes, and Claudia's."
"He was always shady. He has no morals at all." Simon replied wisely.
"Yeah, I remember. Hunson's a real bastard."
...
Perhaps it would have made Marceline feel a little better to know that across the city her new acquaintances were having a pretty terrible evening, too.
Finn curled tighter into his duvet and fought valiantly against the tears. But they forced their way out past his eyelids anyway no matter how hard he tried to tell himself that boys didn't cry because everything hurt.
"Come on, man! Finn! Let me in bro, I made you some hot chocolate!" Jake boomed from outside the closed door.
"Go away!" Finn yelled, and he cried harder when he realised his voice had slid back up in pitch because of the pain.
The doorbell rang and Finn supposed Jake must have gone to answer it because he didn't reply. But then a few minutes later a much softer voice spoke outside his door. It was the very last voice he wanted to hear when he was emotional and hated himself and was consumed by cramping pain right through his stomach and lower abdomen.
"Finn? Jake called me, I brought you some of my codeine. Don't tell anyone you're taking my medication though. Do you wanna let me in?"
Great, even his stupid ex-girlfriend was worrying about his stupid period cramps that his stupid body wasn't even supposed to be having anymore. But, well, she had brought him some codeine and normally he'd be wary of taking anyone else's medication but Bonnie was practically a doctor. She had variety of white lab coats and went to an honest-to-God laboratory all day and ok yes not the kind of doctor that gave out prescriptions but she knew what she was about when it came to medical stuff so-
Finn came to the conclusion that if he didn't open the door Jake might well kick it in anyway. He rolled out of his bed and shuffled across the messy room hunched in pain and humiliation with his duvet still wrapped around himself like a giant cocoon. When he slid back the bolt on the door Bonnie opened it from the other side and stuck her head into his room. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of old sweaty gym kit he hadn't gotten around to washing yet and generally inadequate hygiene.
"I should have brought air freshener, too." she muttered to herself. Finn wasn't sure if she was joking or just being her usual blunt self. He slouched back to the bed and let her wander around prodding his things, as was her usual habit.
"Codeine?" he prompted her quietly after a little while.
"Oh! Sorry. Yes, here." she handed him a packet of small white tablets.
"Can I have three?" he asked hopefully.
"No. That's more than the stated dosage and you know it."
"But it hurts so bad. Please?"
"...Ok fine, but no more than three and you're pushing your liver enough as it is. Alright? If you take three and collapse with hepatic toxicity then I want you to tell the paramedics I have no idea who you are or how you got hold of my meds." Bonnie replied with a heavy sigh and a smile that was more sad than anything else.
He'd already popped three of the pills out into his palm and she handed him a bottle of water with a long suffering sigh. Finn downed the tablets and tried to smile, although it probably came out more like a grimace of pain.
"Budge over, lumpy. I'm gonna be here a while so I might as well get comfortable." Bonnie muttered, shoving Finn gently in the shoulder. He huffed but moved over and let her sit on the end of his bed. They sat in awkward silence for a while, him curled onto his side under the duvet and her staring a little unfocusedly at the various lopsided football posters adorning the walls.
"Jake's worried about you. He made you hot chocolate." Bonnie told him quietly after a while.
"Yeah. Jake's an arsehole like that."
"He's just trying to help. And sugar and cocoa will increase the endorphins and other happy hormones in your brain. He's actually doing something that stands a chance of making you feel better."
"Imagine that, it must be by accident then." Finn replied with a scowl. Jake had been insufferable all day, he wouldn't just leave Finn alone with his misery.
Bonnie turned a genuinely annoyed expression on him and Finn had to resist the urge to hide further under the duvet. Nobody could glare disapprovingly like Bonnie; she could guilt him into just about anything.
"Finn Reuben Mertens, your big brother loves you and he's doing everything he can to help you! I know this is hard for you. And I can't even begin to imagine how awful having a period must be when you're a man, but that's no excuse to take it out on the people who are trying to take care of you."
"I know! Ok? I know that! I just feel like I'm literally dying and I hate everything right now and Jake keeps accidentally dead-naming me and he treats me like I'm a girl and sometimes I feel like I'm so angry and frustrated I can feel my blood starting to boil, like-"
He was cut off by slim arms wrapping around his shoulders and pulling him into a hug. Finn shamefully shrugged out of the duvet and hugged her back. He let another couple of tears slide out onto Bonnie's shirt, certain she wouldn't care or mention it. She always gave the best hugs. The codeine must be kicking in extra fast he thought, because he was suddenly overcome with a wave of shameful emotion and nostalgia.
"I wish you weren't a lesbian." he whispered against her shoulder.
"I know, buddy. But this way is better. You get to keep me as a friend forever instead of having to end up hating me and everyone else I ever date. And you know I'm always gonna care about you, right? And I'll always be here for you. You're my absolute best friend in the world."
Finn nodded as much as he could without lifting his head. It made perfect sense rationally; it just still hurt a lot emotionally. Her logic was solid. It was the same thing he'd reasoned when he came out as trans. Nothing positive was ever going to come from staying in a relationship he wasn't comfortable with. Finn knew he'd never be able to feel completely happy in his identity if he was with someone who was exclusively attracted to women. Still their break up had been hard on him too no matter how shamefully it had come about and how much he hated himself for the pain he'd put her through. He missed her a lot more than he was willing to admit.
"Hey, Finn? I, uh, made some fresh hot chocolate for you." Jake said, peering worriedly at his little brother around the bedroom door.
"Thanks, Jake. I'm sorry I've been such an arsehole today. Just... I thought these bastards would stop once I got on testosterone. Turns out they can still go on for a while, sometimes." Finn muttered, shamefaced. He couldn't quite look his brother in the eyes. Even though Jake was trying really hard he still sometimes slipped up and called Finn the wrong name and every time he did it felt like he was forgetting that Finn existed. Like 'Finn' was just a fictional character that Jake's baby sister was playing at for a while. Finn knew he wasn't doing it on purpose but it triggered his dysphoria and made him feel awful especially when he was already feeling weird about his body. It made him feel like he wasn't real. Like he didn't really exist, he supposed.
But Jake just put the steaming mug down on his nightstand and sat on the other side of the bed. He squished Finn into the middle of a hug sandwich. The codeine was beginning to work on his physical symptoms too and although they hadn't really gone away the intense cramping pains felt distant, disconnected from him. Almost like they belonged to someone else altogether. That was true, though wasn't it? He was absolutely certain they didn't really belong to him. They belonged to some girl called Fionna who didn't even exist anymore. Maybe it was just the codeine talking though. He felt light headed and warm all over, like he was floating.
"I love you, bro." Jake murmured.
"Love you too, Jake."