Christmas descends on Florida in a series of thunderstorms and flash floods, so unlike the snow of New York that she has trouble playing Christmas songs she'd normally start before Thanksgiving. Everything is lukewarm and wet, and the waves in her hair frizz out and give her a distorted blonde halo. Ironic, she thinks, having a halo. Rose has found a job in an overcrowded mall, in a nameless store that sells clothes reminiscent of what she might have worn when she was ten, had the Huntsclan been fashionable. Middle aged women-her age, she reminds herself- march in and out with all the purpose of a mom on a schedule, and if she's lucky, they won't insist that the small sizes can't be sold out and then demand to see the manager.
The buzz keeps her busy, though not busy enough to forget about her visitors. Well, visitors is a soft word. Stalkers, maybe. Colorado had been a beautiful place, all snowcapped mountains and wide open spaces (provided she stayed out of the cities, which turned out not to suit her that well anyway), but certain other people seemed to think so too.
"Huntsgirl, open this door!" A voice boomed, menacing in the fading evening light.
Quietly, quietly, she slipped up to the door and peeks through the little lens. Despite the distortion, she remembered the man immediately. He's a little older, a good bit grayer, and he looks just as irritated as ever.
"Councilor Andam," she growled, swinging the door open abruptly.
The man noticeably twitched, but managed not to jump. "The Dragon Council has a message for you."
Rose raised an eyebrow. "The Dragon Council? Where are the rest of them?"
Andam sighed heavily. "May I come in?"
Well, at least he'd decided to be polite. She stepped aside, and he came through the doorway. "Had I known you'd be visiting, I might have cleaned up a little."
He barked a laugh. The room was threadbare, clean, empty. "I've always appreciated your sense of humor, Huntsgirl."
"I haven't been Huntsgirl for a long time."
He looked over his shoulder at her, from where he had been studying the single picture in her apartment, a ragged painting of the Hunstman that Remy had done for her to throw darts at, years ago. He was the only one she hadn't punished enough. "No matter what your husband thinks, that's exactly who you are. That's who you'll always be. The Council respects you for what you've done for us, and that is all."
It took every ounce of self control left in her body to stay still, to not bother reacting to him. "You've always made that very clear. Why are you here? And how did you find me?"
"The American Dragon is content to let you roam. Last time I spoke to him, he was very reticent to tell me you were gone, and very insistent that I not try to find you. But as the leader of the Dragon Council, it is my job, and my honor, to monitor all threats to the magical world. You are a threat. I've had agents watching out for you."
It had stung, just a little, to know that Jake wasn't looking for her. "I'm not a threat."
"And yet you disappear, with no warning, and keep a picture of your former leader rather than a photo of your family."
Well, she could barely think clearly enough anymore to know what was normal and what wasn't. Far be it from her to let an enemy in on her psychological troubles. "There are things called smartphones, Councilor. I own one, with family pictures on it."
"Don't condescend to me," he snaps. "I know about smartphones."
It was very difficult not to roll her eyes. "What do you want from me?"
"I will be sending agents to check on you, from time to time. Please try to be hospitable."
"Unlikely."
"Not hostile, then," he says, his voice grating on the edge of frustration.
"I'm not interested in the magical world."
He laughed, long and hard. "You've never had a choice."
The memory floats through her mind every time she sees a redhead a little too short or a large man whose skin seems a bit blue, but so far, she's only had one visitor since the last move, and he's somehow wormed his way into her humid little place and taken over.
"Stan," she had groaned. "You clogged the shower drain again."
"Oh! Sorry!"
Nice enough guy, who fixed the drain surprisingly promptly, but she wonders if he writes reports to the Council while she's at work, and as much as she hates to admit it, she wonders what they say. And a too-large part of her hopes he doesn't leave.
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He'll get them each another dragon figure, she knows. He's done it every year since they were babies, brought back a blown glass statue of one dragon at the Summit and saved it until Christmas. One of the first was the Australian Dragon, which he gave to Luke, and which Luke treasured up until the moment he met Fred Nerk-following that it was Luke's most prized possession. Ava has always loved the one of Gramps, with its dark blue scales and vibrantly white beard (so much that she begged Jake for one of Fu). Kyra always wants the female dragons; one figure is of Aunt Haley, all pink and purple with extended wings and long black ponytail flying behind her. Maybe one of these days he'll feel cheeky and give them each one of himself. Actually, she's a little surprised he hasn't done it already.
His family will stuff the stockings to bursting, little gifts tumbling out as they pass the oversized red socks around. Susan will cook enough food for an army-none of it Chinese-and Jonathan will add soy sauce to everything and then eat it with chopsticks when she's not looking because his family is Chinese, and he loves them all. The girls will probably stab a cinnamon bun with a spare chopstick, making Gramps wince, and Jingle Bells Barnyard will blare incessantly in the background (excepting the moments Jake sneaks his own music into the queue. He might get a good three minutes at a time before one of his parents notices).
As usual, she's not sure what she should get them (Rose can't remember whether she's ever been the sentimental type). Luke used to leave links open on her tablet from time to time starting the day after Halloween up until Christmas Eve, probably from five years old on. The girls were easier, anyway, being that they're fairly girly girls. Should she get them anything, this year? A brown box that finds its way to the front door with her best guesses about what might bring smiles to their faces almost seems like an affront.
Rose is not oblivious to the fact that she's walked out on her family.
It's easier, in these moments of paralyzing indecision, to wonder what she'd get Dylan, had he lived (even if thinking about him over three living, breathing children does wrack her with a guilt that's sharper than usual). It isn't as though she could give him anything anyway; there's no struggle over whether or not to send something.
Except that she's never known him, not really, but that's just one more thing on the list of problems Rose doesn't need to think about right now.
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Somehow, Jake has inherited his family's love of Christmas tradition. He's not sure how it happened, or when he shifted from constantly trying to escape Jingle Bells Barnyard and mall Santas toward obsessively making his own traditions. Rose was never super into it, not the way he expected her to be-"You always used to talk about what you'd do with your family for Christmas." "Can't we just skip Santa this year?"- so he's taken the holidays and made them his own. It's unsettling, but Jake has found that everything he planned for the five of them will be just about the same with only four. He could kick himself for not realizing how distant she was. Still, he hasn't heard from her, and life goes on.
Herding his three children into their grandparents' house on Christmas Eve is easy enough, now that they're older. Luke has inherited his mother's sense of duty and trods along next to his father, even though they both know he'd secretly rather be out with his friends. This year, he might want that a little less. The girls skip along in front of them, chattering about nail polish and music and their friends-and their enemies, Jake notices, with some exasperation.
"Neither of you knows anything about having enemies."
Kyra looks over her shoulder and dramatically rolls her eyes. "Dad, we get it. You get in fist fights with terrible people."
Jake imitates her eye roll with extra exaggeration. "It's Christmas. Be nice to people."
"You're such a dad," his daughter retorts.
Good. At least he's doing something right.
His childhood home is bustling with people, as it has for a few years now, and his little family pushes its way through the door, through the neighbors holding cups of whatever his dad has concocted this year-smells like Reindeer Beer-and into a living room decked out in lights and holly branches.
"Mom!"
He can't see her, but she can hear him. "Just a minute, honey!" There's some movement in the throng as she makes her way over.
"I still can't believe you guys are throwing block parties now."
"Well, your dad has been so much more open to new things, since he found out about…you know."
Ava giggles. "Where's Gramps?"
"Hiding upstairs." Jake's youngest daughter worms her way up the stairs, bent on bringing her great-grandfather and his ever-more-wrinkled dog down to sing carols with her. There's a game she plays with Fu: how close he can get to actually singing without people noticing he's stopped howling, and it wouldn't be right to stop this year. "Luke, I'm trying an eggnog mousse this year. Come give me a hand."
And then his mother and his son are gone, and Kyra is leaning against Jake a little bit deliberately and a little bit haphazardly. "Think any sasquatches will show up?"
"Naw, too loud in here. You looking for trouble?" He's tempted to ruffle her hair, before remembering she was in the bathroom trying to straighten it for almost an hour.
"Always."
Like your mother, he doesn't say. Instead: "So what'd you get your old man for Christmas?"
"Daaaad."
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The bigger cities are much easier to live in, exhausting as they are. Rose can blend in there, depending on the disinterest of the crowds. Small towns are much too oppressive with their well-meaning neighbors that she has to see everywhere she goes, prying women, curious men, all peering into her soul and looking for her past. Covering it up has only served to pique their interests further. So three months after she's left her family, this Miami mall is her fourth job, fourth city, fifth temporary home, her own little space crammed into an overcrowded, uninterested large city. No one has asked her a question since the landlord asked if she wanted to pay monthly or in advance, and she thinks maybe this is the place to stay for a while. Even if she's stuck living with Stan.
"Thank you; have a nice day."
A grunt, and the customer walks away. Perfect.
It's much different than married life, this tenuous balance she's struck with her roommate. Rose hasn't had any roommates since the co-op, and the ones she saw the most were chickens, so a large, purple troll constantly invading the refrigerator is jarring. In his defense, he does fill it back up again, which is more than she could say for her teenage son (she misses him).
Her walk home is damp, and water seeps into her shoes and squelches as she walks, forming blisters where the edges of her flats rub her heels. Picking her way around puddles, Rose trudges further downtown, into the dirty, cramped little complexes that she's calling home this month. Whether or not Jake has sold her car flits through her mind. She misses the bright pink umbrella she kept in the trunk.
The front door squeals when she opens it, but the apartment is dark and silent. Stan has already gone out for the night, and there's no note with little hearts on the refrigerator or meat thawing in the sink. Peanut butter sandwich number 207, then.
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"You know, I used to date your husband's aunt," Stan remarks, chewing his way through a head of lettuce. He tugs the blinds closed as the sun begins to peek in.
Rose winces. She'd been hoping to use the lettuce for salads, but she's not going to stop him now. It's too early to get off the couch. "Did you?"
"Sure, Patchouli Long was the queen of my heart."
She almost doesn't want to know. "What happened? Jake never told me his aunt Patty dated a troll."
Sighing heavily, Stan glumly takes a bite out of the lettuce. "Living with a troll isn't easy. After my hairballs started to chase her around the house, I had to come clean. She hit me over the head with a broom."
"I'm sorry," she says, but it's almost funny.
"She was too. Until the hairballs started biting. I didn't blame her after that."
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.
There's a little glass dragon for each of them, as always, that he's hidden away. For Luke, Fred Nerk's design has been updated somewhat after his last molting left him with oddly pink scales where the orange used to be (thus far, Jake has declined to comment on whether he had anything to do with The Incident). It will make all four of them laugh, he hopes, which they haven't done enough lately. Kyra has been wanting Councilor Omina's figurine for years, and this is the first time the Councilor has been willing to stand in front of the artist for more than five minutes-she's too busy for this, she says. So, because he'd like to think he's an okay parent, Jake had called in every favor he had to get the first one.
For Ava, his baby girl, who is so much like her mother that it kills him some days, hasn't asked about a custom Fu in months. "Whatever you find that's pretty, Dad. I'll be happy." Well, it's a year of firsts. Omina's sudden change of heart made anything possible, people said, and to Jake's surprise, when he arrived at the annual meeting, there were little animal guardians for sale in the glass blowing shop.
"Really? You did one of Bananas?" He'd rolled his eyes.
"Sure," chuckled Jamal, the artist. "People love them. They like to buy it with this one." He nods his head towards a delicate figure of Jake's human form, balanced precariously on one foot, about to fall over.
A joke at the American Dragon's expense was a joke everyone loved and told for years. It's a price Jake is willing to pay for Ava's glass Fu Dog.
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Stan has retreated to the sewers for Christmas Eve, apparently to meet his girlfriend. The tiny apartment is quiet, except for the drip of a leak into a bucket. Drip. Drop. Plunk. Her phone screen glows white with a notification, just a silly social network that she forgot to delete. Ava Long has added to her story, it says, blinking at her, and Rose feels a sharp pang in her heart.
It's an old picture, from when her babies were young and chubby-cheeked, when there had still been a little life in her smile and her pedestal hadn't quite crumbled. Jake looked at her like she hung the moon, and his hand rested on her knee, wrapping all three of the kids up like little gifts between them.
The caption burns her. Hi Mom. Missing you this Christmas.
The girls haven't used this in years-it's a vestige of their eight and ten year-old dreams of being Internet famous, long abandoned in favor of privacy. They've all run into themselves in the magical tabloids now, and it's left a bitter taste in their mouths.
American Dragon's Daughters-Terrible Teens?
Mrs. AmDrag, Dragon Slayer.
Kyra Caught Partying with Brother Night Before Competency Exams.
Luke Long's Ugly Break Up With Japanese Dragon's Niece.
Ava-Avaricious or Angelic?
Top Bikini Bodies on Draco, 2034. Does Rose Have a Tattoo?
Jake had tried to protect them, to his credit, but the headlines had burned themselves into the backs of her eyelids anyway, and the children, their daughters especially, had withdrawn into themselves, to the privacy of their bedrooms with curtains drawn and tape over their webcams. Andam was right, in the end. She might not have wanted to be part of the magical world, but in the end her destiny seemed to be written in stone, stones around her children's necks.
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Her head throbs. The future stretches before her in infinite tangles, and she doesn't know which way to go. There's a presence to her left, the ghost of a hand lingering near her fingertips, as if it's tentatively trying to hold her hand. "Rose," whispers a boy's voice. He sounds young, maybe ten. Whipping her head around, she looks for the voice, but there's nothing. "Rose, it's me."
"Who are you?" She whispers.
"Dylan. You don't recognize me."
She gasps much more loudly than she'd been trained to allow. "What are you doing in my dream?" Her stomach flops around, leaping between her diaphragm and her throat. "You shouldn't be here."
"Where should I be?"
"Not here." But it's a perfectly innocently posed question, as if he can't imagine being anywhere except by her side, in a world that doesn't exist. And what is she supposed to tell him, that he was sucked into a vortex less than a week after he was born, never to be seen again? That he's dead, or trapped in an inescapable void?
"I wanted to see you," he says, and she swears that she can see a little glimmer of a silhouette this time, or a shadow where his hand delicately tucks inside hers. "Mom told me about you."
"You're not real."
"What do you mean?"
"You're not really here. I can't see you, and I can barely feel you. You're an auditory hallucination." With deep breaths Rose works to calm herself, but it isn't making her feel much better.
"Okay, I don't actually know what that means, but also not really what I wanted to talk about." The voice-Dylan-drops to a serious pitch. "Mom tells me stories about you every night. Dad too, but we've found him already."
"Why me?"
"You were her best friend."
Rose furrows her brow, but doesn't comment. 32 was a good woman, and a friendly acquaintance, but maybe Rose had focused on her school life too much, that she'd missed something in their relationship. Godparenting in the Huntsclan was standardized, chosen by drawing or committee selection, never by the parents. They'd become friends, maybe but she hadn't realized 32 had thought so much of an apprentice.
More proof this is only a dream, and this child is gone, gone for over two decades.
"You should be almost thirty." There are too many things to say; too many to say and think intelligently at the same time. Still, Rose is unimpressed with her conversational skills in a time and place when she should be on top of things. It's her dream, isn't it?
There's a short pause. Then, "Thirty what?"
"Twenty-eight years old," she replies. "You went away when I was 13. I'm 41 now. You should be close to thirty, not ten."
As if to say that means nothing to him, the boy offers her only a "huh" in response, and they stand in silence for a while as the web of her possible futures weaves in and out of itself before them.
"Dylan," she says, testing out his name. "What do you know about me?"
She thinks she can feel him shift, and there's a glimmer again, so he must have turned to face her. "You're one of the best fighters in the Huntsclan, or you will be, when your training is finished. The Huntsman chose you to be his apprentice. That's pretty cool."
A cold hand clenches around her heart. Everything he says was true, years ago, but it isn't anymore. Isn't it? Wasn't she finished with that part of her life when she wished for its destruction? But then, maybe it's the legacy of a person that lives the longest. You can't move on from that.
"Mom said 88 and 89 were weird choices for apprentices, though."
Rose can't stop a sharp laugh. "Oh, you have no idea. They were completely, hopelessly inept. My husband has a theory about why the Huntsman took them under his wing."
"You're married?"
"Yes."
"What's his name?" Another innocent question, a natural question. Not one she really wants to answer.
"Jake. We went to middle school together."
"Cute." Dylan frees his hand from its light rest inside hers. "My mom told me some people get married outside the Huntsclan instead of partnering with somebody inside. She thought you would."
"I guess she knew me pretty well."
"I'm glad I got to meet you," he says, and she can feel his presence fading. "And I hope we can see each other again. Maybe we'll see Santa and go to Rockefeller Center one year, like Mom said you wanted."
"I wish I could see you," she whispers. "You've grown so much since I saw you last."
His voice is like a whisper on the wind as it blows out of the room. "Mom said to say hi."
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Rose inhales sharply and stiffens in her bed. Her dream charm glows fuschia as she comes out of the dream, and she reaches up to rub her temples while the last vestiges of Dylan float from her mind. The knot of futures has burned itself into the back of her eyelids, a jumbled vision of herself returning to her family, all the ways she could die, hiding away in this damp city for the rest of her life. Blessedly, though, the last little scraps of Dylan's voice are stuck in her ears, distracting her just enough that her usual morning routine of waking, weeping, and wondering what in the world she's supposed to do with herself is disrupted.
Clearly, though, she's been thinking about the past too much.
Her roommate appears to have let himself back in during the night. Stan's pen scratches against paper at her (their?) uneven table, jolting it every time he moves to the other side of the page so that there's a thump at the beginning of every line.
"Why don't you just email them?" She asks.
"Email who?" He turns his single eye toward her, hand stilling. "Trolls have always been averse to new technology. It attracts gremlins."
"The Dragon Council."
Stan's brow furrows. "That was supposed to be a secret."
Rose shrugs and hauls herself out of bed (out of couch?). "Merry Christmas."
Relieved that she's changed the subject, Stan breaks into a troll rendition of Away in a Manger. It's not terrible. Not as terrible as her father-in-law's rendition, anyway. Not as terrible as that Jingle Bells Barnyard. Just the same, there's a strange little prick in her heart when she remembers where she should be.
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A/N: I'm a planner. I have a story map for this and I brainstorm two to three chapters ahead of whatever I'm writing. And I still don't quite know where this is going, which isn't helped by my main character feeling so aimless. Just the same, I think we're getting to the crux of things. Constructive criticism welcome. Or not constructive, I suppose.