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11 years назад
*December: The Child is Gone**I should probably look at this thing.* She is contemplating her cell phone, which is sitting in the middle of a little coffee table in the Admiral’s Club lounge at Reagan International. The darkened screen is an irritation, but picking it up and hitting that fucking little circle-round-the-square button might be a bigger one. Her father sent her a goddamned text message. And she is waiting to be told she can board her plane to Houston. She told Frank she’d talk to her father. And John has already talked to him…which was probably both awkward and hilarious, or would have been to her, at least after it became clear that Jacques wasn’t going to try and rip John’s head off his shoulders (or something equally and tragically vampiric). He’d asked to see her then, in exchange for making their little trip to New Zealand possible… and she will see him, even if she’s not sure she’s ready to. Can’t really blame him for that tiny bit of extortion. She also still wants to punch him in the face. Taking a breath along with a sip of her coffee that probably won’t succeed in keeping her awake on the plane, she leans over and gives up, hitting the button and tapping in her code to open the home screen. Ugh, all those little not-quite-square bubble things. If it weren’t for iBooks and the marvelousness that is iTunes and Spotify … and the Monster At The End of This Book app. She doesn’t know why she loves Grover like a fucking fanatic, but she totally does.... *You’re stalling.* Truth. She taps the green square with the white talk-bubble and sighs. Stupid cheesy iPhone icons. *So, I'm not sure if I should call, or something. Sometimes I forget these exist. I heard you're going away for Christmas. I'd like to see you before then. I've been laid up, and local politics are annoying as hell. It doesn't excuse that I haven't messaged you, though. Host of reasons, which don't really mean much. love you Mari.* The urge she feels to roll her eyes is only slightly less than the urge she feels to cover her face with her hands, which is only slightly less than the urge she feels to laugh. She does none of these things – she just stares at the message. Which is not-quite long enough to hide the last two messages; hers, a tiny bitchfest in response to his autoreply that he was off in Egypt getting not killed, and, though it said nothing about it, getting his soul cleansed and his sins forgiven by 42 little motherfuckers. *UGH. Parents. Are all parents as ridiculous as vampire parents?* She considers this, very seriously in fact. She doesn’t recall her mother, but since she knows she ran away from home before she was at least 15, she can only imagine that her mother wasn’t a stellar example of a parent in any respect. No basis for comparison there. Was there anyone in her life she considered to be like a parent that wasn’t her vampy dad? The phone dangles in her hand, the screen dimming slightly in response to her continued disuse. She wonders if this Nuri chick had been something like a parent. Because in the grand scheme of her fucked up life, some shit like that would make total sense. And would be hilarity – a mummy mommy. Fuck yeah. John *had* said she’d claimed to have taught Mari as a Domme. And he’d also said that she’d had a thing with her father at some point....But, no. And then again...the more she thinks about it, the more it almost feels like Roux was the closest thing to a parent she’d had who isn’t her father. A mentor, at least – which Nuri had also apparently been. And she’d spent more time (that she could remember) with Roux than she had with Jacques. She thinks, anyway.*Wow. De-mom and mummy-mommy. My life is a fucking mess. A hilariously messy everloving fuck of a mess. Yeah. Totally getting hit by a bus one day.* Then she frowns, because it really hadn’t taken that long to go through the list of people she thinks she is even close enough to for her to consider that person a parental figure. Friends, sure. Lovers...plenty of those, too…(Maybe more of those than the friends part? Well, Venn diagrams and all, so whatever.) And she can't really think of lovers, some of whom had been mentors, as potential parents because, goddamnit, she’s not a George R. R. Martin book for heaven’s sake and her father is NOT sexy. And maybe the fact that she holds the potential to drive her father absolute bat-shit-up-the-wall nuts is why sometimes he drives her absolute bat-shit-up-the-wall nuts. She taps the dimmed screen with a thumb to brighten it back up and re-reads the message. *Like, seriously? Sometimes you “forget these exist”? What, paper and pen? Surely they had those in the goddamn dark ages.* *A regular letter does also generally work to convey messages Dad. Maybe you taught me to read? Can't remember, though. J and I will be through around the 20-somethingth. Thank you for making our little holiday possible. I'll talk to you then. Love you too. M* It’s true, she does. And maybe that was too harsh – a bit too cruel - for the father she loves… but isn’t this what he made her? *Scourge.* *He looks at me with wide, startled eyes, then down at his hands, then back at me. There is pain there.* *"I'm a monster... am I a monster?"**I created it, that pain, and I want to suck it out of him til he's a husk on the floor.... but I think maybe the New York City cell members standing around us wouldn't approve.**"You're no goddamned different than you were 20 minutes ago, Jordan. Were you a monster then?"* *"No... just a bored asshole rich kid."* *"Then that's what you are. You're not any fucking different."* *Half-breed.* *Monster.* *Neither am I... no different. But I* was *a monster before my bomb got dropped.*"Ladies and gentlemen," she looks up, almost startled by the sound of the lounge attendant's voice over the PA system. "Flight 291 to Houston will begin boarding in five minutes. Please proceed to gate B70 for priority access. And thank you for fl...." Slipping the phone into her leather tote and seeing it settle next to the old, battered book, she smiles and gets up to leave.