Chapter Text
He had lazy morning breakfasts with his mother. When she went to tend the shop, he worked on his computer setups – both his personal and professional rigs – and slowly found a routine in his new room in his old home. His afternoons were dedicated to relearning his home town, and that proved to be both a larger task than anticipated, and markedly less painful than he feared.
Clint had, indeed, met his wife on the internet. Kara was a semi-professional cosplayer and needed some custom metalwork done, visited Pelican Town for a fitting, came back for a second fitting, and then moved in permanently when the work was done. It took Clint another three months before he realized she was there for him, and even then it took Allana beating him over the head with it, but once he figured it out he hadn’t wasted any more time. They had three boys, with a fourth (a surprise, every time) on the way.
Elliott and Leah weren’t a surprise, nor was their expansion of Leah’s cottage with the proceeds from Elliott’s book tour. The cottage on the beach was a rental, now – Kara had used it for awhile when waiting for Clint to come to his senses – that brought them a modest income and the added benefit of the occasional new face in town.
Emily was still in her parents’ home, next door to Kent and Jodi, although Emily’s parents - Sarah and Tom - had finally come home from their round-the-world voyage. They were getting on in years and Emily’s plans to travel were put on hold. She said it was just until they were settled, but it was obvious she would be caring for them through the end of their lives. Haley had moved into the house Alex had inherited when George had passed, mere weeks after Evelyn. It was possible Haley would take over the care of her parents once her children were older, but for now Emily’s staying in their childhood home had freed her to build her own family with Alex.
Maru still lived in Harvey’s old apartment over the clinic, and Penny was dividing her time between teaching the growing herd of children in town and corralling her mother, Pam, whose alcoholism was finally taking its toll on her health. Nobody liked to talk about it, but Pam got a house call from Harvey every Sunday, right after worship service in the old altar room in Pierre’s shop.
Pierre had not changed – not in personality or ambitions – and his shop reflected that static. He seemed to have been convinced of his eventual election to Mayor when Lewis finally retired. When Lewis had moved out to Marnie’s ranch three years earlier, though, it was with the surprising election of Gus to the position of Mayor. Gus was still the owner of the saloon, and still spent most of his time cooking, but he’d hired Sam to tend the bar and assist Emily so he could devote enough time to the mayoralty. Gus had hired Lewis to handle the produce of Ravenswood and the local tradespeople, partly to keep Lewis out of trouble but mostly because Lewis was the only one with a reliable pickup and could handle the sheer quantity of product streaming out of Ravenswood. It was a better use for the proceeds of Ravenswood than any of Pierre’s plans, and was likely to keep Gus in the mayor’s house for the foreseeable future.
Lewis was taking Shane with him on his daily sales trips, and the thought was eventually Shane would be the point person for Pelican Town goods being shipped to the rest of the country.
Abigail, to Sebastian’s surprise, was still on-again-off-again with Sam, and living with him in Gus' apartment above the Saloon. She met Sam every night at the saloon, without fail. Mostly she was reporting the crazy things she’d seen or done that day as Rasmodius’ apprentice. That was a story Sebastian wasn’t likely to get – the side-eye Abigail sent Emily when he asked what made Rasmodius choose her said there was definitely a story there – but Sam had just shrugged and said she’d earned it. Sebastian spent as much time as he could at the saloon during the off hours, catching up with Sam, but once the rest of the town started filing in at night, he made his way back home to relative silence.
It would have been great if he could say he was texting Allana at night, but aside from a picture or two every day, he scarcely heard from her. And he was glad. He wasn’t sure his conscience could put up with the thought that he was distracting her from her daughters. It wasn’t until the night before the Feast of the Winter Star that he got more words than a photo caption.
<Allana> Hey I know this is last minute but the girls are going out with Harvey tonight
<Allana> Technically with your sister and Penny, but they’re pulling out the telescope and having a lesson about stars
<Allana> Did you want to meet me? Talk for a bit? Maybe not at Ravenswood.
<Sebastian> How about the lake? The beach is probably too cold tonight, and town’s getting torn up for the Feast
<Allana> I think the kids are all meeting at Marnie’s so that should be good.
<Allana> I’ll grab dinner at the saloon and head up as soon Harvey comes to get the girls
<Allana> He’s on the way so it’ll be soon. Want me to grab anything for you?
<Sebastian> If its soon, yeah, we haven’t started cooking here yet. Whatever’s good
He stopped off in the kitchen to let Robin know he was going out – wouldn’t be home for dinner and they shouldn’t wait up for him – and then paused long enough at the door to pull on his coat and scarf before trudging out into the snow.
He was going to beat Allana there by a wide margin, but there was a certain allure to standing at the edge of the lake on a still evening. The stars were bright that night in the absence of the moon – the kids were going to get a great show, especially with Maru’s newest telescope – and there was no breeze to speak of, making the lake a sheet of glass. The subsurface water moved too much for it to freeze over entirely, with the hot springs bubbling up from under the mountain adding both heat and currents, but the edges were rimmed in ice and created a frame for the perfect reflection of the night sky.
It was altogether too cold, and he regretted not grabbing a hot rock from next to the hearth to keep his hands warm, but the discomfort was tolerable. He’d missed this, the silence, the stillness, the way this tiny corner of the world reminded him of the vastness of the universe. This far from the lights of the city – and the carefully shielded lights of Pelican Town, designed by Demetrius to minimize stress on local wildlife – it was possible to actually experience true darkness. He let his eyes adjust and got lost in the unique silence only a still night in winter could provide.
He heard her coming a solid minute before he smelled the fresh bread she’d brought.
“Did you remember hot rocks?” she asked, in lieu of a greeting.
“You know I didn’t.”
He felt the sudden weight in first his right coat pocket and then his left as she dropped in the extra hot rocks she’d brought for him. He switched pockets – moving his hands from his jeans, closer to his skin, to his coat – and gripped both stones for a moment, immediately feeling the heat seep into his bones. He went to make a quip about the more things change, the more they stay the same, but that felt a bit too on-the-nose for the situation at hand.
“Gus had pumpkin soup, and bread was just coming out of the oven,” Allana said as she stepped into his peripheral vision. He took his hands out of his pockets, accepted the take-away container of soup, and tucked the still-hot bread into his left coat pocket with the hot rock. Gus put the pumpkin soup into hot cups, so it was sippable, and Sebastian was able to stand with his left hand around the hot rock in his left pocket and occasionally take out the bread to nibble on.
“Marnie brought out a set of barn heaters for the kids,” Allana said as she settled in at his side, her shoulder rubbing against his arm between his shoulder and elbow. Her height never made sense to him; he was always either surprised how much was tucked into such a small package, or surprised she was only six inches shorter than him. It felt like she should be eight feet tall, with how much she accomplished, and four feet tall for how she presented herself most days.
Like now. He glanced over and she grinned up at him, positively impish. “Sam says hi.”
“Who else did you tell, on the way here?”
She laughed and shook her head. “He wanted to know who the second soup was for. I told him. He said to say hi.”
“Fair enough.” He knew he was going to get a ton of harassment from Sam about it later, and he wasn’t sure how to respond. Not to Sam, not to Allana, not to himself… he still didn’t know what this was besides him being smitten with the same woman for over a decade.
“You wish I hadn’t said anything to him,” Allana guessed. “Why is that?”
“He’s going to ask me what we were doing, and ‘talked’ isn’t going to answer the question,” Sebastian replied. “And I don’t know if I am going to have good news or bad news after this conversation, and I don’t know whether I’m going to want to talk to him about any of it.”
“Good news or bad news?” Allana repeated, and Sebastian sighed.
“I never got over you,” he said, staring down at the lake. “I feel the exact same now – for you – as I did the day I left. I am still unpacking how I feel about having left, and staying away as long as I did, and what on earth I’m going to do with myself now and three months from now and three years from now. Literally the only thing I know is that I am still a complete mess about you, and that you did exactly what you said you would do, and you moved on. So you can keep trying to pull information out of me, or you can tell me where you’re at, because you’re the one who grew as a person and moved on and made a family and found your place in the world.”
“Oh,” she said, softly, and squared off with the lake. She’d been slightly turned towards Sebastian as he spoke, but she mimicked his stance, speaking into the darkness beyond the water’s edge. “I guess I didn’t think of it that way. I assumed you’d found something else out there, something in the ‘City to keep you there, something big enough to fill the hole your mom and sister and friends and home and maybe I left behind. If you didn’t… was the work really the only thing that kept you there?”
Sebastian shrugged and took another swallow of soup. “Externally, yeah. I think my own stubbornness was a bigger factor. I’d decided that was what I wanted, and therefore I was going to stay there and keep at it. If Mom hadn’t gotten sick, I don’t know if I ever would have convinced myself to come home. Mom being sick meant I could come back and not be seen as a failure, I would be doing it for her and not because I couldn’t cut it in Zuzu City.”
“What if I’d written?”
“What would you have said?”
Allana took a long, deep breath, her shoulders lifting several inches as she seemed to steady herself.
Sebastian took a bite of bread to hide his sudden, terrible anxiety.
“I couldn’t have said I felt the same, not if I’d written, because I… I didn’t know that, then. No, I mean... I didn't know it yet. I could have written to say that a small part of why my marriage failed is I was holding Harvey up to your standard. He asked me, once, to stop taking the minecarts – they weren’t safe, he said – and I remembered sitting on the back of your bike on the highway at night and it was everything I could do not to tell him to just live a little.”
“I would actually love to ride around in the minecarts, if I could figure out how they work.”
“I knew it. I knew it. I will show you. Not tonight, it’s too damn cold, and I can’t risk the girls seeing me.”
“The girls don’t know you do it?”
“I promised Harvey I wouldn’t teach them, and they’re both smart enough to figure it out by just watching me from afar. Which is the other thing I could have written… the girls would love you. There was a Sebastian-shaped hole in town, and they noticed it, growing up. They heard stories about you from your mom and Maru, had you mentioned in passing when somebody else won a pool tournament or Sam asked Willow to learn keyboard since you’d left the band, or when the anchovy incident came up, or the rotten egg toss… they have this half-assed idea of you already and Willow especially would adore you. I would love for them to finally get to put a face to the name, to the stories.”
“I want to meet them, too. But that’s not what we need to talk about, I don’t think.”
Allana sighed again. “No. It’s not.”
“What all did you want to say the other night, that you couldn’t put in texts?”
“That I want you on my couch,” she replied, instantly. “But I don’t just mean that I want you sitting next to me on my couch, even though that's true too. I want you beneath me on your back on the floor in front of the fire. I don’t know what I want past that because I keep getting stuck right there, with the way it felt to wake up in your arms the other day and how much I want that again. But this damn little town talks too much, and somebody will ask the girls what they think about you and I know that’s nothing you would ever take lightly. Not with the way you grew up, not with your relationship with Demetrius being what it is.”
She’d hit the nail square on the head, even if he wasn’t ready to consider his relationship with Allana’s daughters beyond mom’s friend just yet. How he met them – and whether they felt some obligation to try to get along – was not the problem for today. It would be fantastic if that was the task he tackled over the summer, but it was far removed from the issue at hand.
“Ten years ago that would have been enough, just being wanted. I think I know too much, now. I think if I try to settle for wanted I will resent the situation far more than I ever could have resented not moving to Zuzu City.”
“The girls aren’t in a place yet where I could realistically get remarried.”
“There are ten miles of gray area between those two points.”
“Is there?”
“Yes.”
“What part of that grey are you looking to clarify?”
“Do you still love Harvey?”
She went perfectly still for a heartbeat. “Yes.”
That should have been enough. He should have walked away then. She wasn’t done talking, though, and he was compelled to hear her out.
“He’s a good man. He was a good husband. Just because we weren’t compatible, couldn’t hold it together over the long run, doesn’t mean I can’t hold him in high regard. He’s a great father, a good coparent. We are good friends, good business partners, have the same ideas for the betterment of the community. But when I came home at night I felt stifled, suffocated, judged. And he felt unimportant, undervalued, unappreciated. He didn’t understand why I kept going into the mines and I didn’t understand why he expected marriage to change me, why he expected marriage to change him. My going into the mines meant he wasn’t enough, the girls weren’t enough, the farm and our home and our life wasn’t enough and that was the last thing on my mind. I went into the mines because that is what I do. I keep the monster population down, and I bring up the ore that Clint needs, that the war effort needs, that the army buys, that helps funds the town. It had nothing to do with Harvey and the girls, and all of that has nothing to do with love. There were reasons we got married and reasons we got divorced and most of them weren’t same. So, yes, I still love him, and in a way I always will, even if only because he loves my girls and they love him. Because he is always willing to meet me halfway when it comes to what is best for them, because he was willing to change his life to accommodate them – accommodate me – and I will always owe him for that. We can get along and I like hanging out with him and we won’t have any problem being a united front for the girls but I don’t want him anymore. I don’t wish him ill but I don’t want him back. I don’t roll over at night and look for him, I don’t miss him when he’s in Grampleton, and I definitely don’t think about him in the shower.”
The words hung over the lake for a moment before he could fathom a reply, but she answered him before he managed to formulate the question.
“And, yes, I still love you. Yes, I put that on a shelf because I told you I would. I promised you that I wouldn’t sit here alone while you went off into the world, that I would wait to see if you came back before moving on. You took the promotion, I sent you the wilted bouquet, and I boxed up my best-friend-with-benefits that I’m in love with and stuck it on a shelf. Because there was no reason to fall out of love with you, either. You were following your dream. You were doing exactly what I advised you to do, and when said you were staying, said it was working out and you were taking a promotion, I was happy for you. I was so proud of the risk you took and the strides you made and the world you were creating for yourself. None of that does anything to damper love. So no I didn’t get over you or fall out of love or change my mind. I just respected your choice, and I’ll keep respecting your choice.”
“My choice? What choice do you think I’m making?”
“To not take that path down to Ravenswood and get naked with me.”
“Yeah, for the two whole weeks your daughters are here. Let me assure you, that was precisely my plan for Thursday night had I not waken up to find Harvey in my kitchen.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“Well, yeah, I guess I haven’t internalized yet the revelation you didn’t move on while you were in Zuzu City.”
“Move on? Allana, you’re actual literal magic. Look at what you did to the town I grew up in, to my friends, to my family. You came into town the descendant of a legend and transcended everything your grandfather accomplished. You changed the trajectory of every life in Pelican Town and probably a lot of people in Grampletown, now, too. If anything, I went to Zuzu City with the intention of being a big enough person to be able to live in your shadow.”
“Big enough…? Sebastian, you’re enough. You’re-“
“I don’t mean that the way Harvey did. You draw eyes everywhere you go, and ten years ago that was unnerving to me. I was the focus of attention because you drew attention. I had to learn to get over myself, to get lost in a crowd of people, to figure out that everyone is too busy with their own lives to worry overmuch about mine. If it took you tossing me out of your house seven years ago to figure that out, that’s my problem.”
“At the end of the day I’m just a person, just a woman. I’m mortal, I get messy and muddy and I regularly injure myself. I want somebody who sees that and accepts it for what it is. You always did, you always saw me like nobody else did. You are still the only person who figured out it was me who put Lewis’ underpants in the soup. When I found his statue and dragged it out into the town square my first thought was Sebastian is going to love this and my second thought was Sebastian isn’t here to see this. I missed the way you love me, missed the way you laughed at my bullshit, missed the way only you would look sideways at me when something shady happened.”
He shifted slightly, drawn to the intensity in her voice. She was already halfway facing him, unable to keep directing her thoughts over the water, and it was impossible to look away once he caught her eye.
“What did you miss about the way I love you? What did I give you that he didn’t? Is that a terrible thing to ask?”
“No, its not. When you saw my stretch marks-“
“Tiger stripes.”
“Exactly. Exactly that. You didn’t wax poetic about the toll motherhood takes. You didn’t have nine suggestions for how to minimize their appearance. You didn’t get sentimental. You found a way to make them simultaneously awesome and completely unimportant. They’re just a part of me, a part that you accept and enjoy, like every other part of me. They just are. I’m tiger-striped now. You completely changed the way I think about them and made me more comfortable in my own skin and instead of worrying about what you might be thinking, I wanted to show you more. And then, when I did show you more…?”
He couldn’t stop himself. The memory surged up, overwhelmed him, and the next thing he knew he had her face cupped in both hands and her mouth drawn against his and he was kissing her with every scrap of energy he could drum up. Her arms were twining around his neck and his left hand dropped to snake around her waist and pull her against him, tighter, while his right cradled her skull, kept their angle right so he could deepen the kiss.
She traced his teeth with her tongue and he lifted her up, staggered two steps to press her back against a tree, and she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled his hips against her thighs. His left hand slid under her thigh, holding her up, holding her against him, and he leaned forward, eager to feel her against him and immediately stymied by their heavy winter coats.
“Mmm not here, can’t do this here.”
“Can’t kiss you on the lakeshore?” he countered, and kissed her again, following the lines of her jaw while she struggled for words.
“If you want to stop with just a kiss, sure, but I don’t think either of us will sleep tonight if that’s all that happens. Also its cold.”
“Where,” he managed, as he swept his hand beneath her scarf and made room for his mouth to trace the contours of her throat.
“Your room?”
“I’m in Maru’s now. Next to Mom and Demetrius. No way you’re staying that quiet.”
She arched a little against him and it was all he could do to keep himself silent. “Spa, then.”
“Locked.”
“I have the key.”
“You have the…? How?”
“Key to the city. Overrides all the auto-locks. Nobody else will walk in on us.”
Sebastian let her slide down the tree, getting her feet under her and swaying a bit before getting her balance. She adjusted his coat while he straightened hers, and then she took his hand and pulled him along behind her.
“Wait, the cups-“
They had both dropped their mostly-empty soup cups into the snow, and Sebastian ran back and grabbed them, detouring back to his mother’s home rather than taking the more direct route up the hill. He set both cups on the bottom step to take in and throw away later, and then turned to find Allana. She grasped his proffered hand and pulled him into motion again, leading him quickly up the ridge to the path carved into the mountains that led to the train station and the town’s hot spring.
“How long do we have?” he asked, hoping she would understand the question.
She did. “Harvey’s going to put the girls to bed and probably stay at Ravenswood tonight. I told him I had work to catch up on and would be home late, so as long as I’m home by my toxic hour I should be fine.”
“Two?”
“Two. Try as I might, I can’t stay awake past two.”
As they reached the deceptively small building that had been built around the town’s hot spring, Allana squeaked and leaned backwards suddenly, stopping Sebastian in his tracks.
“Linus!”
“Allana! Oh, I’m glad to see you. I was going to jiggle the door open to the bath house for Leo. He wasn’t ready for this cold snap but wanted to be in town for the Feast tomorrow.”
“Oh, no! Poor guy. Here, let me get that open for you.” She released Sebastian’s hand and darted for the door. Linus nodded and half-waved at Sebastian, who smiled and nodded in return. He was well aware of Linus – and Alex’s old habits of vandalizing the tent – and Allana of course knew everyone. It was a little surprising how well Linus responded to her, though; it seemed like genuine respect, which Sebastian definitely didn’t expect the hermit to pay to anyone.
“Here, let’s tuck a rock in there, keep it open until Leo gets in,” Allana said and Linus nodded his thanks and hurried around the way he’d come.
“Leo?” Sebastian whispered as Allana rejoined him and gestured for them to head back.
“A couple years younger than Vince. Orphan. Almost feral. Was marooned on Ginger Island. Linus and Penny have done wonders for him, but he and Linus are peas in a pod and neither one will come down to the farm to warm up.”
“For a town where nothing ever happened, an insane amount changed while I was gone,” Sebastian sighed.
“Everyone blames that on me,” Allana replied, without a drop of self-consciousness or remorse.
“As they should?”
She nodded as she shrugged. “If the shoe fits.”
He could hear Linus’ voice in the dark as they neared his mother’s house again, and they walked hand-in-hand to the bottom the steps. Sebastian set Allana on the bottom step – next to the mostly-empty pumpkin soup take-out cups – and wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Sorry.”
“Do not be,” he countered, immediately. “You helped somebody stay warm tonight. That’s a bit more important than what we were going to do.”
“Is it?”
She didn’t mean it, and he laughed without bothering to check the expression on her face.
“Stay with me,” she whispered.
“Not yet,” he replied, as he tried in vain to pull her closer to his chest.
He wanted to drag her up the stairs, parents be damned, but he was right to say not tonight. Her daughters were in town, it was the night before the best holiday of the year – for most kids, at least – and he didn’t have it in him to be selfish. Maybe it was resentment of Demetrius, maybe it was something else, but he could not keep her to himself, not yet.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, at the Feast?” she asked, quietly, as she carefully withdrew and took three steps towards the path back to Ravenswood.
“You will,” he agreed, and reached out, took her hand, pulled her back towards him.
He got the barest hint of a kiss – a brush of her lips on his that left him wanting – and then she was gone, disappearing down the mountain path back towards her home.
Sebastian remembered to snag the soup cups from the stairs on his way up, took them to the kitchen to empty them out and dispose of them properly, and then made his way silently back to his room. He was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.