~Achilles~
Sunny was still snickering as Xander went off to the bathroom. "Did you see the look on his face? He went grey!"
I added in a couple packets of chocolate powder, mixing everything in with a spoon. "Are you going to tell me what happened with your parents?"
She frowned, all the mirth disappearing as she fiddled with her eye patch. "They found my stories. The...mature ones. I left my USB plugged in and..."
I stopped stirring. "What do you mean by that?" We'd never talked about this before but Sunny could be so impossibly random, I'd learned to roll with the punches. Most of the time.
She pushed her long hair behind her ears and fidgeted with the band of her eye patch, an old habit she'd developed years ago. "I write these romance stories...on this dumb online site." Sunny fixed her eye on the pot, watching the milk turn into a dark shade of brown, the sweet aroma filling the space between us. God, she really was sixteen. I'd been careful at that age, deleting everything if I ever did anything. It would've been traumatizing if my mom or Jim or even Anders saw what I googled. Outing myself like that would've been a catastrophe.
Sunny stepped closer to me, still worrying her eyepatch. "We had a big argument. Not just cause of the stories, but what I was writing about cause...The stories are kinda gay." She cleared her throat, speaking slowly. "They realized I'm gay."
With the strength and will of everything in me I continued stirring like she hadn't just completely and utterly thrown me. "Oh." I breathed out. I turned off the burner and started pouring the steaming liquid into one mug and then another. I scooped out a few marshmallows, focused on my task. I sighed, putting down the bag and looking at her, really looking.
Sunny stared hard at the marshmallow bag, barely breathing.
My voice was low. "That doesn't make me love you any less. If that's what you're worried about, Sunny."
She exhaled, finally looking at me. "Of course I'm worried about that. You're always there for me, no matter how many times I fuck things up. You're the only one who doesn't flinch when I take off my patch or take out my eye. Thanks, I guess." Sunny dropped her hand off of her patch and gave me a hug, squeezing me hard and tight. "I love you, and you won't catch me saying this tomorrow so just hug me back and tell me everything will be okay."
I hugged her back, holding her as she shook through sobs. "Everything will be okay."
#
Sunny's eye wasn't too red later on as we sat in Xander's movie room to watch Galatrickiton: Into the Galaxy. It was the first of the saga. The light in the room was low and Xander played with the old VCR player. The VCR was at the front of larger room and Xander's silk pants hugged his ass as he was bent over in a really nice way. I should have been focused on the fact Xander had a mini movie theatre room with a dozen or so seats and a screen that took up the most of one wall.
I just wanted to cuddle with him during the movie but Sunny was there and sat between Xander and myself. As soon as she found out he played the trumpet, her eye had gone wide as a saucer.
Sunny attended a performing arts school where her focus was on instrumental studies and her primary instruments were the trumpet and piano. Just like Xander. They hit it off exceptionally well and Sunny seemed to get more comfortable with him when he'd mentioned off hand that he was gay. She didn't even care that he was a vampire.
Seeing him talking so easily to Sunny made me feel something warm and soft for Xander. I wasn't paying much attention to the movie, just happy that these two people I cared about, seemed to like one another. The music was brilliant though, simple and emotive when it needed to be and sweeping and expansive when the action scenes roared. Xander was really a genius. He was too good for me. Too interesting. Too proud. Too colourful.
"I heard her come out." Xander leaned in and across a sleeping Sunny. She must have been exhausted, poor kid. Xander looked at her, then me. "She's a brave kid."
I swallowed. "Yeah."
"Let's all go to bed?" Xander said in a soft voice. "I made up the guest bedrooms. Yours and Sunny's rooms are beside one another, at the end of the hall." He got up then, turning off the VCR and then the screen.
I woke up a bleary eyed Sunny to tell her to put her prosthetic in and go to bed. She gave me a thick response as I escorted her to her bedroom. She waved goodnight and closed the door.
I went to the bedroom beside hers, opening the door to see a perfectly made bed with my things from the trip in a neat pile on the floor. I quietly closed the door and followed my nose to where Xander was. He was in the kitchen, the sound of the kettle rumbling while he browsed on his phone, facing away from me.
I came up behind him, wrapping my hands around his waist and nuzzling into the crook of his neck. Xander relaxed into my embrace, humming softly. I finally realized what it was Xander smelled like. It was vanilla. Sweet, and clean and perfect; all him.
I kissed his neck. "Thank you."
Xander turned his head until his lips met mine. His mouth was soft and warm as we kissed slowly. I could taste the hints left over from the hot chocolate as my tongue swooped against his. I pulled Xander closer against me and he moaned quietly into my mouth as the kettle whistled.
Xander moved away to attend to the kettle. He poured the hot water into a mug before putting in a tea bag from a green tea box. "You should go to bed." He said.
"I want to be with you." I said.
He stilled, looking at me with an unreadable look on his face, his green eyes dark and distant. "Not with the girl in the house."
"I don't care if she finds out."
Xander shook his head. "I'm behind on my compositions. I've got to stay up tonight to catch up. You should go to sleep."
"Okay." I said, knowing not to push. "Next week, let's go for a drink."
Xander gave me a smile. "Coffee."
"Coffee, it is." I agreed.
#
I was the last one awake the next morning. I took a long shower before shuffling into the kitchen finding Sunny and Xander sitting around Xander's computer at the kitchen island. The place smelled like eggs, bacon, sausages and bread. I assumed Sunny had made that for herself because I saw Xander with several cups of coffee around the island, all on little coasters, of course. There were a few empty blood packets as well, arranged in a little pile. Not for the first time I wondered how much blood Xander needed.
There was a sweeping melody filling the space as Xander and Sunny looked at sheafs of sheet music, talking over the track the laptop was playing.
"It needs more of a thump, y'know?" Xander was speaking to Sunny. "Artweek is going to space for the first time from Terra and she's seeing Earth from space. I need to feel her wonder. Even that same motif from the earlier measure would filter in well here but I wonder how obvious it should be. The scene is very wide and that matters too."
Sunny was nodding. "The way it sounds now is cool. If I could just make one suggestion, not for this track but for the love song between Swila and Arlee. I really love them together, they're cute. But in the next movie it would be so cool if their character themes could merge into one for part of the song. Kind of like a two becomes one sort of thing."
"Oh." Xander started writing notes into the sheet, humming. And then he started singing to her, soft and low. "Do you think something like that would work?"
She blinked, a little stunned at his voice, I could tell. "Yeah, it fucking slaps."
Xander finally noticed me standing there. He gave me a nice smile. "Good morning sleepyhead, Sunny's been helping me with my compositions."
Sunny got up, making me a heaping plate of food, talking all the while. "Why didn't you tell me you have a friend whose basically everything I want to be wrapped all into one?"
I laughed, getting myself a glass of water, before sitting down at the table. "You're fine just as you are, Sunny."
"Yeah, but Xander's like, goals." She put down a plate beside Xander. "Are you half black, too?" Part of me and Sunny's connection was that both of our biological fathers had passed away when we were young and our mothers had both remarried shortly thereafter. We were part of the few blended families in the pack and I could understand her obvious discomfort as a child when looking back at family portraits. Sunny's skin was fairer than Xander's light brown skin but only a few shades and she had Asian features with hair that was thick, dark and wavy. Although, she'd started flat ironing it ramrod straight a few years ago. She hated when people asked her what she was or where she was from, she knew a lot less about her biological father than I did. Her mom never talked about him, he was just some mysterious black guy.
Xander looked relaxed but his voice came out tense. "Yeah my mom's west African, but she's moved around a lot, since, you know, colonization."
Sunny looked down and then up. "Can I ask you about, like, stuff about vampires? Or, is that rude?" Her nose wrinkled as she thought.
I interjected, talking between mouthfuls. "Yeah. What's conclave?"
Xander replied quickly. "A yearly vampire conference. Different hearths meet up, we discuss secrecy practices, ways to ensure safety, any new ways to access blood. And then we drink, we party, sometimes there's orgies, although those lose their novelty rather quickly."
Sunny gawked and quite frankly so did I.
Xander had been filling in things on his laptop, but looked up at me and Sunny when we didn't ask anything. He laughed. "What's the problem? Vampires don't party or we can't have orgies?"
Sunny gained her composure first. "I'm more interested in how you got the job as composer for Galatrickiton to be honest."
"It was more of an accident." He admitted. "A long time ago I was interested in film, so I went to film school. I was more social when I was younger and ended up befriending another student who ended up being the director of the first film. It was more of a favour to him, I didn't get paid much for it. He's a vampire as well but so young. About half my age."
"So, the sunlight thing?" Sunny asked at the same time I asked, "What does that mean?"
He closed the lid of his laptop. "They're really kind of the same thing. Our historians and biologists say that vampires deviated from the human genome probably at around the same time shifters did. The fae folk and other supes have been around longer. No one's really sure which race of vamp came first, only that we kind of popped up around the globe around the same time. Except, mutations go wrong and a lot of White vamps have something that isn't quite albinism but makes them extremely terribly sensitive to sun. Before sunscreen they called themselves night walkers. Non-White vamps never had that issue but it did create frustration and jealousy in earlier conclaves. Sorcerers developed spells, but nothing full proof and always prone to failure." Xander had his elbow propped up on the table, leaning his head into his hand, eyes nearly closed. "Sometimes the rest of us think of the European vamps role in colonization was some kind of revenge. Most middle aged vamps are old enough to remember the scramble for Africa and the abolition movement. Some vamps saw that there was a profit to be made and they didn't mind enslaving Africans since they were human. That was the justification." His eyes were closed. "But it got bad so quickly, somehow African vampires got caught in the mix and they got enslaved, too. But that didn't matter to them. We were just collateral damage. Eventually, when the humans began to stop openly enslaving, the European vamps who took part realized they were damaging their reputations. They were only dividing us further. The hearth of Peace and Longevity was created to ensure nothing like that should ever be allowed to happen again." Xander opened his eyes, reopening his laptop, and beginning to type something. "But I don't know, it's the vamps who think racism is a solely human problem that allowed things to get so bad. You'd be surprised how many vamps are nazis."
"Reconciliation efforts?" I asked.
Xander frowned but continued typing. "Basically European vamps going into the global south where they'd previously colonized and tried to remedy things. Sometimes it was building a school, contributing to infrastructure and sometimes it was social. A lot of interracial marriages popped up, to try to convince ourselves we were always united. And that's where you find me. My parents were one of the first interracial unions during the reconciliation era, but it didn't quite last."
"Why?" Sunny asked.
Xander looked at me for a beat. "Well, because no one likes to be forced to do anything, of course."
#
A little info dumpy but things are spicing up.
Overall thoughts?
Remember, I appreciate you guys, thanks for reading!