Darker London

Joss woke up bleary, rotten and heavy as a corpse as he heaved himself up in bed. His blankets had twisted and mostly fallen to the floor and there was a smell from the half dozen mostly-empty coffee cups gathered at his bedside. It was his own fault, the cups, the smell, and he could easily do something about it, and yet he didn’t grab any of them as he made his way down to the kitchen for another one.

I’ll clean them all up in one go, he thought. Later. When I do laundry. Something else he hadn’t done in a while.

( ... )

Stephie had offered to go round and talk to Noah, despite the fact that, admittedly, she was a little reluctant. No actually, scratch the admittedly; she was not going to admit her reluctance. Well maybe to Thomas, maybe later, but not before she’d actually got up the guts to talk to Noah. She had balanced out her impulse to help him against the weight of the topic of conversation, and if she’d been any less stubborn then the desire not to talk about it probably would have won.

Who wanted to talk about surviving a demon who stole the face – the body – of one of their best friends? And what he’d done to her with it. There was a lump in Stephie’s throat, but she already knew, before she even replied, that she was going to make the offer.

Noah was sweet, and tall and soft and earnest and funny and flinching because some dickhead ghost had forced his girlfriend to try and kill him. Pat had almost killed him, too. Stephie remembered the long nights spent at the hospital with Daria as Daria waited for Noah to wake up, as Stephie waited for Tasha. That had been a pretty firm fucking bonding experience, right there.

So she did it, she jumped the fence and tried not to sink too much into the mud of the back lawn (Marie and Cassandra had been having a field day earlier, there were tyre tracks from a tricycle and gashes of fist sized mud missing from the lawn that had ended up in the bottom of Thomas’s washing machine.) The kid stuff made Stephie feel all the more determined. If she could do something about one of the twins’ parents feeling flinch about the other, then great, good, that was worth ripping up old wounds for.

Stephie touched the phoenix necklace at her throat to remind herself where she was, now, and rapped on the door.

Since appearing naked in front of an angel in a hospital room, Yolande had been wringing every moment she could from the extra days she’d been given.

Every day was packed full of activity. So much of it was spent looking after Daria and Noah and their newborn twins, but the help was spread over many friends so there was time to reconnect, and play, with Neil and her other daughters too. And she hooked in anyone else who came to the house, Hayley’s friends, Joss. Once she’d gone clubbing with Allanah.

( ... )

“Dammit,” Daria hissed, as several shards of shell from the egg she’d cracked fell into the bowl with the egg. She took a moment to suck in air through her nose but this did nothing to calm her, and she dug into the eggy slime with a frustrated finger, trying to hook the shell back up the lip of the bowl.

“I can do this,” Yolande said cheerfully, reaching to take the bowl away from Daria.

“I can make my own daughter’s birthday cake!” Daria snapped, gripping the bowl close to her. “Fucks sake.”

( ... )

“Daria Persephone,” said her mother’s voice, and Daria looked up blearily from where she was staring at the padded corner of the coffee table. There was nothing particularly interesting about it, it had simply been where her eyes had fallen and refused to get up. Dragging her gaze away from the table was an effort incomparable to anything else she’d been through.

Yolande was wearing one of Daria’s Ethereal Façade shirts to sleep in and looked like she’d stepped out of another time. “You should be asleep.”

( ... )

“Dad’s coming in after dinner with my girls,” Daria whispered to her mother, reading off the phone that Noah was holding, since both her hands were occupied with a breastfeeding Alastair. “And Merry again, and Hayley,” she watched her mother’s face as Yolande covered her mouth with her hands to keep the joy from bursting out. Daria felt the same, but with extra layers of tired, and extra layers of sore. She’d always been active, loved the gym, athletic sex, and finding new ways to push her body, but right now there were muscles aching she’d never thought about before. Her whole body felt like it had fallen out of a tree.

She had fallen out of a tree once too. She’d been getting high with Adam in after school and leaned back too far, hit another branch on the way down and was lucky not to break anything. It hadn’t been a very tall tree, but she was discovering new bruises for days.

“Neil and Merry and Hayley,” Yolande echoed, voice creeping out through her fingers. “Cassandra and Phoebe and Neil and Merry and Hayley.”

“I think we should tell Cass and Bee that you’re an Auntie, or something – I don’t want them telling their preschool they got two new siblings and a granny back from the dead,” Daria said, picturing it. Or rather – she didn’t want other adults telling Phoebe and Cassandra that they were making up stories when they weren’t. “That should work, right?” she looked over at Noah.

Merry stepped out of Daria’s room, and instantly found that looking at her mother without the distraction of her sister and new niece and nephew became far more difficult. Her gaze dropped to her hands, one of them slowly wringing anxiety out of the other.

“I’ll, uh, get coffees,” Joss said, thinking that this was a mother-daughter conversation and he better get himself out of there for a while. “What do you drink – uh – do you drink?”

( ... )