Ender Şahin ₪ Delsin Rowe (smoketasticman) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2015-12-26 18:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | ender şahin, melissa hancock |
Who: Ender and Melissa (+NPC Ender’s grandma)
What: A very important gift.
Where: Their new apartment.
When: Backdated to December 25, 2015; morning
Warnings: Sugar shock.
Things had changed, after Halloween. Part of it had been bad. Melissa had gotten more afraid of… everything. Not that Ender could blame her. What had happened to them on Halloween might have been part of the craziness of being reincarnates, but Lady had still died. They’d seen her body. Ender had gotten her blood all over him, and they’d started arranging her cremation. They still had an urn, tucked away in a box somewhere, that they’d purchased that horrible day while Melissa’s direwolf had been dead. Even though they didn’t look at it every day, it was still there. They still knew it existed. They still remembered what it had been like to lose her.
Part of it was good, though, and sometimes Ender felt guilty because something so good had come out of what had happened, that night. Him and his grandma moving in with Melissa hadn’t happened just when Melissa had found a new apartment. Ender hadn’t wanted to be apart from either of them. When he was with Melissa, he’d have nightmares about his grandma ending up with chunks of cement through her legs. When he was with his grandma, he’d had nightmares about Melissa stabbed in their bed by some psycho who had broken in while Ender wasn’t there to—maybe not protect her, but at least try to do as much as he could. At her age, his grandma hadn’t been able to find another job in a factory, not in the area of New York that she’d been able to walk to from Melissa’s apartment, but she’d found a few of Melissa’s neighbors who’d been paying way too much for preschool, and managed to get some babysitting jobs. It’d been better for her, anyway. She loved kids, something that Ender sort of thought about in the back of his mind sometimes, when he and Melissa were together.
After Melissa had asked about moving in together, though, it had seemed pretty obvious. Ender couldn’t imagine being with anybody else. There wasn’t anybody else that he’d ever wanted to live with, that he’d even trusted his grandma with the way he did Melissa. The two of them had bonded, did girl things together that Ender had never been able to do with his grandma, as much as he’d tried to be everything for her, to make up for his mom being gone for her. Melissa, though, she’d opened up to like the granddaughter she hadn’t had. Melissa’s mom was gone, and her dad was busy. Ender hadn’t ever minded the time that his grandma spent on her, because that meant that the two most important people in his life were getting along.
He’d been in the store picking out a ring before he’d even realized that he wanted to ask Melissa to marry him, someday. Not any time soon. She was still in school, and Ender wasn’t going to do anything to get in the way of her finishing. Sure, he wanted the big wedding, the two point five kids, someday. Melissa being able to get everything she dreamed of was more important, though, and she’d dreamed of finishing school, being a fashion designer. Ender didn’t have any great goals, like that. He didn’t mind doing whatever he needed to for her to get what she wanted. He loved her. Love meant waiting until Melissa was ready to take the next step.
That didn’t mean he didn’t want to let her know what he wanted, someday, and that didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to panic over asking her about it, a little. Lucky for him, Elliot hadn’t minded coming to help him when he’d texted her in a panic over picking out a ring at Walmart, and Ender had ended up with something that was small, within his price range, but perfect for Melissa. Dainty. A cut that he could imagine on her finger. He couldn’t afford to give her the sun, moon, and stars, but he’d done the best he could on her budget, and begged his grandma to wrap it for him. She had magic fingers, his grandma, and she’d been delighted that he’d finally decided to ask that girl to marry him. She’d been telling him that he needed to for almost the entire time that he and Melissa had been dating, and it wasn’t like Ender had wanted to argue about it. He knew, had known for a long time, that Melissa was it for him. It was just that she deserved to be asked the right way, and the right way meant waiting until the perfect moment, when he could save up to buy at least a tiny ring that would suit her.
It had just worked out that Christmas had been the right chance to give her the perfect ring. They’d been in their new apartment for a week, which meant they’d hurried to decorate as soon as they’d moved in. The tree was a jumble of the fashionable ornaments that Melissa had picked out and the ornaments that Ender’s grandma had used every year, cheap things that Ender had made and school and gifted to her that she’d insisted were better than anything she could have bought. It had been the first year that they were on such a nice tree, and they looked a little out of place, but it made the apartment that the three of them lived in feel like home. His grandma had taught Melissa how to make traditional Turkish sweets, and that had filled the rooms with the smell of home. It lingered even until that morning, when the three of them had settled in the living room with the presents that had been placed under the tree. There was nothing there from Ender to Melissa; he’d kept her present, wrapped simply, in the pocket of his hoodie. His grandma had given her plenty of things to make up for it. He was waiting, though, waiting until they’d gotten through the small mound of gifts underneath the tree that his grandma and Melissa had decorated together, before he gave something that meant more than just eighty dollars out of his pocket.