some people become your home

a little about me & what i make

Lena Vane · storyteller · she/her

"Some people change your life. Some people become your home."

I write soft hearts and hard people, the quiet devotion between those who've been through something together, and a little bit of the supernatural where it counts. Love stories, found families, and the long way home.

Everything begins in the sims for me — it's my sketchbook, my storyboard, the place my characters come to life before they ever reach the page. So you'll find both here: the images and the words, side by side.

The Only Face I Keep is available now on Amazon KDP.

A Christmas for two, a blizzard outside, and a power outage throughout the village.

Blizzard

Nobody got through. The road up was gone by two and the last of the calls came in around four, everyone apologising, and by five he'd stopped answering because there was nothing left to say to any of them.

Then the power went, sometime after dark.

Sakura took this as the best thing that had ever happened. Candles on every flat surface, the tree on its own strings of nothing, and her flat on her stomach on the tatami drawing by candlelight because she could see well enough and refused to be moved.

There was food for eleven people. They ate at one end of the table and she took her plate down onto the rug halfway through, which he allowed, because there was no one there to see it.

She opened one present early. He'd meant to hold them until morning and lasted about as long as anyone does.

Later she fell asleep against him under the tree with a hand in his collar, and he sat there with his back against the wall and let his legs go dead rather than move her.

The power came back sometime after eleven. Everything in the flat woke up at once — the fridge, the lights he'd left switched on, the small blue glow of the oven clock downstairs asking to be set.

He went out onto the balcony instead of dealing with any of it.

The snow had eased off. The valley was lit up again in pieces, windows coming back on one street at a time, and it was so quiet he could hear the wires ticking overhead.

Two years, he'd said. Maybe three.

Nine months of that gone now, and Brooks had no idea where in the world the man actually was on this particular night, whether it was even the same day there, whether the sea was warm. He knew nothing about any of it. He had never asked a single question worth asking.

He stood out there long enough to lose the feeling in his hands.

Test

He knew before the test. He'd done this once, and the body doesn't get more subtle the second time round.

He was sick at six in the morning on the bathroom floor, and Sakura slept through it, and he sat with his back against the wall afterwards and did the arithmetic he already knew the answer to.

One night. One.

He waited three days, which he could not have explained to anyone. Then he went down early to catch Ren before the crowd, because there was no good place for it and at least there his hands would have something to do.

Ren got there first. Bought nothing, which in four years had never once happened.

"I've got something to tell you," Brooks said.

"Me too." Ren rubbed the back of his neck. "Can I go first? I'll lose my nerve otherwise."

"Sure."

"I'm going away. Kona. There's a station out there." He said it fast, the way people say things they've been rehearsing badly. "Deep water survey. They lost their lead and they want me on it."

Brooks looked at him.

"They want you on it."

"Yeah."

"For what."

Ren almost smiled. "I'm a marine biologist. You never asked."

And Brooks stood there with a tray in his hands and had the strangest sensation, like a floor tilting. A waiting room, a year back. Sakura on his knee with a temperature, a magazine somebody had left on the seat. Three pages on hydrothermal vents and the animals that live at them, and a name he'd read straight past — the same name, the same spelling. He'd found it interesting. He'd put the magazine down and forgotten it, because there was no world in which the man who bought his cardamom buns three times a week was the person who'd written that.

"How long."

"Two years. Could be three."

"When."

"A week."

"A week."

"I found out four days ago," Ren said. "After. I want you to know that. When we — I didn't know."

Four days. Brooks turned that over. That put it after the birthday, after the kitchen, after all of it, and there was no version where Ren had sat on this.

"What was yours?"

He'd had the words lined up for three days. He could feel exactly where they sat.

"Nothing," he said. "It'll keep."

Ren waited. Brooks put the ones he liked into a paper bag and handed them over and didn't take his money, and after a while Ren took the hint and went.

He got through the whole morning. Sold out by one.

After Everyone Left

Ren stayed to help clear up. He'd have stayed anyway.

There was a lot left over. Nobody had touched the strawberry ones, and Brooks put two down on the table and sat and didn't get up again for a long time.

"You didn't have to hit him," he said, somewhere into the second round.

"I know."

"His face is a mess."

"So are my hands." Ren turned one over and looked at it like it belonged to somebody else. "Worth it."

Brooks laughed, and then stopped, because it came out wrong. "I'm not going to thank you for that."

"Wasn't asking you to."

They kept drinking. At some point Brooks started talking about the corner building, the one on the bend with the boarded window, and how long he'd been walking past it and pricing it in his head, and Ren listened to all of it like it was interesting, which it wasn't.

"You've had a day," Ren said eventually.

"I've had a year."

"Yeah." Ren refilled him without being asked. "You want me to go?"

"No."

It sat there a moment.

"Say that again when you're sober," Ren said.

"I've wanted you to stay since about October," said Brooks, "so pick whichever version of me you like."

Ren looked at him for a while. Then he said, "That's not fair," and didn't mean it, and Brooks stood up to put a glass in the sink and didn't get that far.

Afterwards Ren fell asleep first, one arm across him, that ridiculous spiked bracelet still on.

Brooks stayed awake a while. Thinking it was too soon, and that everyone would say so, and that he'd have to look at himself in the morning.

Her Birthday

He'd done the room the night before. Balloons, bunting, candles on the table, cake with clouds on it.

Everyone came. The same faces as the last time this apartment was full, and Sakura in the middle of it, being handed round and loving every second.

Ren came too, and his hands were split across the knuckles. Rohan's eye had gone dark and his cheek was swollen. Brooks looked at one and then the other.

"What happened to you two."

"Ask him," Ren said.

"I'm asking you."

So Ren told him, standing in the hallway with the party going on behind them. He didn't soften it and he didn't stretch it out.

They took it into the bedroom.

"Is it true."

Rohan didn't sit down. "Yes."

"How long."

"Brooks—"

"How long."

He said it. Then he said the rest, the part Ren had seen and the part he hadn't, and he kept going after Brooks had stopped needing to hear it.

"You promised me. In the kitchen. You stood there and you promised me."

"I meant it."

"I know you did." That was the worst of it, and Brooks heard his own voice go up and couldn't hold it. "You always mean it. You meant it and it lasted about as long as it took you to say it, and I've been walking around this place pretending—"

He stopped. Somewhere out there a room full of people had gone quieter.

Rohan sat down on the edge of the bed and put his face in both hands.

"Don't," Brooks said. "Don't do that. Don't make me be the one who feels bad."

"I'm not asking you to."

"Then get up. It's her birthday." He sat down beside him because there was nowhere else in the room to be. "We go out there and she gets her day. Then you and I are finished."

"Okay."

"Say it back."

"We're finished," Rohan said.

So they went out. Sang. Held the cake steady while she went at the candles. Stood next to each other for the photo. Rohan carried her round to see the balloons and she shrieked and grabbed his collar, and Brooks watched him be good with her the way he was always good with her, and said nothing at all.

Everyone left. She went down easy, worn out and sticky.

Rohan took his jacket off the hook around nine and didn't say where he was going.

Ren wasn't looking for him. That's the thing he'd say afterwards, and it would be true, and nobody would believe it.

Rohan came out of the men's with somebody behind him, and it wasn't a kiss at two in the morning this time, and it wasn't hidden either, and Ren stood there working out what he was looking at while the two of them worked out that they'd been seen.

"Ren—"

"Don't."

"It's not—"

"Don't." Ren didn't move out of the doorway. "He told me. About the first time. Sat there and told me like it was a weather report."

Rohan said nothing.

"Do you know what he did that night? He kept his voice down. "There's a door in that apartment that doesn't shut properly and your daughter's on the other side of it, so he stood in his own kitchen and had that conversation at a whisper." Ren's voice wasn't loud either. "And you promised him. And then you came here."

"You don't know anything about it."

"No," Ren agreed. "I just buy bread off him three times a week."

"Right." Rohan's face changed. "Right. That's what this is."

"Say the next bit and find out."

He said the next bit.

There is no dignified version of a fight in a corridor. They went into the wall and then onto the tiles, and Ren ended up on top, which surprised both of them, and Rohan got a hand up over his own face, which isn't defence — it's what a man does when he already knows he's losing something bigger than the fight.

Somebody shouted. Somebody always does.

Ren walked out into the snow with his knuckles opening up and one thought sitting in him like a stone.

He'd kissed Brooks too. Days ago, in the steam, with Brooks angry and unguarded and not thinking straight. He had taken exactly the thing he'd just put a man on the floor for.

He had no answer to that.

Onsen

He went out for the water, not for company. Sakura asleep, Rohan home with her, and Brooks up to his shoulders in the dark with snow on the rocks and steam coming off him. First hour to himself since it happened.

Ren was already there. Of course he was.

They talked about nothing. The market, the season, the man who sells the good eggs. Brooks laughed twice. And then he heard himself saying it, and it came out flatter than he expected. There was a kiss in my kitchen at two in the morning and it wasn't mine.

Ren didn't make a sound of sympathy. He just turned his head and looked at him for a while, and then he said something that made Brooks laugh a third time, and after that the conversation had a different temperature to it.

It went on longer than it needed to. The compliments got less careful. Ren has been buying his baking three times a week for months and has never once been subtle, and Brooks has always known exactly what that was and has always steered around it.

He didn't steer.

Inside, out of the water, still warm all the way through and furious in a way he had not let out of the apartment, he let Ren put a hand on his face and he kissed him.

For long enough. Long enough that there was no version of it he could tell himself later.

Then his hands were flat against Ren's chest and he was pulling back and reaching for his coat, and whatever he said on the way out wasn't a sentence. Ren said his name once. Brooks was already at the door.

He walked home. It had started snowing and he didn't put his hood up. Twenty minutes in the dark with his heart going.

He had wanted it. That was the part he couldn't put down. Not to get even, not to make a point. He had wanted it, and Ren had asked nothing of him, and a man who had been holding a door shut with his back for two weeks had simply let go of it.

The lights were off at home. Rohan asleep. Sakura asleep.

Nobody had noticed he'd been gone.

Two in the Morning

He got up because his bladder woke him. No thought in his head at all. Bare feet, the hallway, the floor giving under him in the two places it always gave.

The kitchen light was off. They hadn't needed it.

Deon in the black hoodie he'd worn in this apartment a dozen times, sitting at that table, eating what Brooks had put in front of him. Rohan with a hand at the back of his neck. Neither of them hurried when they came apart, and that was the part Brooks would keep. Not the kiss. The way nobody scrambled.

He went to the bathroom. Did what he'd come out to do. Washed his hands and stood there with them under the water longer than he needed, because Sakura was three metres away behind a door that didn't shut properly and he was not going to be the reason she woke up.

When he came back Deon was gone and Rohan was standing where he'd left him, arms down, ready to be talked at.

Brooks talked at him. Not loudly. Keeping the volume under the door took everything he had.

Rohan promised. He said it wouldn't happen again, and he meant it the way he meant everything, which was completely and for about as long as it took to say.

Brooks didn't answer that. He started on the morning batch, three steps from where Deon had been sitting, because the market opened at seven whether or not anyone here had slept.

Nothing was over. That was the trouble with it. It hadn't broken. It had just stopped being the thing he could put his weight on.

Late

He came in still wearing the cap. That was the part he'd remember later, not the rest of it. He didn't get as far as taking off his jacket.

Sakura was awake. Not crying, just lying there with her eyes open in a room that had gone dark around her, waiting for someone to notice. She hadn't been fed. He checked, and then he checked again, because there was a version of the evening in which he was wrong about that and he wanted very badly to be wrong about that.

Rohan was at the kotatsu, eating.

Brooks fed her. Changed her. Put her down and stood there with one hand on the rail until she went under. Then he went to the kitchen and did the dishes that had been sitting since the morning, because he couldn't cook anything with the sink like that, and he hadn't eaten since a coffee at the stall.

He didn't say anything. There was a sentence available to him and he could feel the shape of it, and he knew exactly how it would sound out loud: petty, keeping score, ungrateful to a man who'd carried flour sacks for him all through the winter.

So he ate standing up, and he went to bed, and he filed it with the other things he'd decided not to say.

Sakura

He held out through dessert. Through the last of the wine, through Ren saying something he pretended not to hear, through everyone finding their coats. He was the host. He wasn't going to be the reason the evening ended.

By the time the apartment was empty it was too late to go anywhere.

Rohan went down in the living room. One moment upright, the next flat on the floor, and Myron carried him to the sofa and left him there because there was nothing else to do with him.

So it was Lucien. Who turned out to be a doctor, which Brooks had known and never had cause to think about, and who took over the way people do when they've done it before. Sway with me. Breathe out longer. Myron behind him with both hands on his back and no advice, which was somehow the more useful of the two.

Nothing was ready. He'd packed for a hospital, not for his own floor. Myron went out for supplies and was back so fast that Brooks registered it as strange and filed it somewhere behind everything else. He had a great deal else.

She came on the tatami, in the room with the low table, some hour with no name.

Sakura.

He named her for the trees on the bridge, the first thing in this country he'd stopped walking to look at. Rohan came round on the sofa an hour later and Brooks let him hold her and said nothing about missing it.

Pink

Rohan wanted a party. Brooks wanted a quiet afternoon and lost, cheerfully, the way he lost most arguments with Rohan, and so the apartment filled with balloons in colours that matched nothing else in the room and a dessert table he'd spent two days building and refused to let anyone help with.

Everyone came. Yuki, Reese, Lyndsey. Deon. Lucien, who he'd somehow become friends with over a market stall and a shared dislike of small talk, and Myron, who came where Lucien went. Brooks moved through his own living room with a plate in his hand and a hand on the small of his back and found, somewhere between the second and third tray of cake, that he'd stopped counting who he knew and who he didn't.

One person hadn't been invited. He'd thought about it longer than he wanted to admit, and then decided against it, and hadn't told Rohan why.

The cake came out pink.

Nesting

The hospital gave it a name he had to look up twice, and a list of things to watch for that he pinned inside a cupboard where customers couldn't see it. PPROM. A risk, not a promise. They gave him something for the baby's lungs and told him to come in fast if anything changed, and then they sent him home to a body he no longer fully trusted to behave.

He told Rohan because there was no version where he didn't. He'd braced for a lot of things, but not for how simply Rohan took it. No flinching, no working out of exits. Just a hand over his, and by the end of the week a box of Rohan's things in the genkan next to the geta, and Rohan moving through the apartment like he'd always meant to end up there.

He wouldn't let Brooks lift the flour sacks anymore. He vacuumed at odd hours. He learned which cupboard the list was in and read it once, quietly, and never made a thing of it after that.

It should have been easy to sink into. Mostly it was. But some part of Brooks, the part his grandmother had trained to shake its own head and wait to catch its own mistakes, kept watching all this care arrive and wondering, with no reason and no kindness, how long he'd be any good at holding onto it.

He put the thought away. He got very good, that season, at putting it away.

It kept happening. At the stall, mid-sentence with a customer, he'd have to turn away. In the night, out of bed and down the hall before he was properly awake. Once at the edge of the road on the way home, bent over someone's hedge with a hand against the fence, hoping nobody he sold bread to walked past.

He'd told himself it was something he ate. He'd told himself that for a week.

The test was in his hand before he'd decided to buy it, and then he was standing in his own bathroom in a towel, looking at two lines and doing the math on a body that wasn't supposed to be able to do this and was doing it anyway.

His first thought wasn't Rohan. That came second, and complicated. His first thought, standing on the cold tile with his hair still wet, was of a kitchen too small for two people, and a grandmother who'd shaken her head and waited for him to catch things himself.

He caught this one on his own. There was nobody to shake their head at him now.