✨ Here to be my rabid fangirl self. ✨

He's had his head down in work, all morning. It's planning season for the year's upcoming programs (short-form for more meetings than his grimaced patience can handle), and he wears the stress of it like a veil: his hair tousled by rummaging fingers, the finery of his vestments stubbornly ignored, his gloves for the day long discarded.

To most, even dressed down as he is, he would still be Papa: carved with skull-paints and exuding an air of unnerving regality, his green-white eyes a smoldered flame in a black starpool.

But, Saints, it's rare to have him out of the formalities, these days.

For Ale, the sight has come to mean an almost guaranteed derailment of any other priorities they could have.

Terzo sits slumped over his paperwork, chin pillowed on his fist, and has to look twice to fully register the intrusion. The switch from steel-browed impatience to cattish softness comes quick as a blink.

"Oh—what is this?" he rumbles, that familiar graveled drawl they've so grown to love. "My darling has come to visit me, eh?" His eyes slip down to their hands, and bloom. "And they gift me—ah, you are spoiling me, sweetness."

"After how many coffees you've brought me, over the years?" Ale smirks, leaning down to set the mug on his desk. They have to take some care to avoid the piles of drafted calendars and lecture proposals and event plans that litter it. He's all but buried in them. "It's no trouble," they continue, lowering their voice to a whisper. "Besides...I wanted to snoop."

A chuckle huffs across from them. "Did you, now?" Terzo whispers back.

"Ricci's talked my ear off about this, all morning. I need something to tell her."

"Ah-ha—so this is not a gifting, but a bartering for early informations, huh?"

"No."

"Meh." He leans back in his seat, flicking one wrist. "I see how it is."

"No," Ale says again. His eyes squint playfully at them. "Maybe," they admit.

His laughter is infectious, more a rumbling breath than anything. "I, eh...could be persuaded," he muses, ticking a brow at them, before he takes a sip. A low groan of satisfaction purls from his chest—not much different from the one he'd bitten against their neck, last night. To no damned surprise, it all but flatlines Ale's attention. "Darling, you have no idea how much I needed this."

Absently, their hand finds its way to scratch at his shoulder. "You look tired."

"Mnh." Terzo melts like a little animal into their touch, taking another long drink. "You know how the meetings do me. You expect any of them to reach a shitting consensus? Have you seen them?" He tacks the mug blithely to the desk again. "Like trying to get a stone-age man to drive a space-vehicle."

Ale chuckles.

He smiles, crooked and wrinkling, and sighs, and they can't help their sinking eyes; can't resist watching the swell of his clavicle beneath the dark plum of his neckline, shadowed by a thistle of raven hair.

Their fingers itch.

"I'm sorry, lovely," they say, fiercely trying to behave, and only knead a light touch along his nape. But then he shivers—makes that silent-stuttered hitch of breath, the pretty lines of his lashes drowsing closed—and, well.

Maybe it's not in the cards for them to play nice.

Their thumb tracks down his nape, again. "Any hints on the selections?" they start to prod.

He clicks his tongue: sinks into one elbow, the point of his knee skimming theirs. "Still being finalized. It has to go through the pincher and Sister and Felipe and all that—much too early to say, eh?"

Ale studies him like a fox lying through its teeth. He often is. "Too early, huh?" They lift their other hand to finger through one set of proposals. "Seems near-finalized, to me—"

"Ah-ah-ah—" Terzo swipes back the page immediately. "Highly confidential information," he yaps. "Much too important to disclose."

Their weight shifts on their hip: looming spitefully over his slow blinked stare. "Terzo."

He tilts his chin over his fist. Perks his brows, all impish innocence.

Ale huffs. "Papa," they amend, dryly.

His teeth glint at them. "One kiss minimum."

"I brought you coffee—"

"But a coffee is not a kiss—"

"You had plenty, this morning," they tease—because, rightfully, he had: slopped over them like the most boneless creature in the world, the molten weight of him delicious, the incensed musk of him threaded through the sheets and the slide of his thigh lazy against their own as he kissed them to brainless giddiness.

They'd been half-convinced to keep him in bed as much as he seemed dead-set on trapping them there, clinging to that addictive slope in his waist and dragging their nails through the silk-soft jungle that covered his belly and chest, just enough to hear him purr.

And they're staring at his neckline, again.

Flushing, Ale yanks their eyes back up to his. His grin is too smug, too vain, too goading for his own good.

Of course they have to kiss it off him.

The spiced smoke of his lunchtime cigarette still ghosts his lips, sweetened now with notes of cherry and chocolate. It's intoxicating, and it's gentle, and they kiss him again: the slow-slipped, breath-mingled kind that never fails to have him leaning closer, ready to take with eager hands and tongue and teeth.

Their palm presses warningly against his collarbone. Feels the veins in his neck pitter against their fingertips. "A hint," they remind him.

He sneers against their lips. His eyes dart up, lashes heavy and pupils blown, stubbornness burning like starlight. "Darling."

They can't help their own cheeky smile, teasing gentle fingertips along the inside of his collar. "Please?"

He's all theatrics, in an instant.

"What do you want me to say? That we have spent an hour and a half running circles on whether to host the solstice banquet in the great hall, or that Nihilist's sinking cashpit of a heated tent?" They burst into giggles, tethered closer and closer by his wandering hands: greedy sunbursts at their elbows, squeezing lingeringly down their sleeves. "Come here," Terzo rumbles on, his breath tangled with theirs. "Kiss me, again."

"That's the only hint I get?"

His nose bumps into theirs, impatient as a dog after a pet. "Kiss me, again," he repeats, soft and husken.

And they do.

Again, and again—and the growl that ebbs like satin against their lips zings straight to their gut, leaves their knees weak and their hands splaying across the broad bow of his shoulders—and they can feel him smirking, can taste his hunger, can feel the otherworldly magic in his bones as his lips catch at theirs.

"Don't you dare stop," he purrs.

"I have work."

"Fuck your work."

Scoffing and toothy, they nudge at his collarbone again.

After enough reasoning, he gives in: slumped back in his chair with petulant eyes and an even more petulant scowl, the paint smudged to a gray mess. "Sweetness," he grubbles, and lifts a thumb: smears slow and limp-wristed at the corner of his mouth. "My love, my heart—you come in here and torture me."

Ale rolls their eyes. They brush a soft comb of nails through his hair. "I'm just being rational."

"Rational," he parrots, a quick-closed suck off the side of his thumb. Fully on purpose. Has to be. "Yes, rational indeed—how is it I've gotten stuck with the rational one, huh?"

"Stuck?" Ale snickers.

He pits his elbow over the back of his chair, glaring coyly. "They would need a crowbar to pry me from you," he says, as though it's the cruelest offense of all, and not a cherishing clinginess he himself has instigated at every given opportunity. Eventually, he finds the spite to detach his hands. "You have bewitched me—look at this," he babbles on, grumpily straightening out his collar. "Two kisses, and you have me a mess."

Ale giggles, again. "Terzo."

"What."

He is so raw with them. Whip-tongued and rustled-feathers and more affection than they can deal with.

It makes their heart want to break with how much they adore him. How easy it all is, now.

It's taken years, so many years, to get here.

"I love you," they say softly.

He's welded his cheek back against his fist, slumped and scrutinizing against his desk. But his eyes are wild. Needing. The dimpled crease of his smirk so quick to flourish, again.

"Love you, too," he hushes. His lashes fall, just enough. "One more," he murmurs then, and his eyes simmer up at them, green as a forest and white as a summer moon. They watch his throat ripple. Know the soft beg that will speckle the edges of his voice, before it comes. "Please."

Oh, he shouldn't have said that.

Shouldn't have looked like this, with the loose waves of his fringe untamed, the dark glisten of hair down his forearms on display, chipped varnish on his nails and rings on his ticking fingers and paint smudged on his lips.

Ale, out of some wicked streak, decides to make it count.

To slide their nails along the soft paths that fall from his ears to the back of his neck, twisting the layers of his hair between their fingers.

To kiss him with teeth on his parting lips and tongue skimming the inkling of a moan that muffles against their mouth, his brow twitching and his fingertips sliding blindly over the back of their thigh.

To crowd between his splaying legs and lick the smoke-sweetened coffee off his teeth, drink down the shiver of his breath, the sigh of Al against the promise of more more more—

And pull away.

They don't get far.

He's on his feet before they have a chance to flee, the heat of his palm coiling around their wrist like a brand—and he yanks them back into the furnace of his body, smooth as a dance.

"You," Terzo snuffs hotly against their ear. Their back has slunk into his chest, supple and solid and delectable. "You tempter—you witch."

Ale lifts their free hand to stipple unhurriedly against one of his sleeves: a shameless pilgrimage across the divots of his bicep, squeezing with sly-smiled ease. "Mh?"

"You were going to leave, after that?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe," he scoffs, sharp with disbelief. He noses behind their ear, his breath dangerous on their neck, and the quivers come only natural: their eyes rolling closed, tilted slowly into his searching mouth. He sighs against their skin. "Saints' tits, Al."

Ale snickers. His other hand is lost in their waist, half-tangled through their beltloops, weighing down on them—and then they feel him, and—

"Oh."

Her full name was Annabel Lee. To everyone, she was just Anna, but her dad called her Tinkerbell.

When asked why he gave his daughter the name of a dead girl from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, he would usually reply, “I wanted to name her Lenore, you know, like…” and then, straightening up and folding his hand in a pinch, he would begin to recite, ”'Ah, broken is the golden bowl, the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll! A saintly soul glides down the Stygian river!’ My wife wanted to name her Anna, after the suffragette Anna Elizabeth Dickinson,” he changed his tone quickly, "So it was some sort of a compromise.”

When Anna asked what a compromise was, he said it’s when people gave up their privileges to become closer. And then, as if having remembered that she was a child, he squatted down to be at eye level with her and added, “You see, Tinkerbell, sometimes daddy wants to have a barbecue and mommy wants to go to In-N-Out. And that's when we make a deal to get hot dogs.”

As dad's departure approached, he began to smell different. On his shelf in the closet, in the company of a shaving cream, some gum paste, and a box of lenses, stood a bottle of perfume, the one that was brought out whenever talk of a new tour began. A couple of times, in his absence, Anna spritzed the perfume on her hand; that was how she became convinced that it was the intricate glass bottle that was responsible for dad's special scent. Dad was trying to be someone else for a while, so he surrounded himself with a cloud of fragrant, fresh, tart-grassy scent.

There was no secret to his work. Sometimes mom and she even attended his concerts. On those days dad would ask her to put a lens on her white eye, so it matched the color of her left, green-brown one. “It is simply the right thing to do,” he would say. The first time he brought her her personal box of lenses, she was scared. They practiced applying it for a long time, and in the process he would distract her with various stories, make a show of placing the lens in his eye as if to demonstrate how it’s done while deliberately picking the  wrong eye, and they would laugh together about how much of a dummy he was. And so, with the help of silly jokes and play, she finally learned to put the colored circle on her iris.

There was one more rule: she could not talk to the masked people or to the short, gray-haired woman who often accompanied dad at concerts.

Mom would always worry before these trips. Squatting down in front of Anna and combing her hair with a soft, springy rubber brush, she would remind her not to attract attention. "Of course, I understand you want to boast to the other kids and people at the concert that it's your daddy up there on stage,” she would say. “But you have to pretend you're just a regular girl, just like the other kids who came to hear him sing. Under no circumstances could it occur to anyone that you are his daughter.” If dad did everything in a joking manner, mom was strict in moments like these, and Anna could feel the tension in her voice, could see the worry in her eyes. She didn't know why there was a need for such secrecy, but she suspected that the answer would be, ‘It is simply the right thing to do’.

The last day before he would leave was always a long one. Dad would push her on the old wooden swing he had made when she was still a baby. The whole world soared in a dizzying flight. Rising and falling! Up and down! Of course, she would show him how she could jump off the swing while in motion. His daughter was the bravest. That's what he would always tell mom when she was in doubt and then remind her of real examples, as if flipping through a photo album. Here's Anna growling at the dog. And here's the time she kicked the neighbor boy’s ass when he tried to take the klaxon off her bike (we don't say ‘kicked ass’, we say ‘gave him a black eye’, because we don't use bad words, tut-tut, daddy, wash your mouth out with soap!).

Soon after, they would be flipping through the comic book version of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ for the umpteenth time, all together, while seated on a bench on the veranda. Mom would remark that Mole looked like some politician from TV, and both parents would laugh at something of their own. Anna had read the original book a long time ago. “Every child should have one”, dad said, and bought her first the book, followed by a watercolor comic book based on it. Then, as if he couldn't stop himself, he gave her the coloring book, and she spent long evenings in his absence filling in the empty outlines with pencils - the characters in their nifty English costumes, the river, the flowers, the houses.

The last day before he would leave was always a long one. There was paprikás for lunch and asparagus with mushrooms for dinner. They brought out the table and chairs to the lawn under the trees for the occasion and sat down, enjoying the fact that today they could still eat together. In the middle of the table was a large bouquet of flowers. The wind rustled in the crowns of the ash trees, ruffled the edges of the tablecloth and tried to blow the napkins off the table. Cutlery was placed on them so they wouldn't fly away. “The napkins think they’ll be eaten too,” dad joked, “So they try to escape.”

In the evening, mom and dad drank wine while Anna watched “Shaun the Sheep.” She sat on her favorite spot, on the floor in front of the screen with a pillow under her, and her parents were on the couch behind her, talking quietly as usual. There was a bottle of wine on the coffee table in front of them. Anna wasn't invited to join, but it didn't offend her at all. There are things meant for kids, and there are things meant for adults. The wine was for grown-ups. The cartoon was for her. When the episode ended, she turned around. Mom was sitting with slightly flushed cheeks, glass in hand, head resting on dad's shoulder. Her gaze was sad for some reason, frozen in thoughtful contemplation. That's how people usually look at a fire. Dad, with his arms around her, was lightly stroking her shoulder, covered with a light home sweater. He turned his head to her and whispered something in her ear. She nodded.

At the end of the day, when mom had already put her to bed and left the nightlight on, Anna heard her parents in the room downstairs talking in loud voices. ('fighting', it's called 'fighting').

"Do you realize how rarely we see you now?" mom said. "If you only knew how much Anna misses you." 

"Well, this way she doesn't get tired of me," dad answered softly, but Anna could hear every word through the thin ceiling.

"Three months is a long time for a child. It's a lifetime."

"But she's happy when I come back. And... I try to create good memories for her when I'm here."

"She's got school coming up."

"You're doing a great job."

Long pause.

"They're not your family. All these people you're reaching out to, they're nothing to you. You don't even know them. They have families of their own. And we don't have a second you, you know,” Anna caught a sarcastic bitterness in her mother's words.

"You don't understand. It's a calling. A mission!"

"A year ago you didn't have that mission. You had a normal job and we saw you every night. And now you're consumed by it. It’s your second life... where we don't belong."

"You do realize,” dad's voice became hard and irritated, ”Why I have to differentiate between you and the Church."

‘It is simply the right thing to do,’ Anna heard in her head.

"It's not about that. It's not about safety. It's just that you're all there. Even when you're here..."

"No, it's not true!"

"Even when you're here, you're slipping away. And you can't make it up to me with all those flowers! It's not even close to a compromise!"

Dad was silent in response, and Anna clenched the corner of the blanket between her fingers. Then, mom's voice came, much quieter.

"You know I'm not yelling because I hate you. It's because I love you."

"Of course. I know. I know..."

It was quiet downstairs for a long time, the only sound being that of tree branches scraping the wall of Anna's room. After a while, she heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. The door was ajar, and dad came in quietly.

"Are you awake, Tinkerbell?" he ran his hand over the touch-sensitive nightlight making it a little brighter, and warm yellow light lit up his face.

"Three months?" Anna pulled the blanket up over herself. 

“Yep. In a blink of an eye,” dad sat down on her bed, and she felt the mattress sag slightly, moving out from under her knees. He gently tucked the blanket around her body, wrapping her up in a cozy cocoon. When he's gone, there won't be anyone to do this, she thought.

"Want me to read to you?"

Anna nodded silently. A smile tugged at the corner of dad's mouth. 

"Okay. Hmm... Well...” he clicked his tongue, as if giving himself the go-ahead to begin. “'It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea...'”

"No, not that." 

"Which one? Of the raven?"

"No..." Anna licked her lips quietly. "About the city."

"About the city..." dad looked up, and his face, illuminated by the warm light, became dreamy for a second. "Okay..." and he began. "Far, far away, under the godless skies, stands the city of Meliora..."