#the end!!!!!

The wind blows in my face, as I walk to my old park. I am doing my near nightly routine of walking to the bar and then walking back home. Often, I stop at the park to smoke.

It helps. But not enough. I don’t know what will stop this heavy weight in my chest. I lean against a tree and fish for my lighter in my pocket. A familiar, but somewhat new, voice calls my name. “Hey, loser.”

The voice sounds drunk, something I know Cethin knows he shouldn’t be doing. That makes two of us. I flick my lighter, a flame coming out. The end of my cigarette lights, and I take a long drag, before greeting the new refugee in town.

“You called?”

The gangly teenager waves at me with a toothy grin. He has a beer bottle dangling from his right hand. I almost ask him for some, but I know he won’t share. 

“I checked the park if you were here and you weren’t. I know you and the alcohol aren’t friends.” He hugs the beer bottle to his chest. He starts to whisper loudly to it, and I don’t know if I should be concerned or laugh. “I won’t let Min drink you. It’s okay.” He straightens, throwing me a sneaky smile. “Shoo. I want to be drunk in peace. But I can’t do that when you and the alcohol are enemies.”

“It’s dangerous drinking alone in the park. Could get mugged.”

Cethin frowns at me. “Do you think Lao will be able to feel it if I’m mugged? Because, I’m thinking if I piss Lee and Lao off enough, they’ll snap their fingers and appear.”

“Wouldn’t they snap their fingers and appear regardless?”

“Lee’s fingers…they’re so small.” Ray starts to snap his own fingers, which make no sound. He’s either too drunk to snap his fingers, or it is a talent he has not come to possess yet. “He can’t do it. And Lao…he’s dumb. He’s just an idiot.”

I raise an eyebrow. I’ll have to add that one to the list of things that Cethin has rambled to me about Lao and Lee. Sometimes for writing practice, I’ll write down things he’s said that I’ll secretly show his family later. 

“I hate to break it to you, but your plan won’t work.”

Cethin pouts at me. “You don’t know that.”

“I do, because there are a lot of things I would do if I could snap my fingers.”

“Party pooper. You should go home. I want to roam the park in peace, but instead you’re here ruining my mood and plans.” 

I snort, causing him to throw a nasty glare at me. I cover myself with a cough. “Smoking. It’s super bad for me. Sorry.”

Cethin rolls his eyes and grumbles, “I stole to piss off Lao too. I’ve got like…five more crimes to commit before going home.”

“You are in desperate need of a no-crime-do list.”

“I can’t read.”

“Yes, but Ellen and I can and we will remind you.”

“My second crime was going to be…vandalism. Well, no. I have to steal the supplies. So that’s my third crime.” He holds up four fingers.

I bring the cigarette to my lips, taking in one last breath. I blow out the smoke. As entertaining it would be to see what Cethin would come up with in regards to vandalism, I have a feeling that now is not the time for such shenanigans. 

Maybe that’s a crime we can commit when things are more stable in his home. My stomach drops. Then again, with my standing in this town, perhaps it’s not wise to get into such mischief period. 

It’s another reason I walk at night. There’s no one there to stare at me in disgust. 

“Come on, we’re going home. Dump out the alcohol.”

“No.” Cethin takes a large swig of it, and then drops it on the grass. “Finished.”

I flick aside my cigarette. “Remind me to make Jing take me home when we get there.”

“On it.” 

Trying to ignore the tempting smell of alcohol, I approach Cethin and wrap an arm around him. “It’s dangerous out here, you know. Got mugged a few times.”

“I laugh in the face of danger.”

“Do you now?”

“Mm…I’m a laugher.” Cethin’s head droops and strands of loosely curled chestnut hair fall in his face. “It’s why Lao needs to come back, so he can laugh. Ver..Awiti doesn’t get it. If we have a good time here, then we can donate our laughs to Lao.”

“Is that so?” I ask.

“Mhm…” Cethin stumbles, and I catch him. Cethin pauses and rests his head against my chest. His arms wrap around me, and I slowly hug him back. “Lee was my platonic husband…” What had before been a trembling lip turns into a smile. His eyes peek up at me. “Do you think he’ll be mad if you’re my platonic mistress?”

“What on earth is a platonic husband?”

“It’s someone you do everything with. But no kissing. It’s a higher order of marriage. And then when your siblings are stupid, you make plans with the platonic husband to stop your siblings from being dumb-dumbs. You have to jump over a line of pine cones to officiate it.”

I can’t tell if this is a drunken ramble or if Ray really goes around calling Lee his platonic husband. “So what’s the difference between that and a platonic mistress?”

“It’s the same thing, dipshit. But I’m cheating on Lee. I help you when Ellen is stupid, and you help me when Verity is stupid. A-and I betray you and help Ellen and Winola when you’re stupid, but…” he puts a finger to his lips. “Don’t tell.”

“You need to go to bed.”

“I just proposed to you.” His mouth drops open. “You’re missing out on the platonic marriage deal.”

I sigh. He’ll probably forget this in the morning. “Sure.”

Cethin lets go of me, pumping his fist in the air. He bends over, nearly falling, but catching himself just in time. He lines up a group of pebbles onto the cement right behind me.

“We have to jump over this.”

“I’m not jumping.”

“Then get jumped.” He lunges at me putting his full, scrawny body weight into mine, which does nothing but make me stumble backwards. Cethin busts up into laughter, pointing at the pebbles. “You went over the line. You’re my mistress. Lee is going to be so mad.”

Cethin scrunches up his face, in what I think is an imitation of what Lee looks like when he’s mad. “Okay, um…sure. I guess we’re platonic mistresses. I’m going to have to take you to bed.”

Cethin bursts into a fit of immature giggles, and I take the opportunity to put my arm around him again, guiding him down the pavement towards Jing’s. The whole time, he rambles to me about Lee and their platonic marriage. Some of it is things I’ve heard before, other things new. He tells me once more that Lee is a head shorter than Cethin and has two braids. I learn that he’s a sneaky little guy but that’s a big secret, because Lao doesn’t suspect it. Lee cheats in every game he plays, but he’s so cute that he always gets away with it. He starts to tell me of how Lee would help him take care of Lao and Awiti. They would never take care of themselves, so the two of them would help make them happy, do chores, or force them to eat. Lee is his best friend and understands him the way no one else does. He loves Lee and wants him to be safe. 

My face falls, as Cethin confesses that’s why he let Lao leave, because he couldn’t bear Lee being left behind. But he also couldn’t bear his sister to go back to slavery. He doesn’t say how, but that’s how this all started, because he wanted to protect Awiti. 

The porchlight from Jing’s doorstep illuminates a tear stricken face from Cethin. His eyes are wide, when he says “That’s why I need you. Verity is really stupid, and it’s a two person job to keep her in line.”

I nod knowingly. “Be honest with Jing. Jing is more helpful than you think.”

“He’s an adult.” Cethin folds his arms.

“Jing saved my life. He cares a lot about the kids, and he’ll care about your sister.”

Cethin’s face softened. “He saved your life?”

My mind wanders to the windy road that Jing had found me on two months prior. “All the time. He can help your sister. I’ll help out too. Scour Vira to see if your family is here. Leave no stone unturned. And while we do that, we can show your sister why it’s better to stay. I used to be a criminal. I have some ulterior methods to finding people.” A smile lights on Cethin’s face. “Don’t tell Jing I said this, but he used to be a criminal too. Same with Sunya. We’ll keep your sister busy. We can create a home here, and maybe your sister will see the value of staying, because she’ll want to share that home with Lao.”

Cethin’s arms wrap around me tightly again. It’s at least a minute until he pulls back. “Thanks. You’re a good friend. If you ask me sober, I didn’t say this, but I’m glad I met you here.”

I force a smile onto my lips. Throat tightening, I swallow away a lump. I don’t want Cethin to know how much that means to me quite yet. “I’m glad I met you here too.”

Cethin smiles up at me, and I feel the heavy weight on my shoulders lighten a bit for the first time in months.

The forced smile softens into a genuine one, and I ruffle the top of his hair, messing up his bun. His arms are still wrapped tight around my waist, when I knock on the door for Jing.

Ellen’s words of wisdom come back to me. Looking down at Cethin, a realization hits me.

“I can’t possibly pull this Dr. Frankenfurter costume together without a good pair of fishnets. I’d just be a sad, goth drag queen rather than– Geralt, are you listening?”

“No,” he said. “What time is it?”

“Nearly six,” said Jaskier. “Pay attention, my friend. Fishnets.”

“I’d check Ciri’s room,” mumbled Geralt. He rubbed at his face a while longer, making no move to rise from the coffin. Jaskier immediately bounded up the stairs but paused at the top, dangling on the hand railing to poke his head back into the basement.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “and I forgot uh… it’s a full moon. May have slipped my mind during the party planning. So like. When I wolf out when the moon rises, don’t let me bite anybody. That would be a smidgen embarrassing, wouldn’t it? Nearly as bad as a few years ago with the ice sculpture.”

He ducked up the stairs before he could hear Geralt’s likely judgemental answer.

Truthfully, nothing could be as bad as the ice sculpture.

And, fortunately, he was a fairly tame terrifying creature of the night. Gnawing non-consensually on people’s flesh was not his thing, even when transformed into a mindless wolf creature.

From what he had been told, because no matter how hard he tried, Jaskier could not remember his monthly episodes, his wolf form was not much different than his human one, except with less vocal skills and slightly better dance moves. 

Horrible taste in music though. One year, his wolf form had ruined his Spotify Wrapped by playing Nitty Gritty’s Fishing in the Dark for seven consecutive hours.

Jaskier entered Ciri’s room with trepidation. She technically no longer lived here, off on interdimensional time travel adventures doing whatever it was a teenaged girl with universe-hopping superpowers did, but it still felt wrong to intrude on her unnervingly pastel childhood bedroom. There were a great deal of unicorns and far less half-dissected dead rats than there had been when she lived here.

Geralt was right of course, and he found his fishnets flung over the back of her desk chair. He thanked his lucky stars that they were not hopelessly tangled, and he had not had to dig through a young girl’s underwear drawer. He had half-worried that Yennefer would emerge suddenly from a darkened corner just when he was wrist-deep in bras.

The witch had yet to show herself today, though he knew she was somewhere in the house because someone kept adding My Chemical Romance songs to his trial run of the Halloween playlist blasting through the bluetooth speakers in the living room.

“Yennefer!” Jaskier called, nearly face-planting down the ornate grand staircase as he tried to pull on his fishnet tights and scurry down them at the same time. “Quit looming in the shadows like some gargoyle and help me with my corset!”

The witch materialized without a sound before him, and he did trip down the last few steps into the faux cobweb-strewn foyer, sprawling on his ass on the blood-red rug. If he did not know that Yennefer dressed like Morticia Addams every day of the year, he would compliment her Halloween costume. As it was, he scoffed at her lack of creativity.

“Come on, Yennefer, you could at least mix it up a little,” he said, wrinkling his nose as he leapt to his feet. “You of all people should fully embrace the Halloween spirit. Wear some jewel tones or something. At least one color.”

“I’m an immortal witch who lives with a vampire and an idiot werewolf in a secluded, haunted manor on a hill,” she said. “Every day is Halloween for us.”

“It’s not really haunted, is it?” he asked. “I haven’t seen any ghosts.”

“Haunted by your irritating presence."

"Yennefer. Help. Corset."

“Turn around,” she said and began to lace and tighten his corset with sharper tugs than strictly necessarily. “Isn’t it a full moon?”

“Yes, yes, I forgot the moon phase. No need for everyone to bitch at me about it.”

“I’m certainly not bitching,” she said. “Wolf man you talks far less. I could do without the leg-humping though.”

Jaskier made an apologetic gesture.

"Don't lie. You love the leg-humping."

Yennefer scoffed.

When he got drunk enough, he was prone to humping Yennefer’s legs even in man form.

Ciri was the first of the guests to arrive, spiling through a shimmering portal into the middle of the living room. She was dressed as the Thirteenth Doctor, and a unicorn stepped through the portal behind her, wearing a Dalek eyestalk covering the slender horn on its forehead. 

Jaskier considered reminding her that this household had had a firm “no horses allowed inside” rule since the infamous Roach in the attic incident, but he wasn’t actually certain if unicorns counted as horses or were just vaguely horse-shaped. Ciri glared at him like he had brought it up anyhow. It was probably rude to accuse a sentient being of being a horse when they weren’t, and Jaskier was nothing if not a considerate and gracious host.

Living with several people who could either read his mind or knew him so well that they didn’t have to was just inconvenient.

Not long later, Eskel arrived dressed as a lumberjack with enough casserole dishes of assorted food to feed dozens of people, holes cut in the lumpy beanie on his head to accommodate his curved succubi horns, and Lambert showed up only a little late with the keg, wearing a leather jacket and cuffed jeans, grinning as impishly as expected, given his nature. His sharp, little teeth glinted, and his hair was slicked with grease around the pointed nubs of his horns.

“No poodle skirt?” Jaskier called, grateful for the arrival of the beer but unable to avoid giving his least favorite of Geralt’s weird brothers at least some shit. 

Lambert flipped him off. His forked tail casually snagged a pigs in the blanket from one of the platters Eskel was arranging.

“I’ll be the one laughing tonight, Wolf Boy,” he said. “How’s that moon feelin’?”

“I have another hour at least,” said Jaskier. “It’s barely dark out. Speaking of, where the hell is Geralt? He’s not going to hide away in that creepy little crypt of his all evening. He’s supposed to stop me from using anyone as a chew toy.” 

“What are you supposed to be anyway? A sad, goth drag queen?”

Jaskier gasped in scandalized affront, just as another My Chemical Romance song began to play from the speakers, and he hurried off to fix his playlist once again.

Triss Merigold showed up bearing several bottles of wine in a blush-pink Playboy bunny costume that clashed horribly with her red hair, and his flagrant ogling of her exposed bosom was cut short when the very scary Philippa Eilhart stepped up to press a hand to her lower back. She was wearing tufted wolf ears and sharp fangs, plus a bright red cape, which he personally felt was a bit derivative of yours truly but was not about to open his mouth to comment and risk being turned to ash.

The rest of the Coven of Sorceresses, or whatever they called themselves, appeared one after another. There were several among them dressed in sexy witch costumes, which seemed nearly as uncreative as Yennefer, who technically had refused to participate.

Fringilla Vigo had apparently missed the sexy part of the memo sent by the group and was dressed in full stereotypical wizard regalia, complete with moon and stars cape, pointy hat, and long faux beard. She got tipsy on Merigold’s wine very quickly and kept accidentally smacking people with her oversized wizard staff, giggling girlishly.

“Geralt?” Jaskier called into the dark basement. “The party’s in full swing, you know. I could transform into a significantly hairier fanged beast at any moment. Geralt, are you busy moping? Is this because the unicorn is allowed in the house and Roach isn’t?”

“I’m not moping,” said Geralt, decidedly moping in his coffin. “I’m meditating.”

“Your brothers brought beer. And those tiny biscuit-swaddled baby hot dogs you love so much,” said Jaskier. “Regis just showed up. He’s dressed as Dracula again, which… come on, does no one have even a small shred of creative integrity anymore? I know he’s a different flavor of vampire than you, what with the whole ‘doesn’t burn in the sunlight and isn’t allergic to garlic’ thing, but it isn’t that a bit of an offensive caricature? He’s talking with a really bad Transylvanian accent. That should be my gig tonight!”

Geralt’s inability to eat garlic bread was really, horribly, desperately sad to Jaskier, so he brought it up in conversation as often as possible, just so that Geralt knew he hadn’t forgotten that Jaskier was incredibly supportive of his depressing garlic-related plight.

“Go away, Jaskier,” said Geralt. Rather than go away, Jaskier took a running jump and vaulted himself into the coffin with his friend, only poking him a little in the shins with his tall, heeled boots.

“Are you having a case of the Mondays?” he asked. “Are you in blood withdrawal? Is it really the unicorn? I can ask it to leave but it does have a four foot sword on its forehead, so if it stabs me right to death I–”

“It’s not Ihuarraquax,” said Geralt. “Or blood withdrawal. Or… it’s not even Monday, Jaskier.”

“As previously-stated, I rarely have any clue what day of the week or month it is, Geralt.” 

“I’m just not feeling up to partying tonight.”

Jaskier snapped his fingers. 

“Case of the Mondays, it is.”

Geralt stared at him with a miserable expression. 

It was not much different than his usual look, but after years of strange, supernatural friendship, Jaskier considered himself a connoisseur of Geralt’s varying moods and quirks. Most werewolves and vampires did not prefer to spend any length of time in each other’s presence, but even Jaskier’s wolf form was unusually attached to Geralt. It was often him he ended up using as a chew toy, after all.

“You mind if I stay down here for my shift?” Jaskier asked. 

"You'll miss your party," said Geralt, his voice almost a whisper.

"Naw," he said. "I'm already going to miss it. Wolf me would probably spend the whole night line dancing again or something."

For a while, they just sat facing each other in the coffin, staring, and Jaskier dropped his chin to rest on his folded knees. He knew he must look as moon-eyed and dopey as usual while getting a good look at Geralt, but that was hardly his fault.

They called it puppy love for a reason.

Without consciously doing so, Jaskier's breathing slowed to match Geralt's even breaths, and he had the fleeting thought that maybe the vampire was faking a bummed out mood to draw him down here, where a relaxed, meditative state would ease the inevitably painful trauma of his transformation.

It didn't suck sometimes. Living with a house full of creatures who knew him so well.

Through the narrow slats of the basement windows, the moon rose bright and full in a crisp, black sky.