I'm back from my long hiatus. Holy toadstools, no wonder I've put off typing updating all of this, it's depressing. Bandy, this one… I swear VVV will be happy. But it won't go up until tomorrow, eheh.

The light of the afternoon found Roman much improved. He'd more or less finished throwing up and was already trying to hold down a cup of mint tea and lemon. It was a notoriously unpopular drink with the rest of the Abbots, but he'd always liked it. "When was this?"

Oscar leaned over the toddler-sized photo album and peered at the indicated picture. "Oh, that's very old… I don't think I should tell you."

He was joking, and seemed to be comfortable doing it at this juncture, after earlier failed attempts to catch Roman off-guard with humor. The jokes still weren't very funny to him, but Roman had begun to realize that they had an intent far deeper than mere diversion and a sought-after laugh. He smiled, put down his tea very carefully and then nudged his father with his knobbly shoulder. "Come on," he said, balancing the album in one hand. "Tell me. That's my mom there, right?"

"Yes, that's your mom." Oscar let out a very soft, almost nonexistent sigh. It sounded like a mouse skiing down a mound of sugar. "She was so beautiful… Good thing you look more like her than me, or you'd be in big trouble." He laughed, and there was very little about it that seemed forced. "Heaven knows she was the only woman in the world who would put up with someone like me."

Roman touched his own nose and tried to make a mental picture of his face that didn't include his sunglasses. For some reason, this was easier while his sunglasses were lying neatly on a table on the other side of the room. He looked back at the photograph. After a moment of serious contemplation, he opened his mouth to say that he looked almost exactly like Oscar, but then he closed his mouth again and sucked at his tongue. Obviously his dad saw her in him somewhere, and arguing that would have been cruel, extremely so. Instead, he pointed at the picture once more and said, "So tell me when it was taken, Dad."

He still wasn't entirely comfortable calling Oscar that, but he was slowly learning that as long as he said it when it felt right, it got a little easier to say the next time that it felt right again. He was also trying not to call his father 'Oscar' aloud, because it was so much nicer to see the tired man smile. It made him look less intimidatingly human and more forgivably something else. He angled an arm around Roman's shoulders and shared the good view of the photo album. "Oh fine. That would have to be high school," he confessed, then chuckled again. "I loved your mother from grade school onward. She was so much smarter than me… And you'd never believe how modest she was."

This went on for some time, Oscar reminiscing in several broken pieces, like an apopheniac with a favorite subject, Roman listening with an expression that was oddly hungry. He dozed off in the middle of a one-sided conversation, or near the end of it. He dreamed of what his father continued to say, and eventually of nothing but a woman holding a teddy bear and giving it a dubious look.

When he awoke, most of the photographs had been cleared away, save for a very thin stack next to a small dark blue album with a plain cover. Roman swallowed a yawn as he leaned forward and picked up the stack of photos. The one on top was yellowed with age, but only about the edges, and showed a very young man wearing old clothes that proudly shoved the word 'farmer' into the mind of whoever looked at them. He flipped it over and read, Alan Abbot, followed by a long-past date. The further annotation was of deeper interest. Written in a delicate, possibly feminine hand, it read, Rascal. And that was it.

He set it down and looked at the man's hands. It was too easy to forget that human lives were so short, and their biology seemed more aware of it than their consciousness. So many continuing generations, and he had become part of it. Large hands, passed down from one son to the next. He shook his head and looked at the second photo in the stack.

It was another shot of his parents together. His mother was quite visibly expecting, and his father was holding her in a protective, careful embrace. They both looked painfully young. Roman set the photos on top of the dark blue album and settled back into the couch. "These are for me," he told himself, while mentally searching his senses for the bittersweet ache that he'd come to realize marked his dad. It was faint, but not far off. Roman shot a guilty frown at the photographs, then pulled the blanket over his head.

Never mind how long and careful he'd been, trying to stay detached. It had been arrogant in the extreme, thinking he could live in persistent denial. Now the arguments would stop, of course, but the worst problems were no longer avoidable. Sooner or later, he would leave the entire tangle of humanity behind, but now…

Now there were people who would miss him. It had all gone feet up when that happened, but it was even worse when the responsible party, i.e. him, was going to miss them. He retreated into his head to look for West, but Roman stood in the way, throwing a mental tantrum, singularly unwilling to be denied. He pressed his face into the couch and whimpered, then tucked the blanket under his head, encasing himself in a personal cocoon.

Eventually, he fell asleep again, and was mercifully unplagued by dreams. He took solace in the nearly timeless sleep of fatigue and almost hoped he would stay ill a while longer. But then he awoke once more and wished he were someone else.

His head felt like a grape in dire distress, and his limbs followed along a similar theme. There was no adequate simile for the headache—at least, if there was, his head hurt too much to go in search of it. Against his better judgment, he sat up. The room was still empty, but it had changed since his previous waking moments. There was a covered tray on the coffee table with a Post-it note stuck to it. He leaned forward just enough to read it through a careful squint and the little light available from the hallway. "Sorry it's boring, love, your Dad." There was a disturbing little grinning face beneath the signature, which would have made Roman laugh if he hadn't felt like a mouse that had just survived a ride in a hamster ball with a half-brick as a passenger.

He lifted the cover off the tray and discovered a very safe-looking sandwich. The bread was toasted and the crusts had been cut off. It had been years since he had decided that he was a more or less adult entity, and did not need to remove the crust from his bread. But he had never liked crusts.

The sandwich disappeared quickly as he decided what to do. This was a generally difficult task, but he made a decent effort. Unfortunately, it ended with a pinging phone in his hand. Logically, this marked the beginning of a far more difficult task, but it was the kind that demanded results.

"Hello?" The voice on the other end was kind, in a way that brought gingerbread to mind. Roman had never seen the point of gingerbread, aside from its use as a remarkably long-lasting building material.

"Good evening, Mrs. Mosher," he said, the more functional parts of his brain stepping to the fore and automatically supplying details that inevitably mattered. "This is Roman Abbot."

Pleasantries followed. They were noticeably brief and ended with a question about Dice, (Do you want to speak to him), and information about Van (He's not at home). For some reason, largely to do with the image that Mrs. Mosher presented, Roman assumed that comment did not have to do with Van's casual, self-disregarding insanity.

"Where is he?"

"With a friend," she replied, sounding quite pleased. Roman wasn't sure what worried him more, the idea of Van forming attachments, or that it was the sort of attachment that a decent, kind older lady could approve of. The latter seemed fundamentally wrong in some indefinable way. "He should be back before 9:00, though."

And he had at least made a mocking bow to curfew. Roman's headache worsened. He rubbed his left temple with a very careful index finger and gripped the phone a little tighter. "Did he say where he went? I'm afraid I need to speak with him right away."

After a bit of what he refused to think of as handling, he had a location and a phone number. He thanked her and politely removed himself from her very small world. The supercilious thought did not give him any comfort. It just made him feel like a jumped up little twerp. The feeling seemed to be a bit vindictive, especially when he looked inside his head and found Roman still standing there, locking the doors and then kicking them.

He gave himself a careful shake and then shuffled up to his room to get dressed.

Ten minutes later, he was sitting on the floor in front of his bed and tying his shoes, wondering if his brain was melting. He hadn't asked who Van was with, or why. At the time, it had only seemed important to find him, but the where was almost as insignificant when weighed with the who and why together.

The door opened slowly, and Oscar stuck his head in. He was smiling, although worry continued to gray his face. "Feeling better?"

"Yes." The coldness of this reply made Roman wince and nearly apologize. "Thank you for, um, s-staying up with me, Dad."

Oscar positively beamed. Roman fought back a full-body cringe. It should not have been so easy to make anyone smile like that, he knew. It was the smile you got when you gave a starving person a loaf of bread that someone had taught them they did not deserve. His head pounded angrily. "Any time. Where are you going? Not too far, I hope. You still don't look well enough to be running around…"

"No, not far." Lying should have been a simple business. All he would have had to do was smile and open his mouth. The lies would just tumble out, and oh dear, wouldn't they sound good.

Oscar stepped into the room, one hand still on the door. "Go on…"

Roman didn't smile. He pouted and slumped, letting himself slide into a curve. "Merell Park. You know where it is, right?" They both nodded at the same time. Butirk was not a big place, and Oscar had spent Roman's entire life there.

Neither of them mentioned this. It would have raised the subject of the reason he had moved his life to Butirk, a reason that Roman had been ignorant of until that afternoon. He'd thought Oscar had always been part of the town. He'd just lumped them in the same category and walked away, congratulating himself on his own superiority.

He pushed himself off the floor and lurched into his father. The movement resulted in an awkward hug. "I'm sorry…" Oscar had run away and Butirk had turned into a hidey-hole that he couldn't climb out of. His life had been thrust into the starkest opposite of what he'd hoped for, and Roman had made it worse. His head throbbed. "It's all my fault…" His mother had died giving birth. And he'd turned out to be a self-important little prig.

"Hey now, none of that." Oscar squeezed his shoulders and then stepped back a bit. "You haven't done anything wrong."

Roman wanted to wail an argument and present the evidence in a long eloquent speech. His lip trembled as he repressed a hiccup. And then he shook his head.

His father kept on giving him the same forgiving, worried look that promised everything would be all right, and there would be pancakes in the morning, even if he didn't make his bed. "You're okay," he whispered. And for a few moments, this was true, because he was the Daddy, and his little boy was close to sobbing.

For a long time, neither of them spoke. Roman sniffled, cutting through the mechanical hum of the heater. His limbs grew steadily stiffer until he felt his own age again, and then he stepped back and wiped his face with his sleeve. He even coughed.

Looking a little mystified, Oscar grabbed a tissue from a handy box and offered it, then ducked his head sheepishly. "You can go if you need to, but… I'd rather you stayed home to rest."

"I…" But why not? Roman asked himself, looking around the room. Van wasn't expecting him, and aside from a vague feeling of uneasiness, he, Roman, had no reason to care specifically about what Van was doing, or who was with him. "You're probably right," he said, after a moment. "I can take care of it tomorrow."

Oscar lead him carefully to the desk chair and helped him sit. "Of course I'm right. I'm the dad."

"Yeah, you are." The concept still shook Roman, but it bore repetition. Beating the idea into himself seemed like the most direct way to learn to accept it. "I think I'll stay up and read for a while." He needed to stay conscious, to consider the events of the day and adjust everything else around them. He had to look at everything all over again.

He was vaguely aware of a hand patting his head, and his father exiting the room. The door clicked shut, leaving Roman in stuffy, feverish silence. He leaned over and started tugging at his shoelaces, his mind working sluggishly towards an uncertain goal. No matter what he did at this point, it was going to be painful. No one knew, even in the demon realm, what happened when temporary half-humans returned. Perhaps the human part died. Some people remembered the lives they'd borrowed, most didn't care. All of the veterans were too smart to have anything to miss or remember.

But now his mind had changed. That didn't seem smart anymore, only selfish. And manipulative, as if humans and this place were just an inconvenient stopping point on a road. That was arrogant too. Roman kicked off his shoes. Why had no one ever stayed in the human realm? There were far less dangers, depending on location, and average life expectancy was much longer everywhere than in the past. It was, by and large, peaceful enough, especially by a demon's standards.

There had never been any record of a demon staying with the humans. It was unheard of and unseemly; no one had ever conceived of it, to Roman's knowledge. He leaned back in the chair and covered his face with one hand.

"They wouldn't keep that kind of record," he whispered. "It would send the wrong message." He wasn't terribly sure of how that worked, but it rang true on a gong inside his head, even if the harmonies were a bit off. He set about undressing and eventually returned to the pajama stage of life, then sat in the middle of his bed with his legs crossed. Dad was right about a lot of things. It would be best to get some more sleep, and he was the dad. It was high time Roman started acting like the son, and for the first time in his life, he was considering it. More than that, he was thinking of what it would entail, and was making an active start at it.

However it would end up, it seemed like an irreversible process. He didn't know how both of him felt about it, although Roman was slowly becoming much more vocal and surprisingly abusive. He set the pillow over his head, allowing his face to poke out a bit and steadied his breathing.