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A/N: Well, it's certainly been a while since I updated this particular story. Obviously I haven't been neglecting it completely, but since this is a rather more serious story, in a much different style and format than "Madrugada", I've been taking extra time with it. No major rewrites for this one.
I'm updating it again, now, because I am actually in San Francisco for the entire week and I've had absolutely no time to work on Madrugada. I literally have no more written of that story than you can see in my latest update. And, since I absolutely hate skipping an "update day" completely, I'm posting this instead.
Enjoy!
None of those things were the reason, though, that the lad found such happiness in the new day. In fact, it would have mattered not at all if the day had been dark, or cold, or soaked with rain.
Today was Gabriel’s wedding day.
In just a few hours he would be meeting his bonnie Aoife at the chapel. In just a few hours he would be a husband, with a wife. In just a few hours he would be the happiest man in the world.
He was absolutely terrified.
Would he be a good husband? A good father? He had, of course, helped to care for his younger brothers and sisters, so he thought he might do alright as far as that went. Still, the prospect was dizzying. In the time it took the lad to get himself from his bed to his breakfast, he had already gone from happy to petrified to faint-headed and back again.
His fears cast all over, from worries about his future to more practical concerns about doing something foolish at the chapel. Surely, though, his darling Aoife loved him well enough not to change her mind even if he did some such fool thing as stumble at the altar or blunder through his vows.
His father, bless him, knew exactly what was going through his poor son’s head and so he took the lad aside for a while, to give him some words of encouragement and advice.
“Son,” he said to him, “You’ll be a man after today. You’re ready for it, sure enough, and I don’t want you to worry overmuch. I raised you myself, after all. If I didn’t think it were true, I’d tell you as much and you know it.”
“Yes, Da,” Gabriel said.
“And don’t you worry about your bonnie Aoife. She’s a fine lass, and I couldn’t be happier for you. Now… Is there, er,” he paused for a moment, embarrassed. “Is there anything you’d be wanting to ask me about tonight?”
Young Gabriel blushed a deep red, knowing what his da was asking. Truth be told, he was almost more nervous about that night as he was about that afternoon. There wasn’t anything could help that, though, except to get through it.
“W-well, I…” he stuttered, as embarrassed as his Da—if not more so. Fearghas smiled understandingly at his eldest son.
“Now I know you know the basics of it,” he said. “There are livestock enough in the fields. Just you be sure to take care with your wife, do you hear? You treat her right, and you’ll have nothing but happiness in your marriage.”
“Yes, Da, I will,” Gabriel said. “I promise.”
His da chuckled. “I’m not the one you need to be promising,” he reminded the lad. “Now come, we must be getting you ready for your bonnie lass. You can be sure she’s busy as a bee getting ready for you.”
Gabriel followed his Da back into his small bedroom to get himself properly dressed. Today he would be wearing his very best suit, which he never took out except for the very best of occasions. As accustomed as he was to his work clothes, the tight suit felt all manner of constricting. The high collar felt as though it was choking him, and he felt like he could hardly move for all the starch in his trousers. He must have spent over twenty minutes just pulling at his suit like a nervous schoolboy. Finally he admitted to himself that he would not be able to make himself any more comfortable in that suit and stepped away from the mirror. He ran his fingers through his hair and turned to find his Da again.
Both his mother and his da were in the main room, helping Gabriel’s brothers and sisters get ready for the wedding. The very youngest, not used to getting dressed so fine, were complaining awfully about the clothes. Gabriel had to smile, though—his littlest sister Delwyn, only six, was the bonniest little thing he had ever seen. Her long brown curls had been tied back with a ribbon and her skirts were fluffed out like a little flower. Gabriel walked over to her to pick her up, but was stopped by his mother’s warning cry.
“Gabriel Kavanagh, don’t you wrinkle that suit, now! I spent an hour pressing that for you last night!”
The lad stepped away from his little sister, a guilty look on his face. “Sorry, Mother,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You just keep yourself clean and pressed, and we’ll take care of the rest. And for goodness’ sake, stop running your fingers through your hair, you’re getting it all mussed!”
She came at him with the brush that she’d been using on the little ones. “Come here, then, and let me fix that for you. And that’s the last I want to see you putting your hands through it.”
“Yes, Mother.”
She finished fixing his hair and smiled at him. “Oh my handsome lad,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t believe you’ll be leaving me now. You promise you’ll bring your lass to visit us as often as you can, alright?”
“Of course I will, Mother.”
“And if you ever need help with your little ones, you’ll bring them? It would be no trouble at all.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Ohh,” she wailed, dabbing at her eyes, “The two of you are going to have such bonnie children! You picked such a fine lass, Gabriel!”
The lad smiled and put a comforting arm around his mother. “Don’t worry, Mother. I promise to come visit you and Da and all the little ones as often as I can. You’ll see. You’ll never be rid of me.”
His mother wiped the errant tears away with her handkerchief. “You’re such a good lad,” she said. “Oh, now, look, you’ve wrinkled your sleeve!”
Gabriel sighed and relinquished control of his arm. His mother tried her best to smooth out the slight wrinkling in his sleeve with her hands. Finally he had to shoo her away; the hour of his wedding was fast approaching. He could not bear the thought of arriving late.
He needn’t have worried.
He and all of his family arrived at the small chapel with time to spare. There were other relations there, too: cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents from both sides pressed into that little chapel, some from his side that he had not seen in years. The priest was there, standing at the very front, holding his bible. He smiled reassuringly at Gabriel as he walked in. The man had surely seen many nervous husbands-to-be, Gabriel thought to himself. He found his way up to stand before the priest, as his Da had told him.
Now it was his own turn to wait.
Any minute, his bonnie Aoife would come down that aisle.
What if she never showed? What if she had changed her mind?
Nonsense. Gabriel tried to calm himself down and felt a slight pressure on his back. He turned to see the priest, smiling still, a reassuring hand on his shoulder. The old man nodded slightly at him. It would all turn out just fine, he seemed to be saying to the lad.
Gabriel believed him.
And oh, then there she was.
A beautiful aes sídhe dressed all in white stepped through the doors of the chapel, and Gabriel saw naught else in all the world. The only thing in his vision then was his sweet lass, more beautiful than he had ever seen her before. He watched her in a daze as she walked towards him, white lace in a halo all around her. She came to him, and stood beside him, and the priest read from his bible and said a few words. Gabriel heard none of it. All he could see was Aoife’s sweet smile; all he could hear was the sound of his heart beating clear out of his chest.
The priest had them recite their vows, and Gabriel could do nothing but repeat the words that the priest gave him, word for word. Then the priest bid them exchange rings. Gabriel’s next-eldest brother handed him the silver band—for that had been all he could afford—with its heart and hands and crown, and he slipped that band around Aoife’s finger. She, in return, gave him a ring to match. With a few final words it was done. Aoife was his, and he was hers, forever as man and wife.
It was the happiest moment of Gabriel’s life.
The view I got of it was actually rather good, despite the overabundance of concrete and steel. It was one of the reasons I liked that line of work. Every single morning—with the exceptions of Sundays, when I tended to oversleep—I was able to watch the sun rise.
I’ve always loved to watch the dawn, for the last forty years at least. True, my current environment added no beauty to the scene, but then again it didn’t need augmentation. Those first few rays of light peeking over the horizon, followed by the rush of brilliance as the sun itself showed its face: there is nothing more beautiful to me. Not even Seth’s little pink aes sídhe comes close, even if she is bonnier with every passing day.
Another worker called for my attention and I turned from the spectacle in the sky.
The labor of this work was not difficult… not for me, at any rate. We are strong, Seth and I, like all our kind. Heavy lifting means naught to us. If I had wanted, I could have made quite the name for myself, doing all sorts of heavy work in a tenth the time. I didn’t want it, though. I just wanted to pass the days in peace, and earn myself a few dollars in the meanwhile. The labor kept my mind from wandering to other things. I put enough effort into my job that I could blend right in: not too fast, not too slow, and easily forgotten when it came time for me to move on to the next town. I saved the most of my strength for the nights, when I would truly need it. It was a lot more difficult to hunt without Seth by my side, but he had a family to tend to, and he had promised Rosalie when he married her that he would never go into an uncertain fight. I don’t have a family to consider. Not anymore. I’m free to hunt as often and as dangerously as I please.
I keep myself busy. I work all day, and I hunt all night. It doesn’t leave me much time to be sleeping, but I don’t need much sleep when I hunt well.
Seth sleeps all the time, the lazy git.
Anyway, it passes the time. Work and the hunt are the only things that do the trick, now that whisky is out of the question. That particular week, they passed the time straight through until Saturday. I destroyed as many as three suckers in one night that week, which put me in a better mood than I’d had for a while.
Picnics are always a grand old time. They’re really just an excuse for all of our cousins in the area to come and socialize, Seth and myself included of course. Every few Saturdays, the lot of us go out to the park, practically in the forest, bringing food as well as toys for the children. These reunions were mainly the work of Rosalie, despite her only being in the family through marriage. She had help, of course, tracking down all the cousins and making sure nobody was forgot. Fortunately for her, we have a lot of practice keeping track of each other—that’s a lot of Sari’s job—so it wasn’t too hard to manage despite the numbers. There’s dozens of us, just in that area alone.
The thing is, most of us don’t have many friends outside of the family. Sure, we all of us had other acquaintances from before, but it doesn’t work so well to keep them around. None of us stuck around in one place very long, so neither did our friendships. The fact of the matter is that there are just too many complications. Too many questions that start to be asked and too many reasons that keep piling up as to why we shouldn’t be spending much time with anybody who’s not a cousin. After a while it’s far easier to simply forget all about everybody else, save what’s necessary for getting along in the world.
And that’s, then, the reason for having these gatherings so often. When you can’t be socializing with anybody but cousins, you find yourself wanting to spend as much time with those cousins as you can. We are, on the whole, a sociable lot—it’s one of the ironies of our existence—and we get all kinds of lonely without friends around. It used to be that we would visit with each other randomly; calling on whatever cousins we knew whenever we got the inclination. If we’d just moved to a new town, we’d call whoever in the area had the list of names. It worked well enough, but it was harder to find new cousins. Socializing with just the same group of people for that long tends to wear on a man.
Now, thanks to Rosalie, we all saw each other all the time, and there’s hardly enough time to get tired of the same people because we can just start talking to other people if we do.
Not that I was likely to be getting tired of Seth. He and I have been like brothers for the last forty years, even if he did go off and get married a few years back. I’ll admit I was a slight bit put out that he chose to settle down rather than hunt with me, his best friend. I may have been a bit put off, and gone off to Australia for a few months immediately after. Actually, it was more like a year or two. The point is, now we were finally in the same town and back to being the best of friends. Now all I had to do was get him back to the hunt. Well, I had time. I wasn’t getting any younger, no, but I’m not getting any older either.
On Saturdays I only worked a half-shift. It gave me time to be taking care of all the things I may have put off during the week, like shopping for groceries or getting all my dirty laundry clean. I suppose I might have also used the time to clean my little house, but to be perfectly honest there wasn’t much to be cleaning. I had only moved to New Jersey a bit over a year ago, and a year isn’t much time to be collecting any clutter. It’s hard to collect much of anything when I never stay in one place for longer than a few years at a time.
Well, it didn’t look like I would be doing much grocery shopping on that particular Saturday. I headed straight home from work and changed into clean clothes, thanking my lucky stars that I had remembered this time to fetch my laundry from Rosalie. Unfortunately, I also found myself with very few options as to what I could bring to that picnic. It wasn’t as if my cousins would turn me away without an offering, but I did feel bad about showing up and eating everyone’s food without giving something of my own in return.
I just had to figure out what I could possibly offer.
I didn’t think bringing a box of cold cereal would go over all that well. I checked my ice– …refrigerator, again, as well as my cupboards. Most of the latter were nicely well stocked with my Cheerios. I actually did consider it for a moment or two, holding the cupboard doors open while I stood there, deciding.
No… no, there had to be something better that I could bring.
There was a fresh loaf of bread in the breadbox, and some sliced meat in the refrigerator. I did what I could with the two, cutting the sandwiches into triangles as an afterthought. That did it. I piled my little sandwiches onto a tin plate I had gotten from somewhere feeling quite pleased with myself. Sure, no, maybe they weren’t the fanciest tidbits, but then again we’re not the fanciest people. Rosalie doesn’t count—she does all that fancy French cooking from scratch and I’ll be damned if I know how. She has downright spoiled old Seth, that’s certain.
It took a bit of doing, but I got those sandwiches into my new car—covered with cloth to keep them from sliding about—and over to the clearing where we have our picnics. Most of my cousins had already arrived, and were setting up their own plates and platters on folding tables out on the grass. There were a few dozen of us living in the area at that time, some with families like Seth, some without like myself. What little ones had already arrived were chasing each other around and laughing at their play. Seth and Rosalie were there, of course. I finally found Lily running along the grass on the other side of the clearing, her chocolate curls flying out behind her and her pretty ruffles smudged with dirt. I’m sure Rosalie would have had something to say about that.
I set my plate of sandwiches down on one of the tables. Sari was there. I had already told her about the sucker I had killed the week before, as well as several others in the same area. I think she writes them down on a map or some such thing.
“Hello, Sari,” I said, nodding at her in greeting. “Good day for a picnic, isn’t it?”
“Not bad at all,” she replied with the barest of accents. “How’s the hunting?”
“It’s been good lately. I got as many as three the night before last, and two more yesterday. Mostly vampires, though you already know that.”
She laughed and tucked back a stray black hair. Her dark, almond eyes sparkled. “Boy, I wish I could go out hunting like you. You folks keep me so busy I barely have time to sleep! It’s a good thing my own children have grown and gone, or I’d never have a moment’s peace.”
“How are they, by the way?”
“Oh, they’re doing fine. Lavanya has found herself a husband back in Maharashtra, and Dhaval and Prabhat are out in Northern California.”
“Keeping good track of them, I take it?”
“Of course! I am an organizer, after all. It’s in my job description!”
“And keeping an eye out for potential grandchildren has naught to do with it, I’m sure,” I joked, a twinkle in my eye.
I soon excused myself to collect a better assortment of food from the tables. There was plenty to be had, and I intended to take full advantage of this opportunity. If I wasn’t going to be making it to the market, this would do in its stead.
I met Seth at one of the clear tables, the like of which had been set up so that we might actually have a place to eat all of this lovely food. He and his Rosalie had finally managed to catch hold of their little sídhe, who was now seated quite politely on the grass, a plate of food on her lap. It consisted mainly of Rosalie’s contributions, of course. I don’t know that she would have approved of any less for her little daughter.
“Hello, Seth,” I said as I set my plate down on the table. “And how was your week?”
“No different than it was when you asked me yesterday,” he replied laughingly. “A legal clerk sees very little variety in his days—I’m afraid I have no exciting stories to tell.”
Not to be dissuaded, I turned instead to Rosalie. “Surely you had some excitement in your own week?” I asked. “Come now, that lass of yours must give you some awfully entertaining escapades. It’s the age, you know.”
Rosalie laughed. “No, no. Not at all! Lilianne is always a little angel for her Maman. It’s my husband who tries to spoil her at every chance.”
“Is that right, lass?” I asked the girl, bending down to her. “Does your da spoil you rotten?”
She giggled through a mouthful of crumbs and shook her head vigorously. We often had this exchange.
“And of course I don’t spoil you either, do I?”
Again she shook her head.
“Well, that settles it,” I told Rosalie. “Neither of us has the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
She groaned in mock frustration. “You will be the death of me, I know it!” she told me.
I just grinned and dug into my food.
