It was a dark and stormy night, fitting for a small Halloween party.

Their get-togethers, by now, had a formula. Nim wanted to do something. Cail facilitated it. Nerion said "no" first and "fine" eventually. Quir was dragged along as an afterthought.

And she didn't mind, not really. She wasn't good at making friends. No matter how hard she tried, she never could find the right moment to speak up - and when an opportunity did present itself, she somehow managed to squander it every time.

Just sometimes, she wished she wasn't an afterthought.

Tonight was different. Tonight, she didn't mind being a bit invisible. Nerion rang the doorbell, and she was hoping Cail would look at him like he always did, and not her.

There was no such luck. Cail was smiling warmly as always, his eyes barely drifted over Nerion before settling on Quir. 

"I am glad you could make it," he greeted, "I know how busy your work gets." And he stepped closer, arms ready to embrace, lips ready to - to - to …

"Um," she squealed, just at the same time as Nerion cleared his throat sharply. Cail froze still. His green eyes scanned over Quir's hair - on a ponytail, and parted, and combed straight - to her clothes - a hoodie, jeans, running shoes.

Nerion's clothes.

"Seriously?" Nerion's voice, always tense and never satisfied, came from behind his hair - messy, combed open, and a fringe improvised with kitchen scissors. "My boyfriend can't tell me apart from my sister?"

Her sweater looked baggy even on Nerion, and through some miracle Quir had found a pair of trousers that were an acceptable color and didn't make him look like "a fucking hippie".

“Oh.” Cail’s confusion quickly turned into warm laughter, and his attention towards Nerion. “I’m sorry.”

“He’s not wearing his contacts,” Nim intervened with the conversation, sailing elegantly from the bathroom and adjusting a pair of white, fluffy angel wings on her back, completed with a white dress and a halo. “He just had to get those red contacts for the devil costume, and of course they have zero correction.”

“Hi, Nim,” Quir said meekly, but it was drowned under Nerion making a fuss out of Cail almost kissing Quir, and Cail leading them inside with the grace of an experienced host. Nim’s attention naturally drifted towards the drama, but she did extend her hand to pull Quir inside through the door.

There were candles on most of the surfaces, and Quir found herself a place to sit next to the window, back resting against the wall. There was a movie which was too loud, but everything was too loud for her nowadays, so she did not say anything.

Every now and then, her attention drifted out from the window, to the opposite side of the street where windows of the apartment buildings blinked open with light or closed into darkness. She thought about Conri and Iona, and a small suburban area where the pathways to the woods weren’t shut down with asphalt. Small, spilled dreams.

She missed home.

“Can we pause? My leg’s falling asleep.” Cail’s movement of reaching towards the remote sunk into Quir’s consciousness faster than his words. The screen froze and left the house where nobody lived anymore for them to observe. Cail got up to stretch his legs, Nerion took the opportunity to go and fetch more coffee for himself.

“How are you liking the movie?” Nim pinched a candle flame on a flickering heart. All of her movements were gracious, like a dancer, or a swan. It always made Quir feel an odd kind of hunger she did not know how to explain.

“It’s.. interesting,” Quir hurried to reply with a meek smile. She had no idea what the story was about and was hoping Nim would not ask more. Thankfully there was something Nim liked talking about more than anything.

“How has - how has your w-work been?”

Nim never passed an opportunity to talk about herself and promptly launched into a rapid, energetic conversation touching on the world of fashion and the design of it, of people who understood her and who did not, and got so into it they had to push back continuing the movie for another ten minutes so that she could finish her story.

Nim had been her first crush in this city, the first real person she had wanted to touch and get closer to.

(Nerion had put a quick stop to it. Said it would make things weird for him and Cail if Quir and Nim would date.)

She had fallen in love dozens of times after that - puppy crushes, most of which had been fictional. On the surface her days consisted of moments in time related to school and biology, Nerion and data insertion, and taking care of Fenris for Alais.

But underneath, whenever she had a moment - in the bathroom of the university, waiting or sitting in a bus, lonely moments in the mornings and evenings when her body ached to be touched - her mind was elsewhere, in some alternative reality or another.

She read comics, played silly little games and devoured romance novels. Sometimes, when she was working with rows and rows of data, she secretly watched series where people found each other and never were lonely again.

Nim had been different, because even when she was clearly above Quir, she had been attainable, even if it had been in the most theoretical way imaginable.

Someone more cruel (like Nerion) might have said to her that she was not in love with the people, but that she just wanted to be in love with someone, no matter who (and they would not be entirely incorrect).

Quir did not feel like she was asking too much. In the absence of real arms wrapped around her at night, she imagined countless fictional encounters.

By the time the movie ended, a familiar ache was sharpening its claws against her temples. Migraines and headaches had been a familiar friend ever since the accident.

Nerion glanced at her, just once, and turned down the invitation to stay over for the night and recount the events of the movie over a glass or three of wine.

It took the whole walk back home for Quir to feel like herself again. The laughter, the sounds, the noises, the scents, the brightness and loudness of others - it wrapped around her and bit in her flesh, until she lost track of who she was and what she wanted, if she even wanted to be there (except of course she did, because the alternative would be to be alone all the time).

A small voice at the back of her mind whispered: “But if they don’t know you, or accept you as you are, aren’t you just as alone even in their company?”

Nerion, from her left-hand side, asked: “Did you have fun?”

It was one of those few genuine questions Quir never knew when to expect and what to make out of them. He was not looking at her when she was trying to find her keys from her pockets, but his tone was calm and controlled.

“Yeah,” she replied and flashed him a smile. “I’m just tired. Will you go back?”

“I’ll go tomorrow, need to work. Bring me coffee tomorrow when you wake up.” She watched his back as he started to head off.

She wanted to tell him that she did have fun, but it was never as simple as just “yes” or “no”. It was balancing with “good enough” or “better than”, acknowledging that “Nerion’s friends” were not her friends, and coming to terms with the frightening realization that Nerion was settling down here more with each passing day.

For her, this was an interlude, a temporary state of being. One day, things would go back to normal, because what if they wouldn’t?

What if they wouldn’t?

Oh, what if they wouldn’t?