2.20 Return to Sender

Mab is the town's elusive eccentric, and even when she's seen out and about, buying groceries and whatnot, she's not one to stop and chat with her neighbors. The most they usually get is a smile before Mab walks away. She'll make an exception for her former apprentice, though.

While the snow continues to pour down around them, Mab and Accalia catch up on the spirit chasing business (most calls are false alarms now), and discuss ideas on how to deal with the snow piling up around their houses.

"How is the colony reacting to it?" Mab asks.

"They're fine," Accalia answers.

"You still... the mage thing... with them?"

"Yes. And I'm teaching Jasmine and Hawthorn what I can."

"What happens when Vance grows old, and you're still young?" A tactless question, but surely one that's been on Accalia's mind.

"I can't stay here once that happens," Accalia mumbles. She can't let humans see she isn't aging.

"Perhaps you'll visit," Mab says quietly, not dumb enough to suggest Vance would want to follow his wife into the forest to live out his last days among people he finds creepy and, perhaps literally, alien.

Sensing the approach of someone else, the spirit catchers switch their conversation towards the more mundane, without even bothering to take notice of who it is.

Awkward.

"Could you at least tell her to talk to me?!" What Timmothy meant as gentle pleading instead manifests as an enraged outburst. "I still love her. Even if she doesn't love me, I want to get to know my son."

When Mab stands silent instead of answering him, Timmothy mutters something about being invisible and walks away.

He'll walk back to his parents' place before remembering they're dead and he lives somewhere else.

Timmothy hates the snow.

People tell him it's cold, but the longer he wanders around in it, the more it burns...

Once Timmothy is out of sight, Accalia turns back to Mab. "Do you think he's dangerous?"

"Not to us," Mab says.

Accalia hugs her friend, knowing her sad feelings about her daughter. "I'm so sorry."

Finley agreed to meet Roscoe Riverhawk at Fiddler's Green for a night out. He's not a stranger; every other month, she uses him as a wealth of information to write an article about mountaineering and survival in the wilderness. He is a man with fascinating hobbies. He traveled a good distance to snowboard at certain times of the year, for example, and is now thrilled at the chance to popularize the sport right here in Hidden Springs.

They chat casually as they dine on fish & chips. When Roscoe talks about his father, Nicholas Riverhawk, someone he looked up to as a great outdoorsman, Finley can only think of Timmothy and his stories about his mother who loved to drag him out camping.

Roscoe says his father hated to see the inside of supermarkets, and was a vegetarian with his own massive garden. Finley tells him about her brother behaving similarly.

Roscoe asks about Finley's adventures out of the city. He asks about what it was like growing up as the daughter of a spirit medium. These are questions he's asked before, and he gets the same vague answers this time as he got the times before. He offers to take her skiing with his buddies sometime, on the other side of the mountains.

As Finley goes to ask the jukebox to play a tune less broody than what's currently playing, she begins to second guess her reasons for being here. Which reason was it, anyway?

She wanted to reassure herself she could still date, maybe? She doesn't want anyone thinking she's still unavailable because of her messy breakup with Timmothy, maybe?

Did she want to seem fun—is this just a show for her friends? Or did she want to come here to actually have some fun?

That's how it all began with Timmothy. It was just some fun. Then it was a mutual attraction. Then it was mild escapism. Then Finley was in a bad place, emotionally, after the mess in Bridgeport, and it was hardcore careless escapism, and a flurry of something real, too, she was really worried about Timmothy, she really fell in love with his casual attitude and hidden regrets and efforts to better himself.

She fell in love with how he made her feel. But any guy could do that, right? Why isn't it all the same, when Roscoe Riverhawk tries to make Finley feel special? Why is it different? Why can't she just enjoy this?

Maybe a relationship with a human is just not a path she wants to go down again.

 "I don't guess you play pool?" he asks.

"I haven't touched the game since high school." She's usually up for some competitive gaming, but she can see that gleam in his eye, in his mind. He wants to impress her. "Why don't I just watch you?"

"Well I have some trick shots I've been practicing."

Roscoe's first ball misses the cup by a mile. Maybe even a parsec.

"Eeeh, that didn't count," he flirts, "usually I'm not distracted by a gorgeous woman when I practice."

"Let's dance," Roscoe suggests, when the jukebox moodily gives out and one of the patrons fills the empty air with a few notes from a guitar instead.

It doesn't take a psychic to see Roscoe is really into Finley.

Unfortunately he's not just into her looks but into her personality, or at least the fraction he's seen of it. So although it crossed her mind to offer to go home with him and take their clothes off and get it over with, because such behavior made everything better before, Finley gets the vibe he's looking for a real girlfriend and not just some meaningless score. And she doesn't want to break any hearts.

"I'm having a lot of fun," Finley says, as he twirls her around. But the attraction just isn't there. "But I need to get home before my son is ready for bed."

"Alright." Roscoe likes her more for this detail. Not less. If she intended to scare him off, she failed. "You don't talk about him much."

"I have a life outside of parenting, but my son is extremely important to me."

Roscoe smiles and nods and says they ought to do this again sometime. He kisses Finley on the cheek and they part ways.

"She's interesting, isn't she, Jeff?" Roscoe takes a seat near his friend.

Jeff has forgotten about his guitar and is working on another glass of nectar. The cloudy weather is messing with his metabolism. Without adequate sunlight, digestion has slowed down. He feels like shit. "Whatever."

"She's just not like other ladies."

"Laaadies," Jeff mocks.

"Don't you have an ounce of romance in your body?"

"Nope."

At home, Reve is already showered and ready for his bedtime story.

"You've started dating again," Mab observes.

"Not very seriously," Finley replies.

"Why not?"

Finley is stunned by the question. "You never needed a guy around."

"I'm not insinuating you need to date... it's only, you seemed happy, with Tim."

Finley glares. "If you're not insinuating I need a man, then what are you insinuating?! Why aren't you on my brother's ass about this? He's never had a single girlfriend. At all."

"Does he want one?"

"I don't know! I guess?!"

"I'm not 'on your ass'. Forget it." Mab gets out of her chair to take her bowl to the sink. "I'm sorry."

Squashed behind the rest of the mail, there's a wrapped gift box. Timmothy often sends Finley trinkets, sends Reve presents. RETURN TO SENDER, Finley writes on them all.

She gets letters, too. Those she keeps.

She keeps them in a shoe box tucked far under her bed. The first many letters were coherent. Over time, they've become less so. These days Timmothy writes about surreal nightmares he's been having and stuff he's overheard people saying, stuff that makes no sense. The mayor is poisoning the water supply, that sort of thing. Even Timmothy's handwriting has devolved into erratic scratches.

If anything in the letters can be trusted, and Finley isn't so sure this is the case, Timmothy lived with Leslie for a little while, and Leslie eventually sent him to a doctor—which he blamed on Finley, not because he suspected she'd told Leslie to get him help but because he insisted Finley herself had been there in the office with him and told all the doctors he was crazy, though Timmothy claimed to forgive her for this betrayal—but none of that worked out, so Leslie kicked Timmothy out of his house and Timmothy insists he's doing 'much better' without his brother's pitying stares.

Whatever is wrong with Timmothy, it's gone beyond the scope of his PTSD.

PTSD set it off, sent the bowling ball rolling down the stairway, but now... it seems like he's just too far gone. How is she supposed to respond to that?

Finley feels helpless. It's a feeling she thinks should be reserved for people actually 'there' trying to help their injured loved one. It's not something she should be allowed to feel, since she cut this man out of her life for the safety of their child.

"I'm gonna kick your ass, Alto!" These are the first words Reve picks out of the blur of voices that grow louder as he approaches the school's playground.

"You stole my lunch money!" Newton Alto insists.

"You can't prove anything!" Dexter Abbot, still poorly dressed for the temperature, sticks his tongue out at the other boy.

"Can't we all get along?" Thisbe Vanderburg whimpers.

"I'm gonna make this [redacted slur] pay for telling lies about me," Dexter tells her. "You stay out of this, Princess."

"I know it was you!" Newton grits his teeth, but his anger is getting him nowhere.

Reve tilts his head. Who started this confrontation? Who's lying? There's a way to know for sure: telepathy! And so while standing there, as the arguing and threats carry on, Reve scans the others' minds to figure out what happened.

The lunch money was stolen. Dexter left a note in place of it, bragging about his misdeeds, and when Newton took the note to their teacher Dexter feigned ignorance. Without any solid evidence of anything happening at all, the teacher was forced to decide Newton had either written the note himself, for attention, or the true thief had written down an innocent classmate's name. After all, why would a thief leave a signed note incriminating himself? Once the teacher's back was turned, Dexter made a face at Newton, and that's when Newton knew the truth behind this elaborate troll. Dexter stole his lunch money and Newton was going to raise a fuss about it.

Dexter is feeling smug about all this. He's not a poverty-stricken kid with a difficult home life and plausible reason to steal, no, forget that trope, he's just an ass.

Deirdre Winterly isn't an idiot. She knows what kind of an ass Dexter is. And she totally saw him make that gloating face, once the teacher's back was turned.

Harriet Menon is a deer in headlights.

Sonia Colby and Julie Lho take bets on exactly how big of a beating Newton is gonna get.

Akantha isn't going to take sides. But if she were going to take sides, she's reasoned she'd probably be on Dexter's side. Dexter and Otto are friends, Otto is cute, what more reason does she need?

Dexter throws the first punch.

When it comes right down to it Newton was prepared to whine, not to fight.

"The thief is winning," Reve says quietly to Akantha.

"So what?" Akantha has dryad ancestry and latent powers thanks to her father, Achilles, but being both freaks of nature hasn't made these two friends or anything.

"So. I don't know. Justice is losing."

She grimaces. "Look, if you're gonna be weird, we're not talking."

Newton just got an atomic wedgie and will probably be in tears if he's punched any more. Something about this situation compels Reve to act.

"Everyone knows what you did, Dex. Give Alto back his money."

"You have something to say, speckle-face?!"

"Yeah. I just said it." When Dexter takes a threatening step forward, Reve takes a step backward. "What? Are you trying to knock me over with your bad breath?"

"You think you're funny, Archer? Everyone's gonna be laughin' at you in a minute."

Dexter is one step away from punching Reve's face in, and if it happens, it's going to be majorly embarrassing. Maybe Reve will be able to dodge because he knows it's coming, or maybe he won't, and since this isn't something to be left to chance... "You're too scared to punch me," Reve taunts.

"What?!"

"You're so scared, you're wetting your pants."

Dexter... is wetting his pants.

After watching Dexter run away, Reve takes a moment to wait for the blood to stop rushing to his brain. He's unscathed, but he feels like he's been hit with something. Sending an overpowering mental suggestion to someone isn't something he could ever test out at home. Reve wasn't actually sure if the tactic would succeed.

But it did succeed! That was awesome!

Reve finds Newton Alto hiding, albeit ineffectively, huddled up in a ball at the back door of the school, out of sight of the others. "You okay?"

"I didn't need help," Newton sulks.

"I know," Reve lies, trying to use his psychic powers to understand what the other kid wants to hear. "I shouldn't have interfered, but Abbot looked so... so... like I really needed to call him a jerk. 'Kay?"

Newton does not look up.

"Sorry about your lunch money," Reve ventures.

"He did steal it. I'm not lying."

"I know."

"Forget it."

"You're not annoying." Reve refers to how Newton registers to his psychic senses—quiet and unobtrusive, not loud or chaotic like the others—but gives no clarification to his meaning. "Do you want to be friends?"

Newton just sits there. Because surely this is a cruel joke.

"Alright, good," Reve says, after a long silence. "We're friends. I've decided."

"Sure," Newton mumbles.

"I think you were really brave," Harriet says, joining them.

She skips away before Reve can think of anything to say.





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 Etc.: Harriet just hates Dexter.

Thanks to Colleen for designing Fiddler's Green. I can't wait to use it in more scenes. It's a beautiful lot, and it fits in perfectly with this town.