At four years old, Gale spends his holidays in Times Square, in America. He remembers very little about the events, unknowing that just beyond the vision of normal humans there are terrible, devastating things happening. Death is sweeping across the hunters that no one can see, the horsemen rampaging in their fury and power, and the slaughter is missed entirely by the Gentry family, celebrating both the New Year and their children's shared birthday with a trip to the states. Gale and Leslie's birthday is in December, but their long-planned trip to New York meant waiting a little while, so that they could take them to the enormous FAO Schwarz store and let them pick out their own gifts.

There are hooded men in black, and he almost gets lost in the thick throngs of people, but his father carries him home and Gale does not even recall the men until much, much later.

When he's six, he and Leslie get a cake that's too big for the both of them to eat on their own; a towering concoction of spun sugar and fondant flowers and icing so thick that their maid spends several days trying to get the remnants of it out of the carpet where it inevitably gets mushed. Gale's not a big fan of the flowers, but he's too young to actually care about anything other than the fact that it tastes like candy.

His mother puts a sugar flower in Leslie's hair and the two of them giggle about it for hours.

At ten, the party is at a shared friend's house. Gale and Leslie have a thrilling time horseback riding, hitting a pinata, watching some scary movie, and eating so much cake and sweets that by the time they get back home, they are pink cheeked and heavy eyed with exhaustion and gleefulness. Leslie falls asleep nestled into Gale's bed beside him, like they used to do as children, and that they stopped doing once they got older. He holds her hand and reminds himself that they will be together forever.

(Forever doesn't last nearly as long as he expects it to.)

At twelve, Gale and Leslie share their birthday at their uncle's house, just before Gale leaves to live with him. The time is strained; it's not a happy, laughing matter like it used to be when they were children, because Gale's parents have started to wonder whether their son has something wrong with him. He's told them of the shadows he sees, and for quite some time they've simply played it off as a childish lark - but Gale is getting older now, and the excuses are running out.

They send him to live with his uncle, because they don't know what else there is to do. And Gale's uncle is not exactly a talkative man, nor a particularly father-like one. He does his own thing, and expects Gale to do the same. He doesn't want the responsibility of raising a child - but, then again, neither do Gale's parents, not anymore now that there's something wrong with him.

His thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays are spent at restaurants with his family, but it's not the same. He can feel the disconnect with them, can feel the fake smiles, and Gale knows his parents love him, that they're trying to make it so that he "gets better - " but there's nothing wrong with him. They just don't believe him, is all.

No one does, except Leslie, and she can't do anything, her eyes wide and fearful as she watches him eat his pudding from across the table. Underneath, she takes his hand, and he knows that she understands how lonely he is at his uncle's home, how much he wishes things were different.

He comes to Deus when he's fifteen, which means that his first birthday on the island is his sixteenth. It's the first birthday that Gale has spent without Leslie, and he can't even remember, all these years past, how he spent it. With Bix, probably, the only person who even cared enough to talk to him like a man and not a child in the beginning. His best mate through thick and thin, Gale would die for him, would do anything for him. He remembers only too well when he had actually thought that Bix was dead, and there is still an ache in his chest at the memory.

Bix is still alive, but he is gone now too. So is Marcus, both of them away in places that Gale can no longer reach, and Candace as well, is off somewhere that he doesn't know. Sometimes he wishes they would have taken him with them, but he has what he has here on the island still, and he lives for that, for the small moments in which he can feel happy. There aren't many anymore, but he is okay with what he does have.

His seventeenth birthday comes and goes without much incident, just another passing day. He celebrates it quietly, takes a glass of wine to Leslie's pod and toasts her privately, running his fingers along the little window pane that shows her silent, still face, pleasant in the stasis of sleep. He waits, every day, for her to wake up, but she never will, and Gale knows this by now, enough that he has already made a little grave marker for her in the cemetery, taking flowers to it every few months.

His eighteenth birthday is the first one that is comes while knowing Stormy Ortega. He doesn't know the full weight of this until months later, when he slowly but steadily falls in love with her, with this beautiful, wonderful, magical girl full of music and laughter and heart. Even now, all these years later, even seeing the darkness beneath her eyes, the listlessness, the sadness, Gale has not lost the sense of wonder he feels when he looks at her, the sense of love and adoration. He has never loved anyone so deeply as he has loved Stormy Ortega, and he never will. She is everything good in this world to him, and even with the pain of living, he has never stopped being grateful that she exists in this world.

His nineteenth birthday is the one he gets to spend with her, and it's the first time in a very long time that he has ever felt good about having a birthday. Quiet affair though it is, he feels as though the world is continuing to move, that he can still keep moving forward with it.

He's twenty now. It's a number he never thought he would reach, a number that seemed so far off in the distance that it was almost laughable when he first came to the island. Gale's relatively certain that no one on the island - Caelius especially - expected him to live this long, to having survived for the past four and a half years in a place where the life expectancy is better not even contemplated. There is a lot he's accomplished, but there's also a lot he hasn't.

Still, twenty years old is not an age that comes around often. He's no longer in the dregs of teenage years, and he's no longer the short, inexperienced kid who came from England to the island, whom nobody thought would amount to anything. He's taller (finally), more capable, has learned more than he ever thought he would. He's lost so much, but also gained as well, and he has a hard time thinking about the future, especially when he knows how unsteady it is, how uncertain it can be. Right now, all he can do is take one step by one step, slowly gauging each day as it passes, doing the best he can with what he has.

His life is hard, yes. It was never easy, and it was far from what he expected it to be. Gale does not expect it to suddenly become any easier, but what it is now is what he will bear, what he will take. He would rather be here, where he can do the most good, where he can still breathe and walk and talk and live, even if that means that some of it is painful.

Some, but not all. He will keep moving, he will keep growing.

Twenty is not old, but it's not young either, and Gale is simply grateful that he can say he has lived this long as it is, that he has what he does in his life. From a fifteen year old, green kid who knew nothing about the world in front of him, to a twenty year old young man who knows too much sometimes, he has lived, and he will continue to live.