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Sweet Treats (5) : There’s no shortage of holiday themed popup shops and specials at your local places, and after a long day there’s nothing better than a nice treat for yourself. Maybe you decided to try something new, maybe it was a gift, maybe you got one of the coupons in the mail to try the place out–however you wound up with this drink, you’re in for a good time. No matter what your preferences are, the drink is delicious. Hot, cold, sweet, bitter–there’s a version of it for everyone. But, the flavor isn’t what makes the drink so special–it’s how good it makes you feel. There’s no alcohol in it, but drinking it can leave someone feeling tipsy, warm, and in a general good mood. Inhibitions aren’t lowered and there’s no negative repercussions for having the drink; it might make children more hyper, but the drink just has the ability to put someone in a pleasant mood.
In a lot of ways, Destiny City didn’t seem to have changed much. Not that Avery had seen terribly much of it since a private detective had found his base camp back in Maine and claimed to be there on behalf of Corayani, Corazon, and Bayani Arabejo. That had gotten Avery’s attention immediately. His father had always insisted on making Mama use her married name rather than her maiden name. The b*****d hadn’t even wanted to let Mama keep “Arabejo” as something like a middle name, never mind something like a hyphenated last name. So, for Mama to be calling herself “Corayani Arabejo” again……?
Well, there had been a reason for that, as it turned out. Avery’s father wasn’t around to make Mama do anything anymore if she didn’t want to……except for desperately trying to hunt down someone who was still included in Nigel Arden’s will.
As Detective Gallus had explained while driving them back to Virginia, Avery’s father had redone his bequeathments back in March, after his second-youngest sibling had died by apparent suicide. “Everything about Viray’s death sounds fishy to me,” Detective Gallus had said, and Avery couldn’t help but agree. Maybe that was wishful thinking in both their cases—for Detective Gallus, a suspicious faux-suicide must’ve sounded like a case, and Avery just didn’t want to believe that one of his baby sisters had been hurt so much without him that she’d seen no other way out. “But whether or not your sister actually died by suicide isn’t what your mother hired me to help her with. I would help her with it if she asked, but I’m not about to exploit a mother’s grief for an extra payday, you understand.”
(Avery had understood. He hadn’t expected a private detective to be so ethical, but he understood.)
According to Nigel Arden’s most recent will, everything he had was meant to go to his children and nothing was to be put aside for Mama at all. Detective Gallus hadn’t been able to confirm whether or not Avery was right in thinking that Nigel hadn’t wanted any of Mama’s family back in Manila to benefit from money that he’d felt belonged exclusively to him. Avery didn’t have any question in his mind about it, though. Nigel had always objected to Mama even visiting her family, never mind helping them financially. Sure was an opinion for Nigel to have when he, himself, had been an immigrant while Mama had been born and raised in Destiny City, but what did Avery know.
Either way, the bottom line had been clear: five of Avery’s siblings couldn’t inherit anything, having died at different points after he’d flunked out of DCU and run away. Two of them, plus Avery himself, had never officially been declared dead. Pete had gone missing just over a year after Avery, while Cora (who’d always hated being addressed with her full name, Corangela) had disappeared in early 2023, about six months after her twin, Niyani, had slipped into an unexplained coma and passed. Mama had needed one of the three of them to come back home, alive and reasonably well, or else her ******** husband would screw her out of everything and give the money to his brother’s kids back in Birmingham.
Avery could only remember meeting his English cousins a handful of times before he’d run away. Single digit number of encounters, and he’d enjoyed exactly none of them.
Given the recency, Detective Gallus had expected to turn up better leads about Cora……but instead, she’d gotten hits on Avery. “Not that you made the process easy for me,” she’d told him, during one of their stops off at a diner for a meal that Avery hadn’t needed to steal or trap, kill, and clean himself. “After so long in this business, I can tell when someone doesn’t want to be found and for the most part, you did a very good job of avoiding that. The hits that picked you up were security systems it made sense for you not to have thought of. None of the cameras were on any of the cabins or stores you ever broke into for supplies.”
It hadn’t been, per se, comforting to hear that? But Avery did feel pretty pleased with himself that, after so long, the only person who managed to find him was a private detective motivated by a desire to reunite a mother with one of her children and prevent Mama from getting ******** by Nigel Arden from beyond the grave.
Ultimately, Detective Gallus had gotten Avery back to Virginia two hours before the clock had flipped from Wednesday night into Thanksgiving morning. Tears had ensued when Mama had met them at Gallus’s office. Also, hugs, which had mostly led to more tears for Avery, who hadn’t realized that he’d been missing this kind of human contact until he’d abruptly had it back.
For the past two weeks, Mama and her parents had been loath to let Avery out of their sights. Mama had needed to because bringing her adult son, recently recovered from the woods of rural Maine, to Crystal Academy probably wouldn’t have gone over well with the rest of the staff, the students, or the girls’ parents. Since Abuela and Abuelo had taught their classes at a local community center since retiring, though? Avery had seen a lot of their classrooms. He’d seen a lot of the gym area that got turned into a polling place for election day. He’d seen a lot of the coffee shop, used bookstore, pizza place, high-quality dollmaker’s shop, and specialty candy store right in the immediate vicinity of the community center where his grandparents taught.
But he hadn’t seen too much else of Destiny City……because if Abuelo or Abuela thought he was gone for too long, they would start spamming his new phone with texts. He couldn’t really blame them, he supposed? Almost ten years of thinking that he’d probably died, only to get him back so suddenly, couldn’t have been easy for them. They and Mama likely feared he’d slip away again if they gave him too much wiggle room.
Still, it felt……weird, and humiliating, and emotionally claustrophobic. Going from having no real idea how long he’d been gone because running away had liberated him from needing to think about such things, to being thirty years old with a tight curfew and grandparents who’d helicopter parent text him for taking forty minutes to go grab a coffee instead of the thirty he’d initially promised? It chafed. Avery intended to endure it quietly regardless, out of respect for the fact that he had quite deeply hurt his family by running away, and out of respect for the familial elders who actually loved him.
Didn’t make him any less agitated and fussy as he fumbled down the stairs and out of Detective Gallus’s office, though. She’d offered to help reach out to anyone he wanted to know that he was alive and back in town, and……well. Only one name was on that list. Avery’s contact info was ten years out of date, though, and sure enough, Shulang had left his own family behind. It had taken Gallus a hot minute to find Avery’s only real friend, but as soon as she had, she’d worked to set up a meeting at her place that worked for everybody. And Avery wasn’t about to abandon that meeting or run away from it, not after everything.
He and Mama must have gotten here early, though (impressive, since she’d had him meet her at Crystal after her last class of the day so they could take the bus together). Either that or Shulang had gotten caught up and was running late. Whichever was the truth, Avery itched to not be stuck inside Gallus’s little office, waiting and pacing and mentally chewing the wallpaper. Thankfully, Gallus was a high-functioning coffee addict who needed to keep her office right next to a twenty-four-seven café, and bounding over there for a warm drink was an excuse to move around and not feel quite so leashed that she and Mama both accepted.
Squinting up at the nutritional information on the menu-board—handwritten in different colors of chalk for some kind of bespoke, whimsical feeling, he guessed—Avery felt like maybe Abuelo would be pleased about him getting something here, too. Practically everything but the plainest of plain coffee drinks had calorie counts that Avery thought seemed fairly high. Not that he knew for sure, because he didn’t, because he’d never thought about anything like this before. But two weeks of getting told “No. Don’t help me, Avebrino. Sit and eat, you don’t need to get yourself skinnier” while trying to do literally anything that could assist Abuelo with dinner or weekend brunch had made Avery kinda start caring about calories.
He had no idea if he was caring about them in any kind of constructive way, he and Mama were still working on getting him health insurance so he could actually see a doctor for the first time since 2014. But, like, maybe? Abuelo?? would calm down a little??? If it seemed like Avery was taking his concerns seriously????
One of the winter holiday specials—some kind of hot chocolate with mint flavoring, using darker chocolate as the base—sounded like a good bet, though. Mama had spotted him enough cash to get a snack, too, so Avery picked up a chocolate chip cookie only slightly smaller than his head to go with it. With them in hand, he skulked back out of the café—but he didn’t head back up just yet. He probably had time before Mama started worrying, and the weather was nice this afternoon. Already getting a bit dark, sure, and chilly because winter, but for Avery, it felt pleasant. Being outside also made it feel easier to breathe.
So, he leaned against the brick wall near the door into the building where Detective Gallus rented her office space. As the streetlamp above him flickered on, Avery took a deep whiff, and then a deeper drink, of whatever hot chocolate concoction he’d just purchased. Shulang would be here soon. He wouldn’t have agreed if he were going to skip. And that thought, plus the satisfaction of the warm beverage hitting his stomach, made Avery’s chest flush pink with something halfway between happiness and anxiety.
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