Posted using PostyBirb",
"writing": "Niel watched the countryside pass by. Unending vineyards and fields, and trees beyond them, with clusters of houses here and there. \n\nAfter ten minutes of what his driver, a badger who kept glancing at him in the rear-view mirror, said would be a thirty-minute ride, Niel couldn’t believe how much there was. Back in Minnesota, there’d hardly be anything worth of note in that timeframe once he left the greater Twin City area.\n\nHis phone buzzed, and he glanced at it. Another text from Stewart. It made eight, along with four calls Niel hadn’t picked up. He pockets it without checking it, just like he hadn’t looked at the previous texts or listened to the messages. His dad waited eighteen fucking years to tell Niel about Jarod. Niel wasn’t particularly interested in what he had to say now, and if it was questions about his trip, the man could damned well have enough patience to wait until Niel was back in the US to get his answers.\n\nThe driver glanced at the rear-view mirror again. “Jacques as said you need sex to live.” The accent was thick, and the grin made the intent clear.\n\n“Passed that bridge when you had me sit in the back seat,” Niel replied dismissively. The whole thing had felt like he was some official being picked up for some meeting, with the badger opening the door for him and gesturing to the back seat. That he kept looking in Thomas’s direction showed who the show was for and hadn’t made the best impression on him.\n\nNot that he’d say no to sex, but all the driver did, instead of…stopping the car and inviting Niel to join him in the front, was muttering in French.\n\nSo he probably didn’t want the sex all that badly.\n\n* * * * *\n\n“What is this?” Niel whispered, watching the picturesque houses with whitewashed walls and exposed beams they passed. “A movie set?”\n\nAround them, it looked at what he imagined an early century French town looked like, built on the occasional foreign movie from history class and his own watching, after the teacher talked about Louis de Funès, a late twentieth century comedian.\n\nThe road was wide, and they were the only car on it. Outside the town there had been a farm tractor, and in it everyone walked or biked. Every third building seemed to be an open terrace cafes and more people were seated there, enjoying the day, than working. There was a sense of maintained age to the buildings, and everyone smiled, looked at peace.\n\nIt was surreal.\n\n“We are ere.” The car came to a stop. “Numeros quarante-trois is la maison la.” The badger pointed.\n\nForty-three Rue du Boucher was a two-story house with a whitewash that was more gray and had had the exposed beams replaced recently. Niel was out of the car before the driver had lowered his hand.\n\nHe knocked, then wiped his hands on his pants, realizing he had no idea how to open the conversation. ‘Hi, I’m your son,’ felt too cold to start with.\n\nThe door opened, and Niel closed his mouth on the ready greeting. Instead of Jarod, a girl of not more than ten looked up at him and asked something in French.\n\nFuck, what if no one spoke English here?\n\n“Is Jarod Irvine here?” he stammered, trying to come up with an alternate way to get himself understood if that got him a blank look. Instead, he got a roll of the eyes before she walked back in, leaving the door open and yelled something.\n\nThe only word he understood was American, in spite of the French pronunciation. Not long after, another raccoon was at the door. This one, a man in his mid-twenties at most. He was the twin of the picture Stewart had shown him of Jarod.\n\nThe man looked Niel up and down, and his expression turned into a mix of tired and annoyed. “What do you want?” There was no accent, and while the tone could pass as neutral, the words were clipped.\n\nBefore he could lay into the man about never checking up on him, the girl came back into view, hanging back in the entryway, but watching attentively.\n\nHe swallowed his anger. “I would have liked you to have called that messaging service you gave my dad, your grandson, as a contact number, by now.”\n\nThe man muttered something. Not in English or French, or even German; the tone was angry.\n\n“Jarod?” a woman asked, then appeared in the hallway with a girl of five holding onto her leg as if she was afraid someone would steal her mother away. Jarod joined her as she asked more questions Niel didn’t understand. He said a few things softly enough Niel wouldn’t have understood, even if he’d spoken in English, as he escorted her back. He returned before Niel could wonder if he’d been abandoned there again, taking a jacket from a rack and putting it on.\n\nJarod closed the door and rounded on Niel. “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but if you’re here so I’ll fuck you, leave.”\n\n“Where the fuck do you get off thinking that’s what I’m here for?” Niel snapped. “Hasn’t it occurred to you I might want to know who my father is?”\n\n“Stewart is your father, not me.”\n\n“Bullshit! It’s your DNA in my veins. If you weren’t interested in dealing with me, you shouldn’t have gotten involved in my family’s affairs.”\n\n“Steward was fucking begging me to give him a kid.”\n\n“Well, ta-da! Here I fucking am. And because you had to do that, there are things I have to know. Things that would have been fucking nice if you’d been around to teach me about before they were dumped on me.”\n\nThe raccoon rolled his eyes. “What you’re asking about isn’t sunshine and puppies. You don’t want to get involved in that. That consequences are—”\n\n“Oh, fuck off with the consequences. They’ve already happened. So now you’re going to explain the whole fucking thing to me.”\n\nJarod stared. “What are you talking about?”\n\nIt was Niel’s turn to roll his eyes. “The ‘need sex to live’ thing. What else did you think I was talking about?”\n\nJarod opened his mouth, closed it. He shook his head and tried again, only to look around. Their shouting had attracted a crowd, and Jarod’s ears went red before folding back. He straightened them and spoke in French, motioning to Niel, and got chuckles out of them before they went back to their day. If not for how red the ears still were, Niel could have thought he’d been made the butt of a joke.\n\n“We’re lucky neither of us mentioned magic. Although I had to explain your need sex to live comment as you never getting enough.” Jarod sighed. “Let’s take this someplace we can have a modicum of privacy.”\n\nNiel nodded and motioned to the badger, still by the car, to indicate he and Jarod were heading off together.\n\n* * * * *\n\nThere wasn’t a cafe every third house. The closest one to Jarod’s house was a few minutes’ walk. He ordered something from the buck behind the counter, then led Niel to a booth in the back, away from the sunlight bathing most of the room through the large bay window. Niel’s driver entered as they sat and took a table by the door.\n\nHe was almost as annoyed at him as he was at Jarod. He’d made it clear he wanted him to stay by the car. He didn’t need a babysitter.\n\nAs Niel opened his mouth, the buck placed sandwiches before each of them, along with a large mug of something the color of hot chocolate, but that smelled of coffee. Instead of starting on his explanation, Jarod ate.\n\n“Eat,” the raccoon said, between bites.\n\n“I’m not hungry,” Niel snapped.\n\n“One, keep your voice down. If you draw attention to us, there’s nothing I can do about it. Two, this is a cafe, we come here to eat. Do that, so no one starts wondering what we’re doing back here. You have no idea how weird people get when they start noticing things like you not going to the shitter anymore.”\n\n“Maybe you never had to deal with it,” Niel said through gritted teeth, “being the first and all that, but if I eat anything right now, it’s come out explosively. So if anyone asks, tell them I’m too fucking pissed to eat.” Niel cut the end of his index finger. “As for being noticed.” He traced the cone of silence phrase. Olavo had warned him against using blood, but Niel wasn’t reaching in his pants in a public place. “Now I can scream at you as much as I want and no one will hear me.”\n\nJarod looked at the sigils and deflated. “How did it happen?”\n\n“How do you think?” Niel snapped.\n\n“I’m trying to understand, Niel. Believe it or not, I have no idea what happened to you right now.”\n\nNiel let out a breath and eyed the mug. He’d drank the broth with nothing more than eventually having to go as a result, and he needed something to do while he figured out how to explain things. The content was scalding coffee with too much milk for his taste.\n\n“There was a party. I had sex with a guy who turned out to be related to the Survivors.”\n\nJarod shook his head, the protest clear, but then looked at the blood on the tabletop. “I didn’t know that could happen,” he stated, as if that absolved him. “When did you find out?”\n\nNiel inhaled. “Last weekend. My football—” Jarod rolled his eyes. “—coach has this stupid tradition where he forces the team to take part in No Nut November. In spite of the cock cage, I managed to have sex until he was able to cock block me during an away game. That left me tired, and the next day I figured I’d caught a stomach bug or something. Because of that, I was too tired to have sex.”\n\nHe paused and sipped. “That made me feel worse, so no sex. I passed out in the halls the next day and woke up in the hospital to doctors baffled by the blood work. And before you freak out, the local Society family is taking care of that. Dad put two and two together and brought me to a friend of his. We had sex, I felt better. After that, he showed me a picture of you.”\n\nA longer sip. The drink wasn’t that bad after all. “I was pretty sure you hadn’t been one of the guys I’d fucked with at the party.” Niel smiled. “But it was wild, so I checked with the guys who organized it. They’re Society. That’s when I found out one of them has a connection to the Survivors. I had sex with him.”\n\n“Does your father know you’re here?”\n\n“Oh, I don’t know.” Niel looked at Jarod over his cup as he sipped it. “Do you?”\n\n“Does Stewart know you’re here?” Jarod corrected pointedly.\n\n“Yes… actually, no. He thinks I’m in Argentina.”\n\n“Why would he think you’re there?”\n\n“That’s where the guy’s from. When he told his father what happened, the Cuevet asked to see me.”\n\n“Why?”\n\nNiel shrugged. “I never got an answer to that. The Patriarch freaked out when he found out I’m your son. Did you even stick around long enough to find out if you’d had a boy or a girl?” he demanded before Jarod asked a question.\n\n“I’ve never had a boy before. I didn’t expect this to be a first.”\n\n“So, you’d have hung around if you’d known?” Niel tried to keep hope from building.\n\n“No. Steward asked for a kid. I gave him one, and I left.”\n\n“My dad just let you bang my mom?” Niel demanded.\n\n“It’s the twenty-first century, Niel. Not the nineteenth,” Jarod replied with a chuckle. “There’s this thing called artificial insemination.”\n\n“I thought you had to put it in to have a kid.” Somewhere in one of the memories the bat gave him, that had been explained to him.\n\n“And so does everyone else.” Jarod smirked. “Won’t it be fun when they find out?” his amusement died. “On second thought, don’t tell them. I have no interest in disappearing again.”\n\n“Oh? Disappearing on me was enough for you?”\n\n“It wasn’t about you, Niel,” Jarod replied sharply. “I didn’t leave you. I was never there. I wasn’t to be part of your life. Stewart never said it, but I could see it on his face the entire time I was there. This fear that if I stayed, it would strain his marriage.”\n\n“Fine. That wasn’t about me. You weren’t kept appraised of what happened, so you didn’t care to get involved. Fine. I’m here now. So how about you get involved?”\n\n“No.”\n\nNiel put the cup down harshly and glared at the man.\n\n“What are you after here, Niel?”\n\n“Having a father, to start with.”\n\n“You have one,” Jarod said through gritted teeth.\n\n“He lied to me!” Niel was up, hand on the table, and in Jarod’s face. “For eighteen fucking years, he kept you a secret. If I hadn’t been dying, he would have taken this to his grave. How the fuck do I trust him?”\n\n“That is something you and Steward are going to have to work out. And sit down, before people wonder why they can’t hear you scream.”\n\n“You can’t send me away.” Niel crossed his arms over his chest as he dropped into the seat. \n\nJarod narrowed his eyes. “I’m pretty sure that if I tell that badger to take you away, he will.”\n\n“Damn it, there are things only you can tell me.”\n\n“Ask the Cuevet,” he replied dismissively. “They know the stuff you need to know.”\n\n“Stop acting like I don’t mean anything to you!”\n\n“I’m not acting, Niel,” Jarod said in exasperation. “I am not who you think I am.”\n\n“You’re my father!”\n\nThe raccoon ran a hand over his face. “Stewart is your father, not me.”\n\n“Fine! He’s your grandson, so I’m your great-grandson. Don’t fucking act like we aren’t family!” He was up again, but dropped back in the seat before Jarod told him to.\n\n“Stewart didn’t consider me family until he needed something from me.” He wet his napkin with the remnant of his coffee and used it to wipe the blood off the table. “We are not family, Niel. Go make your own.”\n\nNiel glowered at the older, young-looking raccoon as he signaled for the check.\n\n“Look Niel. You have all of time to come to terms with me not being interested in being part of your life. Right now, go home. I’m sure this is as much of a shock to your parents as it is to you. Go to your father and your mother so they know you’re okay.”\n\n“My mom’s dead,” Niel replied, making the statement an accusation.\n\n“I’m sorry, Niel.” Jarod sighed. “I’m sorry, but that is something else you’ll have to learn to get used to.”",
"writing_bbcode_parsed": "Niel watched the countryside pass by. Unending vineyards and fields, and trees beyond them, with clusters of houses here and there.
After ten minutes of what his driver, a badger who kept glancing at him in the rear-view mirror, said would be a thirty-minute ride, Niel couldn’t believe how much there was. Back in Minnesota, there’d hardly be anything worth of note in that timeframe once he left the greater Twin City area.
His phone buzzed, and he glanced at it. Another text from Stewart. It made eight, along with four calls Niel hadn’t picked up. He pockets it without checking it, just like he hadn’t looked at the previous texts or listened to the messages. His dad waited eighteen fucking years to tell Niel about Jarod. Niel wasn’t particularly interested in what he had to say now, and if it was questions about his trip, the man could damned well have enough patience to wait until Niel was back in the US to get his answers.
The driver glanced at the rear-view mirror again. “Jacques as said you need sex to live.” The accent was thick, and the grin made the intent clear.
“Passed that bridge when you had me sit in the back seat,” Niel replied dismissively. The whole thing had felt like he was some official being picked up for some meeting, with the badger opening the door for him and gesturing to the back seat. That he kept looking in Thomas’s direction showed who the show was for and hadn’t made the best impression on him.
Not that he’d say no to sex, but all the driver did, instead of…stopping the car and inviting Niel to join him in the front, was muttering in French.
So he probably didn’t want the sex all that badly.
* * * * *
“What is this?” Niel whispered, watching the picturesque houses with whitewashed walls and exposed beams they passed. “A movie set?”
Around them, it looked at what he imagined an early century French town looked like, built on the occasional foreign movie from history class and his own watching, after the teacher talked about Louis de Funès, a late twentieth century comedian.
The road was wide, and they were the only car on it. Outside the town there had been a farm tractor, and in it everyone walked or biked. Every third building seemed to be an open terrace cafes and more people were seated there, enjoying the day, than working. There was a sense of maintained age to the buildings, and everyone smiled, looked at peace.
It was surreal.
“We are ere.” The car came to a stop. “Numeros quarante-trois is la maison la.” The badger pointed.
Forty-three Rue du Boucher was a two-story house with a whitewash that was more gray and had had the exposed beams replaced recently. Niel was out of the car before the driver had lowered his hand.
He knocked, then wiped his hands on his pants, realizing he had no idea how to open the conversation. ‘Hi, I’m your son,’ felt too cold to start with.
The door opened, and Niel closed his mouth on the ready greeting. Instead of Jarod, a girl of not more than ten looked up at him and asked something in French.
Fuck, what if no one spoke English here?
“Is Jarod Irvine here?” he stammered, trying to come up with an alternate way to get himself understood if that got him a blank look. Instead, he got a roll of the eyes before she walked back in, leaving the door open and yelled something.
The only word he understood was American, in spite of the French pronunciation. Not long after, another raccoon was at the door. This one, a man in his mid-twenties at most. He was the twin of the picture Stewart had shown him of Jarod.
The man looked Niel up and down, and his expression turned into a mix of tired and annoyed. “What do you want?” There was no accent, and while the tone could pass as neutral, the words were clipped.
Before he could lay into the man about never checking up on him, the girl came back into view, hanging back in the entryway, but watching attentively.
He swallowed his anger. “I would have liked you to have called that messaging service you gave my dad, your grandson, as a contact number, by now.”
The man muttered something. Not in English or French, or even German; the tone was angry.
“Jarod?” a woman asked, then appeared in the hallway with a girl of five holding onto her leg as if she was afraid someone would steal her mother away. Jarod joined her as she asked more questions Niel didn’t understand. He said a few things softly enough Niel wouldn’t have understood, even if he’d spoken in English, as he escorted her back. He returned before Niel could wonder if he’d been abandoned there again, taking a jacket from a rack and putting it on.
Jarod closed the door and rounded on Niel. “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but if you’re here so I’ll fuck you, leave.”
“Where the fuck do you get off thinking that’s what I’m here for?” Niel snapped. “Hasn’t it occurred to you I might want to know who my father is?”
“Stewart is your father, not me.”
“Bullshit! It’s your DNA in my veins. If you weren’t interested in dealing with me, you shouldn’t have gotten involved in my family’s affairs.”
“Steward was fucking begging me to give him a kid.”
“Well, ta-da! Here I fucking am. And because you had to do that, there are things I have to know. Things that would have been fucking nice if you’d been around to teach me about before they were dumped on me.”
The raccoon rolled his eyes. “What you’re asking about isn’t sunshine and puppies. You don’t want to get involved in that. That consequences are—”
“Oh, fuck off with the consequences. They’ve already happened. So now you’re going to explain the whole fucking thing to me.”
Jarod stared. “What are you talking about?”
It was Niel’s turn to roll his eyes. “The ‘need sex to live’ thing. What else did you think I was talking about?”
Jarod opened his mouth, closed it. He shook his head and tried again, only to look around. Their shouting had attracted a crowd, and Jarod’s ears went red before folding back. He straightened them and spoke in French, motioning to Niel, and got chuckles out of them before they went back to their day. If not for how red the ears still were, Niel could have thought he’d been made the butt of a joke.
“We’re lucky neither of us mentioned magic. Although I had to explain your need sex to live comment as you never getting enough.” Jarod sighed. “Let’s take this someplace we can have a modicum of privacy.”
Niel nodded and motioned to the badger, still by the car, to indicate he and Jarod were heading off together.
* * * * *
There wasn’t a cafe every third house. The closest one to Jarod’s house was a few minutes’ walk. He ordered something from the buck behind the counter, then led Niel to a booth in the back, away from the sunlight bathing most of the room through the large bay window. Niel’s driver entered as they sat and took a table by the door.
He was almost as annoyed at him as he was at Jarod. He’d made it clear he wanted him to stay by the car. He didn’t need a babysitter.
As Niel opened his mouth, the buck placed sandwiches before each of them, along with a large mug of something the color of hot chocolate, but that smelled of coffee. Instead of starting on his explanation, Jarod ate.
“Eat,” the raccoon said, between bites.
“I’m not hungry,” Niel snapped.
“One, keep your voice down. If you draw attention to us, there’s nothing I can do about it. Two, this is a cafe, we come here to eat. Do that, so no one starts wondering what we’re doing back here. You have no idea how weird people get when they start noticing things like you not going to the shitter anymore.”
“Maybe you never had to deal with it,” Niel said through gritted teeth, “being the first and all that, but if I eat anything right now, it’s come out explosively. So if anyone asks, tell them I’m too fucking pissed to eat.” Niel cut the end of his index finger. “As for being noticed.” He traced the cone of silence phrase. Olavo had warned him against using blood, but Niel wasn’t reaching in his pants in a public place. “Now I can scream at you as much as I want and no one will hear me.”
Jarod looked at the sigils and deflated. “How did it happen?”
“How do you think?” Niel snapped.
“I’m trying to understand, Niel. Believe it or not, I have no idea what happened to you right now.”
Niel let out a breath and eyed the mug. He’d drank the broth with nothing more than eventually having to go as a result, and he needed something to do while he figured out how to explain things. The content was scalding coffee with too much milk for his taste.
“There was a party. I had sex with a guy who turned out to be related to the Survivors.”
Jarod shook his head, the protest clear, but then looked at the blood on the tabletop. “I didn’t know that could happen,” he stated, as if that absolved him. “When did you find out?”
Niel inhaled. “Last weekend. My football—” Jarod rolled his eyes. “—coach has this stupid tradition where he forces the team to take part in No Nut November. In spite of the cock cage, I managed to have sex until he was able to cock block me during an away game. That left me tired, and the next day I figured I’d caught a stomach bug or something. Because of that, I was too tired to have sex.”
He paused and sipped. “That made me feel worse, so no sex. I passed out in the halls the next day and woke up in the hospital to doctors baffled by the blood work. And before you freak out, the local Society family is taking care of that. Dad put two and two together and brought me to a friend of his. We had sex, I felt better. After that, he showed me a picture of you.”
A longer sip. The drink wasn’t that bad after all. “I was pretty sure you hadn’t been one of the guys I’d fucked with at the party.” Niel smiled. “But it was wild, so I checked with the guys who organized it. They’re Society. That’s when I found out one of them has a connection to the Survivors. I had sex with him.”
“Does your father know you’re here?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Niel looked at Jarod over his cup as he sipped it. “Do you?”
“Does Stewart know you’re here?” Jarod corrected pointedly.
“Yes… actually, no. He thinks I’m in Argentina.”
“Why would he think you’re there?”
“That’s where the guy’s from. When he told his father what happened, the Cuevet asked to see me.”
“Why?”
Niel shrugged. “I never got an answer to that. The Patriarch freaked out when he found out I’m your son. Did you even stick around long enough to find out if you’d had a boy or a girl?” he demanded before Jarod asked a question.
“I’ve never had a boy before. I didn’t expect this to be a first.”
“So, you’d have hung around if you’d known?” Niel tried to keep hope from building.
“No. Steward asked for a kid. I gave him one, and I left.”
“My dad just let you bang my mom?” Niel demanded.
“It’s the twenty-first century, Niel. Not the nineteenth,” Jarod replied with a chuckle. “There’s this thing called artificial insemination.”
“I thought you had to put it in to have a kid.” Somewhere in one of the memories the bat gave him, that had been explained to him.
“And so does everyone else.” Jarod smirked. “Won’t it be fun when they find out?” his amusement died. “On second thought, don’t tell them. I have no interest in disappearing again.”
“Oh? Disappearing on me was enough for you?”
“It wasn’t about you, Niel,” Jarod replied sharply. “I didn’t leave you. I was never there. I wasn’t to be part of your life. Stewart never said it, but I could see it on his face the entire time I was there. This fear that if I stayed, it would strain his marriage.”
“Fine. That wasn’t about me. You weren’t kept appraised of what happened, so you didn’t care to get involved. Fine. I’m here now. So how about you get involved?”
“No.”
Niel put the cup down harshly and glared at the man.
“What are you after here, Niel?”
“Having a father, to start with.”
“You have one,” Jarod said through gritted teeth.
“He lied to me!” Niel was up, hand on the table, and in Jarod’s face. “For eighteen fucking years, he kept you a secret. If I hadn’t been dying, he would have taken this to his grave. How the fuck do I trust him?”
“That is something you and Steward are going to have to work out. And sit down, before people wonder why they can’t hear you scream.”
“You can’t send me away.” Niel crossed his arms over his chest as he dropped into the seat.
Jarod narrowed his eyes. “I’m pretty sure that if I tell that badger to take you away, he will.”
“Damn it, there are things only you can tell me.”
“Ask the Cuevet,” he replied dismissively. “They know the stuff you need to know.”
“Stop acting like I don’t mean anything to you!”
“I’m not acting, Niel,” Jarod said in exasperation. “I am not who you think I am.”
“You’re my father!”
The raccoon ran a hand over his face. “Stewart is your father, not me.”
“Fine! He’s your grandson, so I’m your great-grandson. Don’t fucking act like we aren’t family!” He was up again, but dropped back in the seat before Jarod told him to.
“Stewart didn’t consider me family until he needed something from me.” He wet his napkin with the remnant of his coffee and used it to wipe the blood off the table. “We are not family, Niel. Go make your own.”
Niel glowered at the older, young-looking raccoon as he signaled for the check.
“Look Niel. You have all of time to come to terms with me not being interested in being part of your life. Right now, go home. I’m sure this is as much of a shock to your parents as it is to you. Go to your father and your mother so they know you’re okay.”
“My mom’s dead,” Niel replied, making the statement an accusation.
“I’m sorry, Niel.” Jarod sighed. “I’m sorry, but that is something else you’ll have to learn to get used to.”",
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