Jack had known Twi for years, since long before
she had actually been known as Twilight, when she had been twelve and had just
gotten into a fight with one of her classmates over the existence of Santa
Claus. He hadn’t expected her to see him, after all no one else had ever been
able to, no mortals at least, but he had not been able to let the bruised girl
sit and mope about the trouble she was in for fighting back when she had tried
to stop the kids in her class pushing her around.
Aella, which was her real name, had been a tiny
child back then, with wide brown eyes and straight, chestnut brown hair that
reached halfway down her back. All of her classmates had towered over her and
while Aella had been top of her class material, she had never allowed herself
to get there, if only so she could fit in better with the others and try and
make friends even if it never seemed to work.
It was Aella’s need for friendship that had
made Jack take the risk and try and cheer up the small twelve year old,
creating creatures out of the ice he had formed on the windows and letting the
girl play with them before they exploded into snow. Unlike other children her
age, who seemed to grow up too fast these days, Aella had been delighted rather
than freaked out by the icy critters and it had been about when the ice cat she
had been playing with had exploded into snowflakes which had drifted around her
hiding place when she had finally seen him properly.
That had been the start of a long lasting
friendship that had lasted through more than a decade, long past the Age of
Disbelief, when almost all children stopped believing and as such, seeing the
spirits in the world around them, and not changed when Twi had gotten herself a
job and joined the ‘adult world.’
Other than Jack, Aella had not had many friends
until she had started at university, just Keighley, who unlike Aella had
stopped believing years and years ago but was willing to let her friend live in
her fantasy world if she wanted to as long Aella kept up with her school work.
And between Kei and Jack, Aella had started pushing herself again, not fearing
the reactions of her classmates and pushing herself to get the grades she knew
she could achieve.
By the time Twi had reached University, she had
already worked out a way around the problem of no one but her being able to see
Jack, a small, wireless earpiece that was supposedly connected to her phone,
but had never actually received a phone call in its entire life, lived on her
ear, allowing her to talk to Jack without seeming like a crazy person. Not that
Jack was around the entire year. He had duties to do after all and even if he
hadn’t, he was too much of a free spirit to want to stay in one place the
entire year, not to mention when Spring hadn’t been able to shift him, Summer
had chased him away with brilliantly sunny skies and swelteringly hot days.
It had been disconcerting for Jack the first
year Aella had gone to university, when he had been chased away by Summer only
to come back that Winter to find that Aella had not only moved cities, which he
had been expecting since she had warned him about university, but that she had
finally managed to find other friends. Friends who didn’t call her Aella, but
Twilight instead.
His book nerd of a friend hadn’t changed other
than her suddenly increased collection of friends. Twilight, nicknamed after a
certain book obsessed pony in what Jack had thought was a cartoon for little
girls, had welcomed him back with open arms. Though none of her friends had
been able to see him either, they had just assumed that since she was ‘on the
phone’ with him a lot of the time, he was just some boyfriend from back home (a
fact that had embarrassed Twi to no end), they had been the ones to encourage her
to write a book using her ‘rather vivid imagination.’
She had not managed to write that book before
graduation, but she had at least earned her honours degree in her chosen subject,
something that was rather impressive considering that her final term had fallen
in the Spring she and Jack had run into Bloody Bones, aka ‘Tommy Rawhead,’ one
of the Bogeymen who hunted children for sport. It had cost Twi her 2:1 but they
had saved several kidnapped children, something Twi reassured Jack, was much
better than any degree classification she could have gotten.
Without a high classification Twi had moved
back home, looking for a job related to her degree in Creative Writing and
Journalism, even as she returned to her part time job in the local library,
sorting books and helping the school groups when they came every week. It was a
job she loved but one that gave her plenty of time to work on her book since
most people didn’t bother going to the library any more.
Earning just enough to move out of her parents’
house and into a place of her own, which she got at a reduced rent in exchange
for doing the place up, Twi slowly let it fill with books, until she had to
move some of her bookcases down to her basement. Helpfully the attic had a
skylight, which was always left open to allow Jack free access to the house,
and Twi put boards down before putting a camp bed up there. It wasn’t exactly
ideal, but it was somewhere extra for Jack to go when he needed to crash.
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