angel | • d a s h d a s h

It was a ridiculously cold day. Arden Dasher couldn’t believe that winter had only just begun. She wasn’t looking forward to the big coats, chilly fingers and dark days that came with winter. The brunette had always been more of a summer girl; she thrived in the sun, hiking or camping under the stars. Magic only went so far when it came to doing all of that sort of thing in winter – sure, you could charm your tent to be warm, but you couldn’t charm the sun to come out. Her skin was happiest when it was lightly freckled and sun-kissed.

Dash hadn’t seen the sun in days. Rain lashed relentlessly at the windows; it had been raining non-stop for almost a week now, and yet inside William’s house, it was warm and cosy. She had that to be thankful for, at least. She was curled, warm mug of tea cupped with both hands, on his couch, wrapped in a blanket and warmed with magic. It was nice here; safe. The smell of sweet cupcakes baking in the oven filled the entire house. The Dasher’s had done some cooking together, and they’d been playing cards while the things cooked.

“How are they?” called the brunette, taking a small sip of her still-too-hot tea. The bell had gone off a moment ago, and her brother was checking the cupcakes. She was hungry; she’d been here for about forty minutes or so, but had skipped breakfast this morning. Dash flicked the tip of her tongue over her lower lip, where she’d tried to burn herself with her tea. Despite the charms to keep the house warm, the tip of her nose was still cold.

It was always nice to come here, though she didn’t do it nearly often enough. Dash made sure to keep in contact with her brothers, but the three of them didn’t always have matching timetables, and it was difficult to make regular times to see each other. There were always scheduling problems. Dash glanced down as Dave, Will’s old Irish Wolfhound shifted his head into her lap. He’d fallen asleep on the couch about ten minutes ago.

Will loved winter.

He loved big coats, chilly fingers and the long, dark days. His home was always warm, though. Decorated in a minimalist style with scrubbed floors, leather sofas, striking art, everything was cream with hints of navy blue. When he'd moved in not too long ago, he'd had to make sacrifices. He'd shifted things around around so he could have a bigger, brighter kitchen. He didn't regret a thing. The rain was pelting against the windows, drowned out by the sounds of gentle, folksy-type music that drifted in on the aroma of baking cakes.

Will wasn't stupid. He knew there was a reason Arden was here. She didn't need one to visit but he was the only one out of their family who truly understood her special talent. He often thought it was more of a curse. Her visions caused her nothing but stress and upset. Her break up with Sindri, the foresight of her strange hippie blonde friend's engagement ending, he couldn't see them bringing her any type of joy. She was suffering and he didn't know how he could help her. Apart from tea and sympathy. He was very good at that.

"Good," he said brightly as he took the tray out of the oven and rested it on the side, wiping his hands on a stripy tea towel and took off his apron. It was nice to be cooking with Arden again. They used to do it a lot together as kids when she'd had a particularly awful "nightmare" as their father had called it. Gingerly, he picked up two still warm cupcakes and tipped them onto a plate, cursing as he burned his fingers.

He carried the cakes into the living room and sat on the arm of the sofa, holding the plate out towards her. "They're still too hot to decorate but give it twenty minutes and we can get cracking." Will was dressed casually in a pair of snug fitting jeans, woolly socks and a cream coloured fair isle jumper that their grandmother had knitted for him. His dark eyes blinked as he laughed, low and deep at Dave, his aging ginormous dog who was curled around Dash, as though the was still a puppy. "You can push him off if you want to," he said, nodding to the dog. "He's got a perfectly good bed, he just doesn't use it. He much prefers to sit on and crush people." He sighed fondly. Dave didn't do too well in puppy obedience classes. He looked at Arden for a long moment. "Everything okay?"

Dash took a little sniff of the air as he brought them over, not that she needed to. The whole house smelt like beautiful baking cake. “They smell amazing.” Dash could cook, but she wasn’t usually one for baking. Call it pragmatic of her, but she’d always been better at dinners than sweets. Will had always outstripped her in that area. The brunette smiled as he gave her the option of kicking his dog off of the couch. After Sindri had turned up at her doorstep a few months ago to tell her that their dog had died, Dash had looked at every passing pup with wistfulness in her gaze.

“Oh, he’s fine.” Dash knew her brother didn’t have a problem with his dog being on the couch. The piece of furniture was covered in dog fur. She scratched behind one of the old dog’s ears affectionately, smiling when the creature nuzzled into her a little more. “And I’m fine too.” She smiled politely, nodding at the spare seat beside her, urging her brother to sit down. When he did so, Dash shifted to place her mug of tea on the coffee table, then rested her head against his shoulder.

“I miss you, you know,” she told him softly. Her family was so unaffectionate, so cold. They loved each other, she supposed, but the only member of the family she’d ever felt comfortable with was Will. Her other brother, Elijah, had always been more distant. Neither of them were close with their father like she was.

"Well, you did a very good job," Will said with a sunny smile. As gestured, he sat down. He folded his tall frame into the rather cozy sofa, one arm draped across the back and his long legs crossed casually at the ankle as he stretched out. For such a large man, he had delicate table manners. With care, he peeled back the paper casing and took a small bite. "s'really good," he mumbled as he nodded to the cake. Work still needed to be done to them and like any self respecting modern man, his kitchen was bursting at the seams with all sorts of gadgets. Most of them Muggle. He lived in a Muggle area and it made sense for his neighbours to hear things like an electric whisk or a hoover, even if he had trouble with them.

His big brown eyes watched her for a moment. He didn't like the word fine. As a writer, it wasn't really a word. It was bland and uninformative. It didn't tell him anything other than she thought she was coping. Will was sure that Arden was. She was a sweet girl but unfortunately, she was sometimes guarded. He didn't blame it on her. He blamed it on their upbringing. She'd been through a lot and it still didn't sit well with him that he was away for most of her issues. He nodded as he focused on the slow ticking clock, rearranging her blanket to cover her properly as though he was on auto pilot.

Will smiled gently. "I know," he said softly, shifting his arm to drape it across the younger girl's shoulder and ruffled her long dark hair affectionately. "I miss you, too." It was a quiet but honest remark. His and Arden's relationship had always been his strongest one. He'd never had any issue blowing off dates to come to her aid if she needed him. Arden had outgrown both of her brothers and her father but yet again, Will always felt somehow involved in her life.

"You know, you're welcome to visit any time you like. I have a spare bedroom if you ever want to stay, especially if your strange blonde friend is still...you know, strange," Will frowned. "Does she still do that drumming circle thing with the face paint with those people who believe in fairies?" He asked with his eyebrows arched. "Anyway," he ploughed on. "This "fine" thing that you are. Are you good fine or bad fine?" He asked, sneakily feeding Dave a small piece of his cupcake as he waited for an answer.

Ever the humble girl, Dash waved his compliment away with humility. “We both know it was you,” she said teasingly. Only she wasn’t teasing at all. Dash liked receiving praise, but only when she deserved it. The brunette poked an arm out of the blankets to take a cupcake too. She set about peeling the paper methocially, taking small, delicate bites. Dash noticed when Will adjusted her blanket, but she didn’t say anything.

“Oh, leave Ruari alone,” She said with a half-smile. This time she was teasing. Ruari was into a lot of strange things that Dash wasn’t into, but fairies were the least of them. She’d once caught her blonde friend meditating in front of a cup of ice to try and turn the ice into some kind of happy crystals. Dash was a practical girl, so none of that muggle spirituality stuff sat very well with her. If Ruari wanted crystals, she could have just used her wand to do it.

Dash turned her pretty hazel eyes to her brother when he spoke again. Good fine, or bad fine? He was intuitive, just like she was. She couldn’t help but smile a little, just for him. “Good fine, I think,” she answered with a soft shrug. Whatever was thrown at her, Dash would endure. She was stronger than she looked, and very constant. After a moment, the girl sighed, then leant back in the couch. Her gaze dropped to the dog’s face in her lap.

“Can you tell me something, Will; Do you think I’ll ever fall in love again?” it was a simple question, or perhaps a complicated question full of subtext asked in a simple way.

Will scoffed. As requested, he let it drop. Her other friend was very pretty but he couldn't recall her name. Alice? No, something more exotic. Alyssa? A-Something, regardless. Not that he'd ever do anything. He was confident, just not with romance. He was an old fashioned man in a modern world and modern women wanted modern men. It seemed that the worse men treated women, the more they seemed to like him. He had an example. He was in a bookshop earlier that week. He politely held the door open for a lady, when a man rudely pushed him out of the way. The woman didn't thank Will, her eyes were lingering on the rude stranger.

Her question made him pause.

He frowned at her gently. He didn't want to lie to her but he also didn't want to mislead her. "I dunno," he finally settled on. Will split love down into three parts; love, big love and great love. Love, someone gets over it in two months. Big love, someone gets over in two years and great love? Well, great love changes a person's life. Will had never been in great love. He'd had a brush with love but looking back, he imagined it was more an infatuation and he came out of it relatively unscathed.

"I think it depends on if you're ready." Will had only met Sindri a handful of times. Usually, when he was with Arden. "It's not something you can force. If it'll happen, it'll happen and we'll just have to believe that it will." With a smile, he squeezed her shoulder. "I'm confident you'll find somebody else." Maybe she needed someone different from Sindri. He bit his tongue, unwilling to say that he thought her ex was a fine man. Arden seemed okay and that was without him so he'd speak no more of her past. "Why?" He asked gently. "Are you ready for another relationship?"

“I’m too lonely not to be ready,” Dash teased, too much truth in her words for a smile. When she’d been with Sindri, the brunette had more or less been adopted into his family. She’d started spending holidays at Trickett households rather than going home to her own sad house. She might as well have been Arden Trickett, or Dash Trickett as far as that family were concerned. Now that the sting of losing Sindri was two years into fading away, it was becoming more and more obvious that the family were what she missed the most. Warm, welcome.

Much like this afternoon with her brother, but multiplied a thousand times over. The brunette took another bite of her cupcake, swallowing before leading in to her next train of thought. “I’ve been dreaming,” she told him, not needing to explain any further. The girl thought of Niska – another outsider with a strange gift. He’d made her feel much less alone. “I’ve been having dreams… Vague ones, about love and lust and… connection.” Dash shrugged. Sometimes she was lucky enough to get full-blown visions, in screamingly high definition. Visions that burned their way into her skin, visions that lingered after she woke and were imprinted on the back of her eyelids.

These ones were the more common kind. The memory of a whisper of a thrill. The sensation of lips at a neck. The shadow of a feeling. “They’re probably about you, or Ruari or someone else entirely,” The girl thought of Niska again for a moment, before adding, “But they’re very enticing.”

She'd been dreaming.

Will shuffled, a little uncomfortably. While he was interested, he'd only ever had her recount the bad kind of dreams. They type that left her screaming and crying. The type that affected her so badly, she wasn't feeling herself for a number of weeks. The first thing he'd done was look for a cure but he quickly realised that there wasn't one. There were various things to take the edge of, like potions and sedatives but unfortunately, Arden was at the whim of her gift.

"Oh," he said, frowning. "Have you seen anything? Or is is just a glimpse of a feeling?" He asked. The idea of his little sister catching a glimpse of him made him blanch. Nobody wanted that visual. "Can you feel it?" He asked. He'd come to the conclusion that if Arden could literally feel things with her hands or on her skin, then her visions were about her. Maybe he'd misunderstood. He'd catalogued everything she'd told him, trying meticulously to find a link. Will sincerely hoped they didn't involve him. He didn't want Arden to be subjected to snippets of him entwined with someone. It'd be gross.

"Enticing, hm?" He echoed with a lopsided grin, wiggling her eyebrows at her. "Did you have someone in mind?" He asked. He sometimes wondered if Arden received clues about the people in her dreams. A letter corresponding to a first name, a smell, a momentary look at a landmark that linked the person to a city or country. "That means something good is coming to you," he said as he chewed the last bit of his cupcake and shrugged. "At least you have some sort of warning. I'd like to know if I was going to meet someone nice. I'd completely alter my personality and become someone who stood a chance~"

Dash laughed, “No, they weren’t all like that. I mean, it’s so vague I can barely tell what’s happening. It’s not sex, or it’s not just sex.” The girl looked at her brother. They’d never really talked about sex, not in any sort of intimate way. They weren’t the kind of siblings who shared those things. “It’s like… the sensation of lips at your neck. Or the feeling that you’re with someone who cares about you. Little whispers, faint memories. I think that’s the best way to describe them.” She shrugged slightly.

“I saw Ruari and Hal together months before anything happened,” she admitted, giving him a sidelong glance. The girl reached for her tea again, keen for a momentary excuse not to speak. She still remembered the smell of patchouli, so much more vivid and defined than it was in actual reality. She still remembered the touch of fingertips on skin, lips pressed to necks. By now she was used to the weirdness of her gift, but basically experiencing her best friend and her ex boyfriend’s cousin getting intimate was a little weirder than usual. It hadn’t helped that Ruari had still been engaged to someone else at the time.

Dash sipped at her tea. She’d seen all sorts of things in her dreams, but the ones she’d been having lately were so vague and unclear that they were almost like very intense normal dreams. Dash knew better. She knew which dreams were dreams, and which ones were dreams. “It’s not necessarily about me,” she clarified, “It’s probably just Ruari and Hal again.” The girl tried and failed to keep a slightly jealous tone from her voice. She adored Ruari and was very happy for her friend, but it was difficult not to be jealous. She missed the cuddles, the reliability of a relationship. She missed the sweet exchanges. She missed the sex.

Will glanced at his sister promptly. Was she lying to him? He trusted her completely but he could understand if the feeling wasn't reciprocated. Perhaps she was leaving out details, fearful of his reaction but he was happy to listen. It must be odd, accidentally playing privy to someone else's relationship. Dash sounded like she could see intimate things, she could feel them, too. It must be a confusing, unsettling onslaught to her sanity.

He snorted, unwilling to play this game. He sipped at his tea, his big dark eyes watching his lazy dog happily snoring away. Will had made a point not to meddle in Arden's affairs. He was, of course, always close. In the background, playing the menacing older brother routine perfectly. He hadn't expected her to tell him anything. The inner workings of love were often discussed by friends. It didn't help that he was chronically single, through no fault of his own. Arden's gift might be useful if she saw someone in his future but he never asked. The writer was always worried that he'd accidentally exploit her and turn her into some sort of fortune teller at a carnival called Madame Celestina.

"Probably," Will replied but he knew better. He had a feeling that if they were just about her friend and her boyfriend, she wouldn't have brought it up. He turned to face her, folding his long legs beneath him, his large frame taking up most of the sofa as he watched her. "Are you resisting?" He asked, unusually candid as he smiled gently. "Dash," he said gently, using her nickname like he never did. "If it's going to happen to you, it's going to happen. Don't feel bad about it," he said, nudging her thigh with his knee. "It'll be Christmas soon," he said brightly. "Maybe that person you can sense might be your kiss underneath the mistletoe."

Dash looked over as he used her nickname, scrunching her nose a little to show her displeasure. It felt too strange, coming from him. Unfamiliar. Besides, if anyone should be called “Dash” it should be him, right? Will was the oldest Dasher sibling, and Arden was the youngest. She remembered Aline picking that nickname in highschool for her. She remembered wondering why no one called either of her brothers that. It just seemed obvious.

“Maybe,” she replied, smiling and waving a hand vaguely. The brunette woman snuggled a little closer to her brother, absentmindedly patting the dog in her lap. Her thoughts inevitably returned to the men in her life. Sindri, Niska, her brothers. Hal, on occasion. Leifr, a while ago. They were all good men. Strong, good men. She thought about Ruari and Hal and how she’d felt simultaneously jealous and nostalgic when the two of them had gotten back together.

Dash didn’t know what she wanted. Her father kept reminding her that she was young, and that she had time to do things. She knew that she had time to make decisions and mistakes and to build relationships and a career, but it all felt so imminent. She felt like she needed to start making decisions now. If she didn’t start soon, the woman was sure she’d miss out on some important step in the entire building process. What did she want to do with her career? Study more? Work somewhere new?

“How about your mistletoe?” she prompted, feeling inclined to listen rather than speak at the moment.

"Well what ever is it," he told her briskly, "It's not worth stressing over too much." Typical Will; he had the British stiff upper lip down an art. The thing was, their parents had cared for them well but he found herself stepping in to bridge the gap. He wasn't complaining. He was desperate to be a part of each of his sibling's lives in some way. Elijah had him on the bench for years but sometimes, Arden still let him in. He was thankful for that. He'd learned to be close but not too close, far enough for independence but still within reaching distance.

The Dashers were a small family, so birthdays and Christmases were always cosy. He'd always liked that. Will usually went out for New Year but he wasn't sure why. He had plenty of friends, plenty of offers for nights out. The crux of the matter was that Will Dasher was a homebird. He liked nights in with Dave and some wine. He liked working late to the strains of mellow pop music and the warm flicker of candle light. Whatever he lacked in the relationship stance,  he made up for in bettering himself and his small publishing house.

Will pulled a face. "The only person who'll be kissing me under that will be Dave," he said, fondly stroking the straggly fur of the giant dog. "Or Esme." Esme was a sixty four year old woman who still thought she was eighteen. Grey haired and bespeckled, she wore colours even a fourteen year old would question. She had worked in Write Hand Press for a while, when their grandfather was still involved. She'd grown up with it and she was part of the family. She was flamboyant and a little mad. Will was never one to judge. The clients loved her and she got the job done but she was flirty for a pensioner. There had been one to many bum grabs for Will to put it down to being accidental.

"She wants a Christmas party but I'm not keen," he replied as he reclined, sipping at his still-warm tea. "But you know her," he said with a roll of his big and expressive dark eyes. "Resistance is futile. I'm fine with it if everyone wants to come." He'd happily buy some bottles and put out some food. But he was definitely leaving before Esme cracked open the sherry. Will loved a party but he was more the cheese-and-wine-pub-quiz-board-game sort of party guy. He had never been a fan of strobe lighting.

He stole a look at Arden and frowned gently. He'd received an invitation to the Trickett Christmas party and he assumed that she'd been sent one as well. He knew she should go. The Tricketts were more of family to her than her own was. But he also knew that things between her and Sindri weren't right. Will thought she'd done the right thing. If Arden wasn't feeling it, it would be crueler to let things carry on until a point where there was no turning back. "So," he said cheerfully, squeezing her shoulder. "Are you coming here on Christmas Day or --?" He left the question open-ended. Arden wasn't daft. She'd know what he meant.