102 A Family Of Freaks

Ruby's prediction that Flora would be upset when she became an adult and found out the truth about her parents came true. She accused her cousin of being a liar and packed up her things before storming off to who knows where.

Her parting words were "I'm going to find some nice, normal earth fairies! I've had enough of this freaky little family!"

Ruby sobbed about it for weeks and Ash hadn't been able to do much to comfort her. Vesper was still little and in his constant questions phase so every time he asked where Flora was she would burst out crying all over again.

She may not have been Ruby's biological child but the two of them had been together for Flora's entire life minus those few months on the run when she met Ash. She had been the one primarily in charge of raising the younger fairy for most of that time.

Nothing either of the vampires said or did could make her feel better. Vesper couldn't cry physical tears but he wailed alongside his mother in a show of solidarity because seeing her upset made him upset too.

When Ruby finally seemed to pull herself together, Ash couldn't help but wonder if she was actually okay or if it was simply an act. He asked while Vesper was down for the earlier of his two naps and they were in the middle of playing a popular virtual reality video game.

"Are you alright?" he asked bluntly. "Tell the truth."

She sighed heavily and her distraction led to her losing a lot of points. "No but what else can I do? All of my crying has been upsetting Ves and I can't keep doing that to him. He's such a sensitive little guy."

He really was taking his mother's crying spells hard, poor thing. Ash was glad she had snapped out of it for his sake but was worried about her bottling things up. After so many years together he knew she had the tendency to do that when something bothered her.

"I'm sure Flora will come around eventually," he said wisely. "We did raise her after all. She only said those things because she was upset. Once she has some time for the truth to settle in further she should at least come back to visit. She still has my blood seal on her so she will always be able to find us."

Ruby's shoulders slumped. "Yeah. That's true. I just…really hated hearing those things even though I knew they were true. I was selfish keeping that big of a secret from her and we are a family of freaks."

Ash scowled and paused the game, taking off his headset then hers to make his wife look at him. He held her face in his hands and squished her cheeks. Her ruby and amethyst eyes glared at him because of the squeezing but he proceeded anyway. At least he had gotten her attention.

"You did the best you could at the time with a difficult situation. And we aren't freaks; we simply fall outside the norm."

"Outside the norm? We aren't even in the same universe as the norm!" she complained. "Hearing all of that from Flora was hard enough; what are we supposed to do when we hear it from Vesper too?"

Ash didn't know what to say to that because he had worried about the same thing. There was a decent chance he would want to go be around other vampires someday and they might not accept him if they knew the truth about his birth since they tended to be die-hard traditionalists.

"…we'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

Ruby pried his hands off of her face and slumped forward so it was buried in his shoulder. "I'm tired, Ash. Nobody else in the fae community around here knows how different we are because I didn't want us to end up ostracized but we can't hide it forever, can we?"

"Technically we can if you use your glamour to look like a vampire," he reasoned. "But you would have to explain to Vesper why you temporarily don't seem like you."

She groaned into the sleeve of his shirt, all words abandoning her. There was nothing else he could really do but hold her and that only lasted until their son woke up from his nap and demanded his mother read to him.

Ash wished that things had been different with Flora—he loved her too, though not quite as deeply as Ruby did—but there wasn't anything he could do about it but wait for her to come home someday. He believed that she would…but had no idea when. It might be one year from now or two hundred. His wife would not be happy if the latter was the case.

===

Decades passed. Vesper's fangs grew in and Ash started teaching him about blood magic. The first thing he did was make the barrier visible and talk to him about blood seals and how each vampire's was unique to them, showing off the one on Ruby's neck to make his point.

The little vampire was absolutely enthralled and picked things up much quicker than anyone Ash had ever met. He couldn't help but wonder if Ruby's mineral control powers had anything to do with this because he was completely useless on his own.

If that was truly the case, it was the only thing Vesper got from his mother. He was a vampire in both constitution and magic. By this point his hair came down to his shoulders and he looked more like Ash every day.

He drank blood, slept during daylight hours, couldn't handle being in the sun, and had night vision among other things. Ash was incredibly proud to have him as a son but liked to think he would have been equally happy with an earth fairy child. Raising Flora had given him experience on that front.

He would have loved any child they were given because it would have been half Ruby and he loved her more than life itself. By all accounts, he had gotten very lucky with his second family.