August 27, 2023

Stella Carrera lives in West Morales, some twenty minutes from Jamie's place. By the time Nathan parks his car in front of Stella's house, it's around six A.M., still dark outside and way earlier than what most people would consider an acceptable time to visit their sibling. But Jamie simply tends to be on a different page than most people. In a whole different library, in fact.

An extradimensional library.

"Again, thanks for coming with me tonight, Nate, and for bringing me here." Jamie unbuckles her seat belt. Pauses. Frowns. "Shit, I can't offer you anything to drink now. I was going to, but..."

"It's fine." Nathan shrugs. "I'll live. We'll just have drinks some other time."

Jamie doesn't look convinced, mulling over this proposal for a few seconds before she lights up, an idea apparently dawning on her. "You still have a couple hours before your shift starts, right? So why don't you come inside with me? I'm sure Stella has coffee or tea or anything else we'd like to have."

Nathan does have time, but...

"You're inviting me into someone else's house for coffee. At six on a Sunday morning."

It's Jamie's turn to shrug. "Stella still owes me like thousands of dollars, so I reckon I can visit whenever I want, with whoever I want."

Oh, what the hell. She has a point and Stella deserves it. Anyone callous enough to try and swindle their younger sister out of their hard-earned money can't count on much sympathy from Nathan. On top of that, he doesn't have anything better to do, he's thirsty and he wants to see how this goes down. How will Stella react to their arrival and what even is it that's so important she wanted to talk to Jamie in person?

Nathan knows all of this is technically none of his business, but he can't deny his inner gossip girl wants all the juicy details. So if Jamie's serious about this, he's in.

"Alright," he says, unbuckling his own seat belt. "I think I still have an hour to spare."

"Awesome!" Jamie looks very pleased with this development as they make their way to Stella's modest suburban home together. She rings the doorbell, the sound so grating in Nathan's ears that, for a second there, he almost does feel sorry for Stella.

Almost.

They wait; the door in front of them doesn't budge. They stand there staring at it for two minutes at the very least and Nathan wonders if Stella managed to sleep through that horrid noise or if she's just ignoring her visitors, stubbornly staying in bed while willing them to leave. But then, just when Nathan's beginning to think this was a waste of time, the door swings open.

Nathan has met Stella Carrera only once, at Jamie's twenty-fourth birthday party a month and a half ago; he doesn't like parties much, but had stopped by briefly because he knew Jamie would appreciate it and made the woman's acquaintance there. Their conversation had been short, unremarkable, and, overall, a little like pulling teeth.

If Stella's looks now are anything to go by, any conversation they'll be having today won't be all that different.

The woman stands in her doorway in a haze of sleepy confusion she hasn't entirely shaken off yet, sporting an impressive just rolled out of bed look. Her long, dark brown hair is a tangled mess and the old sweatpants and t-shirt she's wearing seem hastily slipped into more than anything. Crossing her arms, she gives off exasperation in waves. Nathan almost feels a little intimidated, but that's also in part because he remembers Stella makes a living as a pathologist's assistant, and anyone who can perform an autopsy, in his humble opinion, is a little scary.

"Good morning, Jamie." Stella squints,  barely suppressing a yawn. "And good morning, guy who's always hanging around Jamie. Has either one of you spared a glance at the clock lately?"

Nathan resists the urge to protest against the title Stella's bestowing on him, because come on. Come on. When they met at that party, he only stuck around Jamie so much because he didn't know anyone else there. He does have a life of his own, please and thank you, and the jab strikes him as unfair. Maybe he looks too shabby for Stella's taste or maybe it's the fact his neutral expression makes him look like a perpetually irritated douchebag, but Nathan detects a subtle hostility in the way she regards him, as if Jamie pulled some stray dog out of a gutter and brought it home without a word of explanation.

(Which may, in fact, be slightly too true for comfort.)

Either way, if Stella really does hate his guts for some reason, Nathan's delighted to announce that the feeling is incredibly mutual.

Jamie ignores the clock question in style. "Rise and shine, Stel," is all she says with a wicked grin. "It's a brand new day!"

Stella's risen, alright, but the shining part is still a work in progress. "Let's try this again. Why are you even awake at this hour?"

"We were shooting a video about this necromancy ritual, but we didn't manage to summon any spirits," Jamie elaborates. "Then we got chased through the woods by this creepy deer, though I guess maybe it wasn't actually a deer? Anyway, we were in the neighbourhood, so..."

Nothing special, really. Just regular Sunday morning stuff.

Stella blinks five times, sloth-like. "Right. Of course. And then you thought, surely Stella's completely prepared to host visitors at six A.M.?"

"I got your text," Jamie defends, "and you told me to come over as soon as possible, which is exactly what I did. So what's the problem? You're not angry, are you? I am your favourite sister."

"You're my only sister."

"Favourite by default! Can we come in now? I'm ready to talk if you are."

Stella looks like she's counting to ten in her head, or fifteen, or maybe two hundred. Nathan's really struggling not to chuckle while Jamie stares Stella down, her most innocent smile plastered on her face.

Apparently realising she's not going to win this battle and that she might as well get it all over with, Stella relents. She steps aside to allow Jamie and Nathan to come in. "Alright, fine, fine. Just know that if you want coffee, you're going to have to make it yourself. I don't think I'm in the mood for any constructive criticism on my coffeemaking prowess."

"Oh, It's not that I dislike your coffee," Jamie replies as she walks in with Nathan in tow, innocent smile still very much present. "I actually think it's impressive how well you get it to taste like mud."

She leaves Stella looking so utterly aghast that Nathan has to work his hardest not to burst out laughing; awkwardness aside, this situation is priceless and he wouldn't have wanted to miss it for the world. Jamie also does make great coffee, so within a couple minutes, he thinks as they venture further into the house, he'll consider himself a happy man.

Stella Carrera's living room, he notes as he enters it, looks surprisingly cozy. The living room is more colourful than he would've expected—a little vintage, messy in a fashionable kind of way. There's a spacious bookcase filled to the brim with books of all sorts dominating one of the walls. Nathan, whose most significant interaction with a book concerned a grimoire written in a language he couldn't even read, immediately feels intellectually inferior.

He feels even more intimidated upon realising Jamie's disappeared into the kitchen to make coffee and he's alone in the living room with her lousy sister.

"Nice house," he tries in a half-hearted attempt to make conversation with Stella, to fill the uncomfortable silence Jamie left in her wake. He doesn't need to like Stella and she doesn't need to like him, but Jamie, by some miracle, likes them both, so the least he can do is put in a bit of effort. A very, very slight bit of effort.

"Thanks." Stella still regards him with that look of disdain and vague mistrust, like Nathan's little more than a piece of gum under her shoe. "We met at Jamie's party last month, didn't we? What did you say your name was? Nate?"

"Nathan," Nathan instantly corrects, because who the hell does this woman think she is?

"Nathan. Okay. And what is it you do again?"

Nathan may not be involved in any shady practices anymore, but his stomach still churns when he's hit with that question. "I've spent most of my life making a living selling addictive substances," he replies cryptically, which is, in fact, the truth.

"He means he works at Dunkin' Donuts!" Jamie translates this bit of Nathanese from the kitchen, her words chased by a clattering noise that makes both Stella and Nathan cringe. It's followed by the hasty assertion that chill, nothing broke! and Nathan is certain Stella's mental count inches closer and closer to thousand as they speak.

"Sugary foods," Nathan says. "It's very addictive stuff, sugar."

"Right," Stella replies, still looking far too judgmental for comfort, and though Nathan's getting used to her inexplicably hostile attitude towards him and tries very hard not to let it bother him much, it is starting to get on his nerves. He thinks about his current job, the one he left behind for it, and can't help but feel like maybe Stella's seeing right through him. Like she knows he used to be a criminal, like his past is scribbled all over his face for her to read, a residual stain on his person not too different from his magic scar.

Of course it's impossible for Stella to know about the questionable life of crime he's lived and she can hardly judge him in her ignorance, but the mere thought of her seeing his sins reflected in his entire being terrifies Nathan, anyway. If she can see it, that renders his past far more inescapable than he wants to imagine it is, and if that's true, all Nathan's doing to leave it behind might just be for naught. What's the point of working on being a better person if the world's going to shun him for what he once was regardless?

Rationally, Nathan knows the world has nothing to do with his life, knows trying to be better is for him and nobody else, but the loathsome thought still gnaws at him. He hates it more than anything; if he really was a good person, he wouldn't be feeling that way.

He'd thought saying farewell to the dealing would make him feel better about himself, thought becoming a good guy would make him dislike the face he sees in the mirror every morning a little less. He does feel better, but not by much. He doesn't even know if he can consider himself proud of all he's achieved, even if Jamie likes reminding him he should be. Because if you really get down to business, what kind of achievement is it, anyway, holding down a shitty, underpaid customer service job even a high schooler could do if they tried hard enough? It's a bare minimum, nothing more—hardly anything to write home about.

A bare fucking minimum.

"You can sit down, you know," Stella cuts through Nathan's thoughts. She has sat down in a comfortable armchair. "We did buy the furniture for a reason."

Sass must run in the Carrera family, though there's a much sharper edge to Stella's than Jamie's. Reluctantly, Nathan sits down on a midnight blue couch, feeling out of place the whole time, so out of place in this house and these people's lives. He studies Stella and her thinly-veiled contempt a little longer, thinks about bare minimums some more, and maybe, just maybe, it isn't his past she's judging when she sees him, but rather his present.

Maybe this accomplished woman with her degree and her fancy job and her nice suburban house simply takes pleasure in looking down on him, on this shabby grouchy asshole whose biggest achievement is apparently holding down a job at Dunkin' Donuts and who wouldn't even be able to afford his damn rent if it wasn't for Jamie's filming-and-editing side gig.

He supposes the job's the best he can hope for at the moment and that it's an improvement on what came before: Nathan no longer needs to fear for his life or keep an eye out for law enforcement at all times. He doesn't need to worry about sending his clients into an early grave anymore and he's rid of the guilt of wanting to turn his life around but being too weak to actually do it. Still, customer service is a hell all of its own and it's exhausting, so fucking exhausting, to work his ass off for next to no money, pretending to tolerate insufferable managers and getting yelled at by middle-aged women who feel their order isn't being processed fast enough.

On bad days, Nathan feels like his life of crime wasn't that bad. He had more money to spend, could work on his own for the most part, and the majority of his clients wouldn't dare mouth off against the guy supplying their pill-shaped instant pleasure—and if they did, it was nothing a swift punch couldn't solve.

It's because of the temporal distance, he tells himself, that his brain tricks him into experiencing this fleeting nostalgic longing for a gutter existence he learned to loathe long ago. The sentiment freaks him out regardless. He shouldn't be feeling this, thinking this, have anything at all to do with this, but the feeling is there and it lingers and Nathan hates that this part of him exists.

Becoming good is one thing. Becoming good enough is a whole different story.

"Coffee's done!" Jamie enters the living room, holding a tray with three cups of her favourite drink on it. She places it on Stella's coffee table. "Wait, I hadn't thought about this yet, but should I have prepared four cups instead of three? In case Gino joins us downstairs?"

Stella shakes her head. "He somehow managed to sleep through that doorbell, so let's not wake him now. He's earned this rest."

"Who's Gino?" Nathan asks without aiming the question at anyone in particular, just throwing it out there for whichever woman answers first. He hasn't heard of anyone by that name; the guy wasn't at the birthday party and though Jamie's contact with Stella seems cordial enough, she doesn't talk about her family all that much.

Jamie, unsurprisingly, replies the fastest. "Gino is Stella's boyfriend. Italian. From Venice. He's been part of the family for... How long now, Stel? Four years or so, am I getting that right?"

"Four years is right. Though there's one part of the explanation you got wrong."

"...I did?"

A small smile tugs at Stella's lips, the first Nathan has ever seen on her face. It strikes him how much that smile looks like Jamie's, though the brightness is severely toned down. "He's actually my fiancé, not my boyfriend."

It's a good thing Jamie already set the tray down; she might've dropped it otherwise. "Holy shit, you got engaged?" she asks, surprised but sincerely delighted. "That's awesome! I'm happy for you, Stel."

"Congratulations," Nathan says, because he may not like Stella much, but he does have some semblance of basic human decency.

Stella actually acknowledges it with a quick nod. Shocking. "Thanks for that, both of you." She picks up her coffee cup. "And for the coffee, Jamie. It is better than mine."

"I know, but who cares about my coffee? You literally got engaged." Jamie seems to realise she's allowed to sit down, because she claims a spot of her own on the couch, much closer to Nathan than she'd technically need to be; Nathan tries really hard not to overthink that. "Was that the important news you wanted to share? Why you wanted to talk in person?"

"Well, yes. And no." Stella takes a sip of her coffee and leans back. "There's actually a little more than just that."