***ALEX***

Merry Christmas, fam. Though the mellow's more than a little harshed for me and my mom, with all the shit that's been going on the last few days, we're still finding time to celebrate. With AK and his parents, no less. I think the original plan was to meet at Nannu and Nanna's? Well, it looks like all that's changed. AK's 'rents wanted to host the festivities this year anyway, seeing how this is their first Christmas in the Bay. And bonus, because they live in San Cas, that means I get to bridge the gap between two Christmas houses - AK's, and Gideon's just down the street.

Or, more accurately, up the street, because AK's place is at the bottom of a steep hill. Three sloped streets converge in an intersection right in front of his house, and a fourth one, short and wide enough to fit a whole other house, slopes more gently down towards a canyon that runs behind the house. A canyon that allows a very lovely view of San Castiel Mountain, the one major impediment between here and a distant SF skyline view, from the windowed corner of the Grants' living room. Well, it'd be lovely if it weren't still cloudy, and the mountain weren't so shrouded in fog. But at least the rain's done, so that means that as soon as all my cousins - the Cassars, who live on the eastern side of San Cas - get here, we can take that tiny stub of street and convert it into an impromptu mini-football field. The youngest of my mom's sister's kids, Tim (no longer Timmy like we've called him for the last fourteen years), just got a beautiful Nike football as his big present, and of course he wants to put it to use immediately.

"'Cause I'm gonna be on the freshman team next year," he announces to the entire party the second he whips that ball out of the burlap sack in which he brought it. No, seriously, an actual honest-to-Elliot Graziadei burlap sack. I can't make shit like that up, not that I haven't tried.

"You sure you wanna play, Alex?" asks Ben, the sixteen-year-old middle child, who reminds me a lot of Luca but skinnier. Curly black hair, light skin like the rest of the Cassars - my mom and I are the darkest in the family, inherited from Nannu. "I remember you always used to get tired-"

I cut him off by rolling up my sleeve to expose the thicc biceps I've grown in the last year. Just enough to also show the tip of my tattoo, so it looks like some kind of killer's teardrop. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the adult Cassars - Aunt Penelope, Uncle Diego, and Michelle, age twenty-one - all raise their eyebrows at me. They all know I'm inked, but they don't want me being a bad influence on the two youngest.

Not to be outdone, and somewhat misinterpreting the message I'm trying to send to Ben and Tim, AK rolls up his own sleeve, showing a well-muscled arm on a level I haven't seen in real life since Paul Smythe. And with a tattoo of his own, of course. A Maltese cross, just like Mom semi-jokingly wishes Gabe and I would've gotten. Red chevrons with black tips pointing into each other, and a blue outline.

Out loud, AK tells the Cassars, "I'm game."

In his head, he says, Don't look so surprised, Alex. You're not the edgiest cousin in the family anymore, not now that I'm here.

In my head, I tell him, I wanna do that next.

Yes, Mom chimes in behind me as she carries a plate full of fresh pastizzi onto the living room table. I love that design!

Every one of us kids, naturally, grabs at least one cheese-filled pastry before running down and out. That includes AK and Michelle, neither of whom are technically kids anymore - and me, almost, since I'm only about a month and a half shy of eighteen.

And then, once we're on the street, we're joined by someone else over eighteen, but my God, what a kid he really is at heart. Who else but Gideon, skateboarding down the steepest of the three streets leading into this little bowl in his signature Punisher hoodie? No, seriously, I'm pretty sure that by now, he's actually had the thing signed. Jon Bernthal was in San Jose at the start of this month, I think. I bet he'll never wash it again, which would be a shame given how often he wears it. I'd hope that that smell doesn't precede him into any room the way I'd hope the smell of Joey's Pizza would.

Gideon almost crashes into my mom's car on his way down, but I help him up, check him and the car for damages (none) and give him a big damn hug. AK does too, then he goes around shaking hands with the Cassars. He also specifies his pronouns, confusing them for a bit because they're the one branch of the family present to have no openly LGBTQ+ members. But Michelle, already an experienced Bay Area college student, takes it in the quickest stride and introduces herself to Gideon first: "Michelle Cassar. She/her. Haven't I seen you before? At school?"

"Maybe...?" Gideon says sheepishly.

"Yeah, I have! You only ever wear that one hoodie, so you're easy to spot."

Well, that's good that nobody's making mountains out of molehills - the one thing I've always been worried my family is way too skilled at. But they do have a way of being very surprisingly cool when you least expect it. Luca's said the same about his people - not without their problems, namely their initial non-acceptance of Mattia leaving home to live with her boyfriend, but they almost always come around on all the shit.

Speaking of Luca, I check my phone really quickly to see if he's texted back. We haven't really talked since I helped get his family's things from the house, because I think he's still kinda pissed at me, just a little bit. But he's not cutting me off completely. That'd be hella awkward for when we go back to school, neither of us talking to each other despite sharing a room. Speaking of which, though, he's hinted that the damage to his family's place might stop them from being able to send their youngest to Balthazar next year. Unless he qualifies for a scholarship the way Marco did. For now, though, they're getting by, bunking with cousins of theirs in a part of San Jose that escaped the floodwaters.

I'll see about going down to San Jose sometime after Christmas to help the family move back in. They're supposed to be clear to return by New Year's, but knowing how bureaucratic municipal and state governments can get...and that's before figuring in federal involvement. Luca's said that his 'rents are particularly mistrustful of the Feds, having not forgotten any of their historically poor responses to water-based disasters - floods, hurricanes, and the like - in other parts of the country.

"So what are we gonna call our teams?" Ben asks. "Cassars and Others?"

Gideon raises his eyebrow. "Huh?" Then he nudges me and says, "See, dude, I'm learning your language!"

Michelle can't help but snicker at him, then, as the best Maltese speaker out of all of us, she responds most eloquently. "M'intix ħuh tiegħi."

"What'd she say?" Gideon looks at all us Maltese people, but especially me, like he's worried he's just been told to go fuck his mother. Frankly, I could think of no worse curse.

"You didn't let me finish!" Michelle yells. "M'intix ħuh tiegħi...until you beat aħwa tiegħi" - here she gestures to Tim and Ben to illustrate her point - "and me on the gridiron!"

"Well, why the hell didn't you just say so? ¿Piensas que yo comprenda tu idioma?"

"Dammit, he got me," Michelle groans. "Am I the only one here who didn't take Spanish in school? Besides Alex."

"I understood him," I say. "I've been teaching myself."

"Yeah," Gideon says with a sharp laugh. "On Duolingo."

"I use that app too," says AK.

"The Cassars and the Duolingos!" I declare to the whole street.

Everyone chimes in with some half-muttered response along the lines of, "Yeah, works for me." Everyone sounds disinterested, but when Tim and AK get into it the most, chucking the football at each other like a couple of pros, all our competitive sides break out in full force. When everyone present can trace their ancestry back to the Mediterranean (Gideon says that his dad's grandpa's grandparents - his words, not mine - left Spain around 1850 or so, according to what genealogical records they've got), there's more than a shade of that fire in all of us. Not bad considering we're all either water or land elementals in this match.

The Cassars win, probably because they're three land elementals to one on my team. I couldn't tell you why, but land elementals tend to be the best at football. Which might explain why Paul Smythe was always so good at it - though of course he became much better known for basketball in his time at Balthazar.

That said, though, AK has the best way to even the score, one none of us - least of all me, surprisingly, since it's right in my own playbook - could see coming. "Audiosurf!" he yells after shaking hands with Tim, as team captains do.

Michelle's eyes bug out. "That game still exists?"

"Not just that," AK says. "It comes with actual surfboard controls now!"

"I haven't kept up on video game news," Michelle says wryly. "Too many studies. Boys? Have you heard about this in all your procrastination?"

Ben and Tim shake their heads. I raise my hand sheepishly, having seen an article a few months back about the upcoming release of a brand-new edition of the game. I'd mostly forgotten about it, though, because I think I read that article maybe a week or two before Blue Monday happened. And Gabe's death.

Gideon, however, clears his throat and says, "I've heard about this. Wasn't it, like, some free-to-play Steam shit or something?"

Since nobody else here is aware of certain darker aspects of his history, I send him a quick thought. Maybe on Earth, but here it was big like Guitar Hero for a minute.

"I can tell you one thing," AK says with a twinkle in his eye as he leads us back into the house. "This ain't no free-to-play game. They sank some big-ass bucks into producing this!"

The game, AK's got set up in the spare bedroom on the first floor. Well, he says it was a spare bedroom, but there's no bed in here. Not with the surfboard-shaped controllers - professional-sized beasts, no less, shining like they've been freshly Sex Waxed - sitting in front of a beautiful and equally shiny new flatscreen.

"Ohhhhhhhhhh..." begins Tim. Within a second, Michelle copies him, followed by Ben another second after that.

"...shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!" Gideon and I finish for them.

"I'm gonna warn you," AK says. "I'm not very good at this game. It's got a hella high learning curve, as you can imagine."

"Yeah, and I thought Fortnite was tough enough, right?" Ben asks, nudging his sibs.

"Did you ever Battle Royale against ChronoWulf or Khensu?" AK asks. Oh shit, he does know 'Wulf! I hope they put some of his songs in this new Audiosurf. "Now that's tough." He fires up the machinery and flourishes towards the surfboards. "Really, I suck at this, though. Gid? Alex? You wanna establish dominance first?"

He doesn't have to ask us twice. Gideon and I step onto our surfboards - which have obligingly lowered themselves from their initial high-mounted angle - and wait for the menu to load up. "It kinda has a DDR controller style," AK says. "Up and down, mostly. Hard to go side to side on this thing, not that you won't be able to do that pretty well-"

"Unintentionally?" I ask.

"Probably," says AK. "So, uh, what song do you wanna start with? We got a thousand of 'em, a thousand of 'em! No shit!"

Gideon and I get a quick look at the screen. It's alphabetized by song title, so "Another Place" is, of course, pretty close to the top. I lean back and the menu cycles down, almost too fast to read through any of the thousand song titles. So I stop and see the "C"s - specifically, the perfectly timed "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo" by Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

"Only the best Christmas song ever," I chuckle as everyone else gives appreciative whoops. "Am I right?"

"Fuck yeah you are!" Gideon cries. Then he realizes he's surrounded by my family, including a couple who aren't supposed to be watching R-rated movies alone yet (of course they both do; have you seen their Insta stories?) and blushes a deep cherry red. "Shit, I'm sorry-"

"Don't be," says Tim. "I hear worse at school every fucking day."

"Of course you do," I mutter.

"What? We can't all be private-school dicks-"

"Showtime, motherfuckers!" Gideon points at the screen as it splits in two to show double vision of the classic Audiosurf highway. Purple to start, but all the colors of the rainbow are going to show up somewhere up and down this line.

Just like AK said, it's hard as hell, even for me as a water elemental. And Gideon as a land elemental, because his powers - especially his quake abilities - give him bloody good balance. But we almost fall off a couple of times and have to seriously rely on each other for balance instead of ourselves.

Nevertheless, it's fucking awesome. "How the hell did you get this?" I ask AK.

"Is this from that program you were telling me about?" Gideon asks.

"Yep. I'm beta-testing this shit, and now, so are all of you!" AK does a flourish at the surfboards. "Who wants to go next?"

"Hard to top that," Michelle says, "but we can try, can't we?"

Ben follows her onto the second surfboard, while she takes the first. "'My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark?'"

Michelle grins at her brothers, and especially at me, because I'm pretty sure I've got the biggest smile on my face. "'(Light 'Em Up!)'"

As Michelle and Ben struggle to surf to FOB, I stare into the screen and watch the many missed targets go by.

Missed targets that, in my mind, start to represent those we've lost. Gabe. Fionna. Josh. TJ.

And those I haven't seen in too long already. Luca. Aron. Ty. Kelly. All my communication with them lately has been texts, and I'm feeling extra lonely for it, even with my family all around me.

Is that what people like Kristoff Scoville want?

People like Elliot?

Elliot'll be back, and when he does, am I going to be as fucking screwed as I always am?

No. He hasn't fooled me. I'm sure he's going to try and kill me one of these days. And when he does, he'll fail. I fucking punched him in the face, something I'm sure nobody else has ever done before.

Remember that.