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Wondering why a creator never meets its creations? Thinking it might be fun to meet a character you created? Think again. Of what you've put that character through. The struggles, the insecurities, the miseries. You've written for them an inescapable, living hell because it's what sells, right? It's what gets you clicks, and reads and noticed. 

Cruel gods, that's how they would see you. So no, don't meet your creations. At the very least, it's awkward. Like sharing opposing political views over family dinner awkward.

Peneloper Auttsley, face to face with Captain Ire Stormholden, her Ire Stormholden, his fingers grasping her hoodie, his stare steadier and more singular and hot than she could have ever envisioned wants to run. In fact, the eldest Auttsley desires nothing more than to run, which, she could have done so, had her legs not reverted into sacks of melting Jell-O.

But she's steeled herself. Braced herself for the worst to come. And here it was, all two hundred pages shoved into a pair of shockingly - I mean, did she really write them that way? - tight trousers, his muscles bulging under a stained tunic. His anger raw and palpable.

He pushes her away and she manages to collect herself on the nearby foyer table, above which sits a mirror. Peneloper catches a glimpse of herself and feels drawn, as though invisible strings are tugging at her limbs and drawing her toward it.

She starts to think in fragments, all of which start with "I" and assert her feelings, all of which she's currently feeling so there's no real reason why she ought to be narrating them, other than shoddy writing.

Peneloper shakes her head. She will not monologue so late in the game. Monologues are for flatter characters with fewer dimensions. Ones whose own feelings confuse them for entire arcs.

No. She knows how she feels - caught off-guard, curious, amazed, and most of all, ashamed. She looks into the face of her story and recognizes the scars - the ones from the war, from the Scarlet Reef, competing pirates, a few fingernail slashes from a scorned mermaid. She spies the burn mark on his neck, from when his father had been too drunk and accidentally splashed scalding hot water on his then not yet eight-year-old son.

Peneloper had written all that tragedy and here it was, walking, talking, breathing. Pissed off. She can't blame him. Stormholden has every right to hate her.

The captain, meanwhile, feels complicated. More complicated than he ever has. For he's always seen the world in stark black and whites and here was the devil that plagued him from his first breath and would see to his destruction upon his very last and she is small. Thin. Malnourished perhaps.

A curly mop of dark brown hair and eyes the color of deep water. The kind where the stars reflected in the ocean's surface the best, but that also grew rowdy and vengeful when the weather soured.

A child. His creator, his tormentor, his undoing, within his grasp, and she is, unlike Gideon, not frightening in the least as far as first impressions went.

This silent reunion displeases Gideon as he expected something more exciting, more fruitful, to come out of the introduction. Slipping back into the state of being which causes the most destruction - that of boredom - he claps the Cap's shoulder.

The chapter, that'd been waiting, bound to a chair and seated around the Auttsley's kitchen table, shimmies free of its binding and comes into the room. It breathes out, as it knows what comes when a heroine meets her story's antagonist - conflict.

In fact, so late in the game, it's Conflict, the capital "C" important, intentional. It sags its corners and braces, for Gideon's storm has finally met its match, even if he remains ignorant. Gideon will learn. In stories, the best characters always learned.

• Heat On The Street •

Gideon smacked the captain's back, the sound rumbling through the house, the shutters shuttering, the glasses clinking. "Well, Cap, there she is." He eyed the wordless sea captain and smiled.

Having remembered Gideon and all his smiles, Peneloper found this one particularly disheartening - his movements rusted like the hands of a clock, as though the muscles had gone unused for a long time. It was nothing but a forgery of the real thing, and it wasn't half as dazzling. "What do you think?"

Stormholden stepped back. His frame shook as he clasped the door frame for stability. "I think my wits betray me." Though Peneloper knew the situation was one of 'impending' "almost certain" doom—she might as well been chum-covered and standing in a tank of dieting sharks—she couldn't help but smile.

Just a bit, a small one, which took all her strength to fend off, because Captain Stormholden spoke exactly as she'd written him. And, though this was a less important fact - she feels it needs saying - he was gorgeous. The hallway light caught in every line of chiseled muscle and brought attention to the light freckling of his skin from so many days spent under a blistering sun.

Her eyes roamed over the captain's physique once more, not in a lustful, tongue-wagging, leering, and gross way, but out of admiration. After all, it'd been her pen and imagination that had fostered the captain's looks. The tunic, down to every last ruffle and wrinkle was exactly as she'd described, so were his boots (the toes peppered with the correct amount of scuff marks) but the trousers, had she written them to be so clingy? Maybe that part had been left to the readers' imaginations and they'd gone a little overboard with how snug a pirate ought to wear his bottoms. They certainly should have restricted the captain's movements with how suctioning they were.

As Peneloper mulled over the indecency of her readers, Gideon chuckled. She turned and faced him, and in that moment, where their eyes met, the fodder of their friendship ignited and all else fell away.

Gideon smiled. Gideon and I chased the stars. Gideon's lonely. Friends, he says, and together we'll weather whatever comes next. Help me. Help me. Nep, please help me.

"You look taller," she said, in a moment of pure idiocy.

It'd been what? A decade since she last saw him and here he was, and oh, yeah, here to destroy her, and that's what came out of her mouth? The Council's idiocy must have caught, and the vaccine was at minimum, ten years away from being FDA approved. What would be next? Would she invite him to a PowerPoint presentation outlining nine hundred and one reasons why he shouldn't kill, maim, harm, intimidate or pervert her in any way, shape, or form?

Gideon's brow furrowed and his lips pulled tautly. "I'm still shorter than him, aren't I?"

She blinked. "What do you-"

Then, she remembered her budding position in the magical community. She was the library where all kinds of magical weirdos and voyeurs could read her thoughts and aura, no library card or awkward interaction with a librarian who bullies you into a game of twenty questions required.

Since Crispen could read her aura, could he? She shuffled her feet as she recalled miserably Crispen saying that aura reading was a rare gift only a few possessed. How had that translated to almost everyone she met having this particularly hard and rarely-mastered skill at their beck and call?

"Can you read me?" She sheepishly put her arms across her chest.

Gideon shook his head. "Don't have to. I just," he looked down, dragging his fingers along the hem of his shirt, "I just know my brother. He gets whatever it is I want."

"Gideon." His name fell from her lips without her giving a second thought. The boy, with the raven skull around his neck, snapped to attention. The corners of his lips pulled upward, into a more natural and familiar grin. Peneloper had to look away to hide her blush. She exhaled. "I don't appreciate you turning Potter Oaks into that mechanical nightmare outside."

He frowned. "How disappointing." He turned, broke eye contact, and faced Stormholden. "You, this meeting," he waved between her and the captain, "how unsurprisingly disappointing." He shrugged, the bird skull bouncing off his chest. "Though, I don't know what I thought would happen. That you would see me, appreciate me. That you would-"

"Weather whatever came next beside you?" Peneloper gulped. Gideon whirled on her, the blue of his irises cloudy, muddled, like a storm that didn't know whether it wanted to land or pass on to the next town.

He clenched his hands into fists. "You meant everything to me."

She nodded and then reached into her back pocket to pull out the pieces of Gideon's star. They pulsed once brightly in her palm, before dimming. Gideon's eyes widened slightly. "I felt something similar." She held it out to him and they disappeared. "And though I know it'll never be enough, I'm sorry I forgot you."

He snarled and turned away. "He made you forget me. He-"

"My father protected me." Peneloper squared her shoulders. Gideon glared. She did not relent or cower, even as his darkness appeared overhead. "If memory serves me correctly, and it ought to after having to eat that memory sludge soup, you hurt me." Sparks of purple skirted along her knuckles.

Gideon smirked. "Lavender." She turned away and the sparks of her magic died out. "I didn't mean to hurt you, Ne-"

"Don't." She thrust her hand into the air. "Don't call me by a name you haven't earned."

He scowled. "I suppose my brother calls you that?"

Peneloper snorted. "Mr. Heavensley? Byword, no. I stopped him much as I stopped you just now."

"You let your dad call you that?" Peneloper's throat grew dry. Malice shone in Gideon's eyes. "How was that reunion? Was it as bland and uneventful as you and the Cap here?" As though to signal he still existed, Gideon slapped Stormholden's back. "Did you cry tears of joy to find out the man you so admired was still alive?" Gideon leaned in. "No." He shook his head. "No, not you. You got angry. You still are."

"Quit reading my aura."

He moved strands of black hair out of his eyes. "I see." He flexed the fingers of his gloved left hand. "So, all that anger and resentment boiled over, didn't it? You found out your beloved father abandoned you and your entire family, all to succumb to the will of those idiots residing on the Council. He shouldered a punishment for something that occurred years before he was born and you all had to suffer the consequences. I can only imagine what you felt-"

"That's right," she snapped. "You can only imagine."

"Oh really?" A dark tear ran down his cheek. "I haven't a clue what it's like to feel abandoned and betrayed. Such foreign concepts. I've had it so easy up until now."

Peneloper couldn't argue with Gideon. He had suffered, and in many ways, more than her, but still, they weren't here to assert whose misery was bigger. "I'm not here to argue with you."

"Ah," he clicked his heels, "But you are here to fight me."

"If the need arises."

Gideon turned toward the captain and stroked the man's cheek. "Well, you've grown to know me throughout this journey," Gideon's hair started cascading down his back, "what say you, Cap? Will we fight?"

Stormholden reached up and touched his neck. He eyed Peneloper with sympathy as he nodded his head.