So many sides of the story to keep up with and I’m the only person everyone’s talking to. It’s overwhelming.

 
Timeline/World: Darkness of Space – Bird Harem
Characters: Dmitry Utkin
Race: Demon – Sex
Age: 38, physically about 22
Current residence: Red Belt Asteroid
Final Word Count: 795 words
 

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We don’t always get along. Usually, we do. But I’m not going to lie and claim that we live a perfect little life where everything is rosy and pink.

For one thing, we’re prostitutes.

For another, we’re of a breed of demon that loves and craves sex, though we don’t need it to survive like those books of old that speak of things like incubus and succubus. I’ve read those books. I was read those books to when I was younger because my parents thought that they would be useful to me as I grew up. Good job there, parents. I’m sure you wanted nothing more than to ensure I had a good life, and I knew what to expect in the long run and I’m fairly certain that it’s not because of that, that I landed here but that’s something else entirely.

Now, I’ve been called a few different things while I was here. The others are all my friends, I won’t deny that fact but when you spend your whole life, so to speak, stuck inside the same big house with all the same people, and you share your two weekend days always with the same two people—no one says you can’t switch with someone else now and again but it’s one of those things, we’ve been talking about being just completely closed possible two nights of the week—there are times when some tension will arise and, I’m not going to lie, I can get petty at times.

It’s in my nature. You could say it’s in all of our nature but it’s very much so in mine. I’m a petty bitch and I know it. You’ll just have to deal with it.

So, you can consider me rather surprised when there was a bit of an issue between our two sweetest boys. Normally, they’d have talked to anyone but me; I’m not good at advice, I did just mention I was petty and that’s what I tend to turn to if you give me even just a small chance to do things my way.

Instead, I sat down, I listened to the sides of the story and, beyond their own two, eventually almost everyone else added their sides to things and, I’m not going to lie, at one point I was pretty damned confused about things. There were so many sides to this story, and they all had decided to somehow only talk to me. Why confide in me? I still don’t know at this point.

It was overwhelming and I don’t do overwhelming, not very much. I did, eventually, manage to just get everyone the hell together one early afternoon before we were all due to work and everything got straightened out. It was a very, very strange moment in my life, I’m not going to lie. I was happy that everything had worked out, even if the end solution didn’t involve pettiness.

Can’t always win that one, I know. I also happen to think that it wouldn’t really have worked in anyone’s favour if we’d opted for petty, even if it had been the simpler solution. At least, as far as I’m concerned it would have been the simpler solution.

In the end, it did turn out that it was all just one big misunderstanding. I can’t stay I blame either of them for it. The details that got lost in the middle of it all were the one reason why everything did make sense in the end and those details were scattered between all parties.

Even now, when I think about it, I’m not even sure I understand how it all happened or why everyone ended up wanting to talk to me about it all in the end.

Not that it matters, does it? Things were fixed, things got better, everyone was happy to get it all back under some sort of understanding but that one thing that did amuse me, in the end, was that none of them really could explain why they’d come to me to talk about it all. That’s the one thing that still makes me shake my head. I assume that it’s because I share a weekend with both of them. One on my first day off, the other on my second. I don’t know how else to really look at this situation other than this way.

We’re strange people. We’re friends, we get along, but there will be days when we just don’t, and I think that this is all there really is to it. I think our lives would be very, very boring if we all were to get along perfectly well but I think I could do without being that go-to person for issues like these, too.

You’re asking me to join on an adventure I am not prepared for.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City
Characters: Matthias Sarantos
Race: Human
Age: 33
Current residence: New York City Ruins, New York
Final Word Count: 783 words
 

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When I was younger, my parents didn’t take well to my condition. For the most part, I know that they thought I was faking it. Why I would fake something like this, I have absolutely no idea, but I guess it’s one of those things, isn’t it? If your child is somehow showing signs of being so averse to touch from anyone to the point that it makes them violently ill, you might be wondering just what kind of imagination that child has.

I’ve been to countless shrinks.

I’ve seen a shitload of doctors of all types and sorts, and I’ve been on more medication for a lot of things that I know my parents thought would probably do me good but, newsflash, it didn’t. It never did.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

I don’t know that even Doc Flynn, who is more a scientist than a doctor but whose knowledge is still something I totally respect, even knows. I’m just that way. Touch—especially skin-on-skin touch—from anyone out there except Silver which is something I have no words of gratitude big enough for, will make me ill. It’s instantaneous, too. Though it doesn’t always lead me to upchucking but most of the time, it does.

If it’s just a bare little brush, at times, I’ll be lucky enough that it’ll just lead to some hard shaking and maybe even some dry heaving but, usually, it’s pretty much convulsions and I’ve been known to faint.

All in all, it’s not something that’s fun to handle and when my parents first told me, so many years ago, that they were sending me out there in the big bad world for university instead of allowing me to do online schooling, I was baffled. I didn’t want to go. To them it was like sending a child to daycare, let that child figure themselves out and sort their behaviour and all. Somehow, they seemed to think that surrounding me with other people while I studied for something I didn’t want to, would help ‘cure’ me.

It didn’t.

It did, however, lead me to Silver and I’m grateful for that.

I remember thinking that they were sending me out on this great big adventure, and it was one I was just not prepared for. I didn’t tell them to their face, they would have scoffed at me and who knows what else. It was bad enough—in their eyes—that they were wasting so much money on medical things for me that it was only right that I make some effort to repay them back since I didn’t know how to behave.

These comments used to hurt at first but once Silver had come into my life, I sort of slowly wrapped my mind around it all. I know that they thought they were doing it for my own good, but it just wasn’t a good thing.

I remember when we heard the information about the transports, and I sort of panicked. I thought we’d be packed like sardines in whatever vehicles they were using to pick us up that we wouldn’t even have room for breathing. Now, for some unknown reasons, my condition really is mostly triggered by skin-on-skin contact but it doesn’t stop the fact that I’d become so stressed out by my own reaction that the thought of being anywhere near others, even if I was going to be covered from head to toe, didn’t sit well with me.

We did end up going, after all, I mean, we’re here now. I don’t remember much of that day. I remember us walking, I remember standing there and pacing a little, I remember spotting the transport coming our way, but after that, all I remember is Silver sitting next to me on a bed dabbing a cloth on my forehead. I never asked him about that day, but I can only figure I possibly passed out or, what I hope for, is that I just really zoned out badly, so I didn’t have to think about our situation.

I mean, if I passed out, it means that he’d had to carry me inside. Something he wouldn’t have let anyone else do because of my condition and it makes me sick to think that he’d have had to carry our bags and stupid little old me down there into the bunker. I’d much rather think that I zoned out and became possibly just catatonic and I had to be walked from the transport to our room and eventually came back out of it.

This was years ago but I admit that, on some days, I still think about it.