There's a way we all came home, even those of us who were born here. There are worlds where every homecoming is true, the House rolling like an avalanche into each reality where we once must've been so alone, and so at peace.
I think of each of those homecomings like the stories told in taverns, once upon a time. Each of us called to a particular place by the sound of a song, or the voice of a stranger. Each of us listening to some ancient call that is stronger than fear, or hatred, or conviction. Does that make us family? I don't know. I've never known. I only know that we pretend to be, for me. For Joshua. For Matthew.
Clyde would have been content calling us an army, or a collective, or a cult. Grady; a think-tank, or a salon. Brad would specify unit, Dean would say company, Drama would say cast. It's all a relative term that betrays more of where they came from than who we really are. Who they really are. I say Family because it's what I tried to make us into, when I came home. It's a part of who I am, to want one.
We're diseased in the way family can be. We're strong in the way family can be. There's an immovable and irrefutable love between us, the way there is with family. I guess I wanted something thicker than water. I wanted to find the common blood between us, and I think, by now, by God, I must've.
I can say with certainty the one thing I've been able to say since I came here: in a couple of hours, something will happen. Whether it's spoken or unspoken, whether it's something I did or not. I can feel it coming the same way you can feel dawn approaching.
It's the night of the Wolf Moon. It's the night I hold my breath for something to happen which never does. The strange winter ritual Adam, Clyde, and I all know about but have refused to inhabit for it's doomed ending is one where I, the girl in red, wander the woods to find my way home, and finding a wolf instead, become a sacrifice. If I take every aspect of the story as simply or literally as I can, what I know is that I was trying to find my way home when disaster struck. If that means I never found it, I can't be sure. Sometimes I wonder if it's the way I always...
What I know about Fate is that it congeals slowly, like plates full of food left out overnight. It collects on the top of things, the skin of it thickening as it dries. It clots quickly, sealing up a wall between this world and the next one, and then sinks to the bottom of every buoyant thought. What settles after it are the details of reality which can withstand this change - things like love. There's a reason no one's fate is scrambled eggs, the way Adam thinks. Scrambled eggs simply don't transcend the veils of being the way his love for me might.
Bonnie says it's love which cleans the gelatin of fate from the world and makes it so we are masters to nothing, and that might be true. It might be fate which shook loose the house from the world and set it moving through the universe to collect us all, in time and space, to bring us here.
Drama wants me to start writing about the night I brought him home. He says it would make him feel close to me. While I've started it a few times, I haven't been able to do it yet, because it means admitting on some level that I didn't wait for fate to deliver him. Instead, I became his fate by lighting the fire that forced him here. I'd like to say that it was love that did it, but it wasn't. I didn't love Drama, then, but I love Bonnie, and without him, she might've died.
In two minutes, in two hours, in two years, something is going to happen. Something is always happening to revolve slowly the construct of this House. Tonight is the Wolf Moon, both the first and the last simultaneously. It's the night of my homecoming, it's the night of Drama's. It's the night Bonnie meets Clyde. It's the night I'm going to tell Brad I love him. It's the night I die, undoubtedly.
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