Merry Christmas from your Secret Santa, @yoyo-inspace! This is your little gift, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I’m sorry for the delay, but I had a busier holiday than expected and I wanted to proof read it first. This was awesome, I loved getting you as my secret santa! :)
Mary awoke with a start.
She didn’t know why. The room was immersed in darkness and silence, and outside, she could only hear the faint sound of a passing car. For the past months she had been sleeping quite well for a night owl. She had stopped drinking coffee at night and she couldn’t remember the last time she had a nightmare. What was it, then?, she thought, what had woken her up with such urgency? She felt completely awake, not one ounce of sleep in her mind.
Until she heard it, or rather, sensed it: “Finally”.
She looked at her windowsill, and there, perched with her head slightly to one side, half of her black-feathered body illuminated by the street lights, was Päivykkä, staring at her human’s eyes intently. “What is it?”
Vykkä opened her wings and batted them, but didn’t fly from her spot. “It’s today”.
“What is…? Oh.” she paused, and looked at her bedside clock. The clock didn’t tell her the day of the week or of the month, but as a reflex, she looked at it anyway. It was 1:22am and it was the 24th of June. Midsummer day. Now she remembered.
She had planned to wake very early so she could drop by the lab and be able to get off to the Botanic Garden just after her lunch, at 1pm, to pick up Will. But it seemed like Vykkä had other plans for them. Mary snapped out of it. “Is Will alright?”
“He has left some time ago”.
“At this hour?”
“He didn’t seem like himself.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because.”
Mary sighed. Her daemon could be very monosyllabic.
She got up and went to check on Will’s room. She wrapped herself in a dark blue robe and padded down the hallway, feeling Vykkä’s gaze on her back. Her eyes weren’t uncomfortable, but rather, soothing. Mary didn’t need to go much further to find Will’s bedroom door ajar and his bedside lamp on, something that he usually didn’t do. Will Parry was the neatest teenage boy Mary had ever met. Possibly the neatest human being, to be true.
When Will moved in, the woman was afraid she’d have to deal with a teen’s mess, but rather, she found out she was much messier than him. He was actually the one cleaning the house, even though Mary protested. “It’s the least I can do”, he’d say, but still, Mary was uncomfortable. The boy had spent enough of his years caring for other people. Mary wished she could care for him just for a change, but with Will, it was difficult.
The boy never let his guard down, he was always ahead of her: before she could clean her dishes, organize her bills, fold her laundry, Will would beat her every time to those house chores. As the years passed, and under Mary’s insistence, Will stopped cleaning the house so thoroughly. “Look, think of us as roommates. So half the chores are mine, okay? And you shouldn’t worry about them. It’s good practice for you, someday you’ll be leaving for college and you won’t want to become a slave of your roommates”. Will agreed. Talking about college always cheered him up. He was a very curious and intelligent boy, something that Mary loved about him. He’d be just fine in college.
Splitting the house chores meant, of course, that all of Mary’s were left either half-done or completely abandoned. Will never said anything about it though, and Mary was glad.She looked around his room: stacks of books on the floor, even though Mary had bought him a nice bookshelf, that was already overwhelmed with books and crooked in the middle due to their weight. Will was a bookworm, and it was fun to see how organized he was with the house and how messy he could get with his books. But leaving his door open and his lamp on weren’t something that he usually did. Neither sneaking out in the middle of the night, of course, it didn’t matter if he was 18 and ready for college.
The boy had been acting weird for the past semester or so. With college approaching, Will had become more and more stressed. He didn’t really talk to her about this in particular, but Mary could sense that all his nervousness had to do with something other than college. Something much deeper, and much more important.
She bit her lower lip, worried, and turned to Vykkä, still perched on the windowsill inside her bedroom. “You’re right. Let’s find him”.
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