Jaimie Fidel - Chaos
Rolled dice to get a random character and did my best to fulfill the prompt “chaos” from @homesteadchronicles. I just needed to create something small.
Jaimie is the brother-in-law of Zachary, a main character in the Unveiled world. He’s married to Zach’s eldest sister, and was originally not a vampire. In the coteries, turning is something intimate and fairly uncommon, to the point where someone could say, “that family with the turned man,” and others would know who they meant. It was only after half a decade of waiting and pleading that Jaimie and Saryah got permission to marry. Jaimie inherited his family’s company, Fidelity Shipping, and tended it like a prized vegetable as the years marched by. He has a philosophy similar to Zach’s - that vampires should not need to cower and subsist on substandard sustenance - but the difference is that Jaimie didn’t leave his family to pursue that way of thinking.
Here’s a short bit, set just after Jaimie found Zach again after however many years. I did my best to fulfill the concept of “chaos,” though I guess the real chaos comes a while after this. I’m not very good at writing romantic relationships, much less a century-old one that has produced two small children, but I did my best. Family life can be... (wait for it) a bit chaotic.
*guffaw* Yeah okay getting on with it
———
Jaimie Fidel closed the door behind him, doing his best to not make any sound. The hallway was dark, the sounds of his wife in another room muffled in the carpeting, putting Orin to sleep. He heard her voice lower as he crept past into the living room. Perhaps thirty seconds later, she copied him and shut Orin’s door without noise.
“Did Nellie go to sleep all right?” Saryah asked in a hushed voice, taking a bar stool.
Half-wincing from his spot near the pantry, Jaimie answered, “About as well as could be expected. What about Orin?”
“Just the same.” She accepted the bottle he offered and pulled the cap off with ease. “What was so special about tonight?“
Jaimie settled on the bar stool next to his wife and wrenched the bottle cap off of his own drink, not looking at her. “Why did anything have to be special about tonight to break out a bottle of donated blood?”
“Come on.” Saryah rolled her eyes. “You usually get home around dawn, and the kids stay up until later. You obviously have something you want to talk about. Whenever there’s donated, you have something on your mind.”
“Am I really that bad?” Jaimie joked, but judging by the look Saryah gave him, she wasn’t buying it. She waited.
Before going into it, Jaimie took a long sip from the bottle he held. It grounded him. Warmth touched his long-dead heart and steadied the slight tremors in his fingers. A hundred years ago, he’d never imagined where that lovely girl from the Christmas party would lead him. Here, past the turn of the millennium, into a cozy, cluttered home with children of his own.
And family drama of his own, too.
“I know where Zachary is,” Jaimie finally said.
