They Like Me, They Really Like Me!
The Esbat is held, as it always is, in Morgana’s front room in Easton, which smells of incense and old books and the particular quality of magic that accumulates in a space when the same people have been practicing in it for a long time.
The crystals are all in their usual places.
The altar cloth is the good one, the deep purple embroidered one that only comes out for proper meetings.
Candles everywhere, which is a fire hazard and always has been, and nobody has ever addressed this.
I’m the last to arrive, which I did deliberately, because arriving early means making conversation before I’ve fortified myself, and I’m not there yet.
The walk over from the flat was useful in that it gave me time to practice what I was going to say, which I did for most of it, running through various versions of the speech in my head while Bristol got on with its evening around me.
I had a whole speech. Several, actually, in different registers.
There was a dignified one, and a defiant one, and one that was mostly just explaining everything in exhaustive detail, which I decided against on the grounds that some of it is none of their business.
I’m nervous. I’m trying not to be nervous.
I have Dis, I remind myself, who is currently in my flat attempting to understand how a television remote works, as in the science and technology part, which is its own situation.
I also have Adam and Hex, who are well on their way to forgiving me.
I even have Bunny, who, while grating with his eternal optimism, would cheerfully follow me into any situation while wearing his ears.
A witch without a coven is just a loser, but also still a witch, which is fine, which I will be fine with. I don’t need my coven.
I am extremely nervous.
Which is understandable. I have had far more than my fair share of confrontations lately. It really is unjust. When this is all over, I’m going to live my life in a way that does not require confrontations, ever.
Dave opens the door. He takes one look at me and steps back to let me in without saying anything, which is either a bad sign or a good sign, and I genuinely can’t tell which.
There are six of us in total. Morgana is already seated, her silver hair pinned up, her purple robes doing their thing, her expression doing that thing it does where it’s perfectly serene and completely unreadable.
The others are on the cushions and chairs arranged in the loose circle that Morgana always insists upon. Everyone looks at me when I come in.
I sit down. I put my bag on the floor. I look at Morgana.
“Felix,” she says, in that voice like wind chimes, warm and carefully neutral.
“Morgana,” I say.
A pause. The candles flicker.
I’ve been practicing what I was going to say.
On the walk over, and in the flat before that, and possibly in the shower this morning, and definitely while Dis watched me leave with the focused attention of someone who wanted to come but couldn’t because bringing a shadow being to my hearing would not at all help my case.
Anyways, the point is, I’ve been practicing. I have a whole speech.
“I’ve been an arse,” I say.
Not the speech. But accurate.
Dave makes a small sound that might be a laugh quickly suppressed.
“Not intentionally,” I continue, because honesty has been the theme of my recent life, apparently, and I might as well commit.
“But I’ve been dealing with something significant and I handled it by going silent, which wasn’t fair to the coven, and I know that.
I should have said I needed space. I should have checked in.
Should have said I needed cover for my duties. I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”
The room is quiet. Morgana’s expression has shifted into something warmer, something that wasn’t there when I sat down. Something I’ve caused by not being an asshole.
Personal growth, I think. Absolutely foul. Moving on.
“Before we start, I need to ask something,” I say. “My father. Don’t contact him again. Whatever happened with that, whatever the intention was, I need that to not happen again.”
“We were worried about you,” Morgana says gently. “We thought...”
“I know what you thought. And I understand why you did it.” I hold her gaze. “But my relationship with my father is mine to manage. Or not manage. And right now, it’s not. So please.”
Morgana looks at me for a long moment with those clear eyes that have always seen considerably more than I’m comfortable with. “Wouldn’t it be healing,” she says, carefully, “to perhaps consider some form of reconciliation? In time?”
“No,” I say.
“Felix…”
“No. Never going to happen.” I say it without heat, which is new.
It’s not anger, it’s just certainty. Something that has settled in me in the past few weeks, something that knows the difference between a door that’s closed and a door that’s simply not there anymore.
“That’s not a conversation I’m having. Not today, not eventually. I’ve made my peace with it.”
And I have. That’s the strange thing. Somewhere between the Scrabble board and the futon and blue eyes watching me across a summoning circle, I’ve actually made my peace with it.
Not because I’ve forgiven it. Because I’ve understood that I don’t need to.
I have what I have, and what I have is everything.
Morgana holds my gaze for another moment. Then she nods, just once, with the grace of someone who disagrees but respects the boundary.
“The shadow being,” says Celeste with her usual arrogance. “We’ve all been aware of the presence. They are, as a category, deeply dangerous entities.”
“He’s not dangerous,” I say. The words come out immediately, completely without thought, with the ease of things that are simply true. “He’s mine.”
Silence.
I become aware of what I’ve just said. I consider feeling embarrassed about it. I decide not to bother.
“He’s staying,” I say, in case that wasn’t clear. “That’s not a negotiation. He’s not in a circle anymore, he’s just here, and he’s not going to be a problem for anyone.” I pause. “The most dangerous thing about him is his obsession with Bake Off and news segments about cold remedies.”
Dave, very carefully, looks at Celeste. I cannot read the silent communication they share.
“And the attacks?” Morgana asks. “There were disturbances we felt. Significant ones.”
“Dealt with,” I say. “The entity that was directing them has been neutralised. There’s still an unknown element but it’s not actively targeting us right now and we are working on it.”
I say we without thinking about it. It’s just true.
Morgana looks at me for a long moment. There is something in her expression that I don’t have a name for, something that might be satisfaction if satisfaction looked that gentle.
“Thank you,” she says, “for explaining. And for the apology. It takes something to offer one honestly.”
I nod. I look at the candles. I wait for the other shoe to drop, for the vote to be mentioned, for the formal processes Dave warned me about to begin.
Morgana opens her notebook. She looks at something in it. “Now then,” she says, in a different tone entirely, the one she uses when she’s moving things along. “The solstice planning. Celeste, you had thoughts about the location.”
I blink.
Celeste begins talking about a field in Somerset that someone’s sister owns. Someone else has opinions about the field. Dave starts eating a biscuit from somewhere.
I sit very still.
“Wait,” I say.
Everyone looks at me.
“That’s it?” My voice comes out slightly strangled. “I can stay? That’s just... we’re moving on?”
Morgana looks at me with those clear eyes. “Of course you can stay, Felix,” she says, as if this is self-evident. “You are a valued member of this coven.”
I stare at her. “I am?”
“Yes.” She says it simply, without ceremony. “And we like you.”
“You do?”
“Very much,” she says. “You reorganise the ritual space before every Esbat, and none of the rest of us can be bothered to do it. You have excellent instincts and considerable practical skill.” A pause. “And you make us laugh.”
The room is very quiet.
“Of course you like me,” I say. I pull myself together. “I’m awesome. Everyone likes me in the end.”
Dave makes the laugh-suppression sound again. Celeste rolls her eyes with what I choose to interpret as fondness. Morgana’s mouth does something that would definitely be a smile if she let it get that far.
I sit with this. I sit with the fact that I walked in here braced for a fight and prepared for rejection and ready to defend myself, and instead the coven looked at me and said of course you can stay and we like you, as if it was never in question, as if the question had always been a little absurd.
I look at Dave.
Dave is eating his biscuit with the focused contentment of someone who has no idea he’s about to be held accountable for anything.
“Dave,” I say.
“Mm?” he says.
“You told me Morgana was going to call a formal coven vote on my continued membership.”
Dave considers this. “I said she might.”
“You implied it was imminent. You used the word formal.”
“It could have been formal,” Dave says, with the easy confidence of someone who is completely unbothered by this line of questioning. “Potentially. If you hadn’t shown up.”
“Did anyone actually discuss voting me out?”
A pause that is slightly too long.
“Dave.”
“There was a conversation,” Dave says carefully, “about whether a strongly worded letter might be appropriate. To express concern.” He eats the rest of his biscuit. “It was a very brief conversation.”
I stare at him.
For fuck’s sake. I fell for Dave’s love of making a drama out of everything.
Again. I have known this man for four years.
I know he has the same energy as someone who texts you ‘can you call me, it’s urgent’ and then wants to tell you about a mildly interesting thing that happened to him at the supermarket. I know this. And yet every single time.
“You told me,” I say, with great restraint, “that I should sort out whatever I had going on and come back. You made it sound like my membership was genuinely at risk.”
“It was encouraging you,” Dave says. “Motivationally.”
“Motivationally,” I repeat in disbelief.
“You needed a push.”
“I punched my wall, Dave.”
Dave has the grace to look slightly apologetic. “That’s on you, mate. I just said there might be a vote. I didn’t say punch your wall about it.”
Morgana, I notice, is looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone who has been managing Dave for considerably longer than I have and has developed a comprehensive peace with it.
“Right,” I say. “Right. Good. Glad we cleared that up.”
“The letter would have been very strongly worded,” Dave offers. “Genuinely. We put real effort into it.”
“There was a letter?”
“A draft,” Dave says. “Celeste has a real gift for passive aggression in written form. It was impressive.”
Celeste looks pleased by this.
I open my mouth. Close it. Decide that this is simply who these people are and that I knew this when I joined and that there is something almost comforting about it, the absolute consistency of Dave being Dave in all situations and all weathers.
“You’re all terrible,” I say, with considerable warmth.
“We know,” says Dave.
I’m all out of words. A little stunned, to be honest. Hit with a feeling I only felt for the first time recently.
The surprise of being told you are wanted. Of discovering that the thing you thought you had to earn was simply there, had been there, had been waiting for you to notice it.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get better at noticing it.
“The field in Somerset,” Morgana says, returning to her notebook.
The meeting continues. I sit in my usual spot and I listen to the discussion about the solstice and I eat one of Dave’s biscuits when he offers the packet and I feel, underneath everything, that particular quiet that comes when something you’ve been tensing against for a long time simply isn’t there anymore.
I’m a valued member of this coven.
They like me.
I walk home through Bristol in the dark, hands in my pockets, and I think about the thirteen-year-old who didn’t have this, who learned too young that belonging was something you could lose, who has spent the years since then building walls and keeping distances and managing everything alone because it was easier than risking being found wanting again.
I think about the coven in Morgana’s front room, eating Dave’s biscuits and debating fields in Somerset, and the complete absence of drama in the thing I had been dreading.
I think about Dis in my kitchen this morning, making tea wrong again with absolute confidence. The way he looked at me when I laughed. The way he has always looked at me when I laugh, from the very beginning, cataloguing it, finding it pleasant, never pretending he didn’t.
I think about “you were forged in the brightest of stars” said in a kitchen over a wrapped teabag, and how I’ve been carrying it around like something warm in my pocket.
I’m getting better at understanding that being wanted isn’t something you have to earn every single day against the odds.
It’s a work in progress. But then, most things worth doing are.
The flat is lit when I can see it from the street, warm yellow light in the windows, and something in my chest does a quiet, complicated thing at the sight of it.
Home.
I take the stairs two at a time.