Epilogue
Felix
Two Years Later
The thing about starting over—again—is that this time it smelled like apple juice and Play-Doh.
I stood in the doorway of what had been our guest room, watching Marc assemble a bookshelf with the quiet intensity he usually reserved for reviewing power play footage. The instructions were spread across the floor in a language that might have been Swedish or might have been deliberately designed to cause marital discord, and Marc had abandoned them twenty minutes ago in favor of what he called “structural intuition“
and what I called “guessing.”
“That shelf is upside down,” I said.
“It’s not upside down.”
“The little arrow should be pointing at the floor, Marc.”
He turned the shelf over. He didn’t look at me, but the tips of his ears went red, and I felt the temperature in the room tick up by a degree—his tell, even after two years of living together. Every strong emotion came with a thermal footnote.
“I’m a professional hockey coach,“
he muttered, fitting the shelf into its bracket with more force than was strictly necessary. “I manage elite athletes. I have won awards.”
“And yet IKEA remains undefeated.”
He threw a wooden dowel at me. I caught it, laughing, and tucked it behind my ear like a pencil. The room was coming together: pale blue walls, a small bed with dinosaur sheets that Marc had picked out yesterday morning with a seriousness that suggested he was drafting a game plan rather than shopping for bed linen, a nightlight shaped like a crescent moon that cast soft silver patterns across the ceiling. On the dresser, still in its frame, was the photograph I’d taken yesterday—Marc and me, smiling so damn hard, and between us, held in Marc’s arms with his small fingers gripping the collar of Marc’s shirt, was Olivier.
Olivier David. Three years old. Dark curly hair, enormous brown eyes, a laugh that sounded like a handful of bells thrown down a staircase. And somewhere in his tiny body, dormant and waiting like a seed in winter soil, the same gene that had detonated Marc’s life at sixteen.
His biological mother had been a dragon but didn’t want to care for a child. She’d reached out to the community through channels I was still learning to navigate, and Ignatius Steel, who involved himself in the welfare of every dragon child the way the sun involved itself in the business of growing things, had connected her with the family services network that operated quietly within the dragon world. When Marc and I had put our names forward six weeks ago, I’d expected a process measured in years. Instead, Ignatius had looked at us across his enormous mahogany two days ago, his silver-streaked hair impeccable as always, and said, “I actually have a boy needing a home right now.”
“Yes,“
Marc had said immediately, and clutched my hand.
“And you.“
Ignatius’s gaze had shifted to me—heavy, assessing, the weight of centuries behind it. “You are human. You understand what it means to raise a dragon child as a human parent?”
I’d thought about Marc at sixteen, terrified on his bedroom floor, his world cracking open. I’d thought about his parents—how they’d known, how they’d prepared, how they’d held him through the impossible and then driven through the night to keep him safe. I’d thought about the fact that Olivier might someday go through that same transformation, and that when he did, he would not be alone. He would not be confused. He would have a father who understood it from the inside and a father who understood it from the outside, and between the two of us, we would hold every piece of him together.
“I understand,“
I’d said. And I’d meant it with every atom of my rebuilt, restructured, dragon-adjacent heart.
Olivier had spent his first night in our apartment, in this room, in the dinosaur bed, and had woken up at four-seventeen a.m. crying for reasons he couldn’t articulate. Marc had gotten there first—he always did, his hearing sharper than mine—and I’d found them in the rocking chair we’d bought secondhand from a teammate’s wife. Olivier curled against Marc’s chest with his thumb in his mouth, Marc humming something in French that I half-recognized from his childhood, his hand spanning almost the entire width of Olivier’s small back. Marc’s eyes had been dark in the dim room, and when he’d looked up at me, standing in the doorway in my boxers and his old shirt, his expression had been one I’d never seen before, not in two years of rediscovering each other, not in every fight and reconciliation and slow, patient rebuilding of trust. It was awe. The terrified awe of a man holding something precious and breakable and understanding, for the first time, the full scope of what he’d agreed to protect.
I crossed the room and knelt beside the rocking chair, and I put my hand over his on Olivier’s back, and I felt the warmth of both of them—Marc’s impossible, dragon-furnace heat and Olivier’s smaller, softer warmth nested inside it like a flame inside a lantern—and I said, quietly, into the four a.m. stillness of our home, “I love you. I love you in every version of this life. The one where I lost you, the one where I found you, the one where we’re sitting on the floor of a room with an upside-down bookshelf and a three-year-old who’s going to grow wings someday. I loved you when I was twelve and didn’t know what the word meant yet. I loved you when I was seventeen and thought you’d abandoned me. I loved you through every year I told myself I didn’t, and I will love you tomorrow, and the day after that, and on every single day you promised me, until the very last one.”
Marc’s free hand found mine and laced our fingers together, and his grip was warm and steady and sure, and Olivier sighed in his sleep between us. A small, contented sound. The sound of a child who did not yet know what he was but knew he was held safe, and I pressed my forehead against Marc’s shoulder and felt, for the first time in my life, like every broken thing had finally been made whole.