Alex and Melvin were walking down to their house with the feeling of being overwhelmed and blown-minded. Not just a blow but an entire flight to the other dimension.
The scene from before kept on playing on their mind in 4K that they walked right past Melvin's house and had to walk back the extra three kilometres back.
"My mouth isn't going to close anytime soon."
Melvin told the other and showed his jaw not closing after doing an uppercut to himself.
Alexander immediately stopped his mind TV and checked if there was any wound on his boyfriend's jaw.
"I'm fine, I'm fine." The blonde pushed his boyfriend away and asked, "What do you think about all of this?"
Alex sighed and stopped walking to look up into the sky. "I honestly don't know... After seeing all those... things... Seeing those with my own pair of eyes, I do believe that supernaturals exist but being told that I'm one of them was something else."
"Yeah..."
The two resumed walking.
At the watch tower, after their friend suggested that they should shift, every one of them was very kind and shifted partially, if not half-shifted. They even called one of the witches and showed how they would look if they were in their natural form.
Alex had brown, rigid pair of wings separated into four, and on the other hand, Melvin's were pretty much like Tinka's but a mixture of green and brown. The witch around their age with red hair explained that the colour was the only difference in pixie's wings as in faes, different types and shapes depending on the race.
Although the wings and other features on them were only illusions based on imagination and predictions, they didn't look weird with them. In fact, they felt as if they knew the feeling. Those belonged there. Natural. When they saw the wings on their backs, they shivered and knew that it was in their blood and bones.
Even after the projections were gone, their backs and facial features still felt as if they were still there.
Imagining all the things they could do with a pair of wings anyone would die for couldn't keep them hyped up for a long time as Alek's words sank into them. They still had to ask their family if they knew how to explain the unreal, almost absurd situation.
The boys walked to Melvin's house without much of a talk until they reached and exchanged greetings.
"Should we meet tomorrow?" Melvin asked.
"...Yeah." The other answered with a heavy nod and hugged him tightly, sharing a kiss briefly on the lips afterwards.
The routine kiss didn't lighten up the mood like usual. They had hard feelings. But nonetheless, they separated and Alex went home straight and Melvin entered to find his father's slipper's gone, meaning that he had come home from work.
Although he was deaf and couldn't hear anything from the house, he knew his father would be playing a music genre called jazz every day he came back from his clinic in the living room while going through the photo album of the tiny family of three.
Between the two, Melvin had things harder as he only had a seventy-five-year-old father with him, who adopted him as a baby and raised him all the way to where he was now.
Melvin didn't remember that much about his adoptive mother, who died of an illness when he was little. So becoming a pixie meant that he had a long life of mourning after his father when passed away, probably going back to his old life.
Before he met Alex and Alek, he had suicidal thoughts every minute of every day. The looks the neighbours gave him when they heard he was deaf and adopted... Kids bullied him and gave him gay p*rn books when they found out that he was not like them...
Every single day, the same thing was repeated, over and over again, if anything, worse than the day before. Of course, his father, Michael, did his best in protecting the child, but people didn't stop. Michael also informed the school about the bullying, and the bullies were suspended for a week.
But when they came back, people's opinion of Melvin had changed to bad. He heard students and also, many teachers saying that the son and the father were overreacting and that they should have just dealt with it instead of making it public and making the 'poor boys' into suspension. To them, it was just a normal occurrence that people experienced daily.
Eventually, Michael made Melvin spill the beans about what was happening to him and finally decided to change schools. The boy didn't give a speech or a word when he silently disappeared from school in the middle of the second term.
Quitting school added fuel to the neighbours' gossip. They moved from the home town they knew all their lives to a completely different state to lead a new life.
For a long time, he couldn't open up to the new environment and was known as the quiet, weird new kid in school. He was scared of what people thought of him when they knew about his past and his family relations and began to feel sorry for his father that he was such a son.
Melvin came out to his father when he was about thirteen. He cried as he told Michael that he liked a boy but was rejected and apologised for not being a boy like everyone else.
But before he could apologise again for disappointing him, his father embraced him soft and tight at the same time. The father then soothed him by caressing his back while humming, and when the boy was calm enough, he told him that he was happy and proud that his son was courageous.
Michael also told him to live a life he wanted to live and make no regrets. Don't do something just for the sake of making him proud.
That was the moment he knew that his father had his back and it was okay for him to be the way he was. From there, slowly but surely, his suicidal thoughts faded, not fully, though. He began having confidence in himself and became open. The discriminating, hateful, pitiful words didn't reach his new ears full of confidence and understanding.
Meeting Alex and Alek accelerated his self-boost. They were one of the best things that happened to him, and they knew that well.
Although Michael was a little suspicious at first (thinking that the two were just curious and wanted to tease his son), but soon changed his opinion seeing how the three bonded really well and were happy. When his son confessed that he and the other boy were dating, he wasn't surprised as he had already suspected and wished them well and all the support.
////
Melvin knocked on the door when he spotted his father just as he imagined; sitting on the rocking chair and caressing the beautiful memories in the form of pictures.
With the knock, Michael raised his head from the album and closed the book to keep it on the tiny table nearby. He then gestured to come in and spoke using his bony hands, "How was Nate's house? Did you enjoy it?" Nate was Michael's friend since he was in college.
"Yeah."
Michael removed his glasses and tapped another rocking chair in front of him. He knew something was going on with his son.
Melvin sat on the chair, rocking it for a second.
The father kept his silence as he waited for his son to share whatever was on his mind. As expected, Melvin began talking, but the topic was something he least predicted.
"Dad, do you know my birth mum?" Even though there was no sound in the room, to begin with, they both could sense and feel the silence all the way to their mind.
Seeing his father taken aback, not in a good way, Melvin panicked a little, "It's not like I'm going to leave you, but I just want to know where I came from."
Truth be told, Melvin didn't know how he came to be adopted by his parents. They kept on telling him that he was the one and only gift that was passed onto them, and they were going to protect him even after their death.
"Son..." Michael looked for the right way to explain. The time had finally come. His son quietly waited without any force and just sat there. "I should have told you earlier."
The father then reopened the oldest photo album from the shelf, strictly for albums, and removed one photo without any hesitation. Melvin was surprised by the action of removing the photo from under the protection because as far as he knew, removing photos from their protection layer was a big no.
Michael handed the picture after a deep sigh.
The boy received the photo as carefully as he could and inspected what kind of memory was put in there. A pale, blonde woman in white, blown by the wind carrying a baby wrapped in a white towel in her arms was smiling at him. On her, both sides, were his parents in their younger days, probably in their fifties, also smiling.
"Who is this?" The son asked, knowing damn well who it was. He didn't need to be told to see the resemblance with himself.
"Your mother."