FREYJA DAMASCA
Psychic
Posts: 184
Age:
28
Occupation:
Analyst at The Mystic Falls Courier
Status:
Married
Partner:
Theo Damasca
Played by:
Julia
“But it’s hard, when you’re hurt, to let somebody wreck you again.”
Last seen Nov 17, 2024 18:29:01 GMT
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Post by FREYJA DAMASCA on Jan 21, 2023 0:00:14 GMT
 ━ they set me on fire, and i did a lot of burning ━
Just like Bo. His teeny cheeks were beginning to puff up in the way babies always got chubby after birth, but he’d always been beautiful. Cooing to him softly, Freyja pressed her lips to his forehead and laid him in the convertible bassinet they (thankfully) hadn’t gotten rid of after Hazel. Even after seventeen years, it was still in perfect condition, almost like it’d only been a fraction of the time. The style didn’t seem all that old, either, but she wasn’t the best judge of that kind of thing.
He was sleeping, and she was determined to keep it that way, though she knew Theo would be home any minute. One of the last working days before their vacation, where they’d have to leave both their babies to go sit on a beach. She hoped they’d be able to actually relax and not just sit there fretting the whole time.
It was a little late for an anniversary, but that was Theo’s fault for forcing her into a marriage on Christmas Day, leaving them little to no free time to celebrate in subsequent years. Freyja liked spending Christmas with family, and there were a whole bunch of them to celebrate with: her parents and siblings, Frank and his gang of miscreants, their own, little family, plus making time to call Theo’s parents when the time zones lined up.
Anyway, they’d go somewhere warm… if she could ever find their passports. In less than a year, they’d flippin’ vanished, which Freyja thought was just ridiculous━Hazel’s relocation to the attic likely had something to do with it. Ugh.
With Bo on the other side of the table, Freyja plopped herself down at it and began rifling through her last-ditch effort. A box of “important” files that somehow became a mish-mash, catch-all box of credit card contracts, loan agreements, mortgage shit… ah-ha! The three little blue books were fished out from the bottom, identical on the outside, but on the inside…
She double-checked her own, glaring at the Date of Issue with a furrowed brow. What the fuck? It claimed to be issued in January twenty-twenty-one… which was only a year ago, except that Freyja had gotten her passport specifically for their Valentine’s Day trip. Getting it sixteen years later didn’t make any sense.
And Theo’s had been renewed at the same time. Hazel’s was later, before they went to visit her grandparents in Japan, but━according to this date━she would’ve only been a few months old. Freyja remembered her being far older than that.
Puffing out an exasperated breath, Freyja continued frowning down at their documents. She pulled out Hazel’s birth certificate when she found it, and ran her finger over the birth date like a bouncer trying to spot a fake ID.
September eighteenth, two-thousand-and-twenty-one.
“What the fuck,” Freyja whispered to herself, out loud this time, and only seemed to pull herself out of her frustrated trance when she heard the door open. “Hey,” She called out, her voice full of clear distraction. And she didn’t bother to be quiet, either━in a family this big, Bo had to learn to sleep through the noise. “Baby, c’mere… I found our passports…” Except the tone of her voice didn’t sound at all excited━not like it should’ve.
“Look at this. At Hazel’s, and her birth certificate. Why’s it say she’s only a year old? And why didn’t anybody stop us when we flew to see your parents?” She slid the documents over the table so they’d be closer to Theo when he came near. “And mine━I only got it for Valentine’s Day. Look’it that.” Her own passport went next, offered to Theo instead of the greeting kiss she would’ve given if the facts of her whole life weren't crumbling before her.
THEO DAMASCA | happy bday teeo  |
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THEO DAMASCA
Banshee
Posts: 179
Status:
Married
Partner:
Freyja Damasca
Played by:
ANGE
Last seen Nov 11, 2024 20:33:58 GMT
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Post by THEO DAMASCA on Feb 2, 2023 21:01:51 GMT
 If there was one down side to converting the attic for Hazel to move up there, it was having to find places for seventeen years of accumulated junk to be stored. Half a lifetime – no, not quite, it wasn’t like he’d been a blushing, babbling freshman when he’d run into Freyja on campus, he’d already burned out at the hospital and had gone back to teach – building it all up in layers of memories. He’d cried when he’d brought Hazel’s first bike down, remembering how hard he’d blubbed as he’d put a band aid on the knee she’d scraped falling off of it, harder than Hazel for sure. They’d rolled again a couple of years later when Uncle Jack’s attempts at teaching Hazel to ride had ended up with a trip to the ER, a cast being put on her wrist. In a couple of years’ time he’d be balancing Bo on the bike – not letting him get near Jack and the horses until he was definitely ready - holding on to the back of the seat until the second of his kids pedalled away from him.
The suitcases wouldn’t – shouldn’t - turn on the waterworks when he got them down out of the closet in his home office. They’d still have the labels on from their anniversary trip last year, practically pinpointing when ‘let’s have another kid’ had definitely ended up with success on the first or maybe the second or third (they’d made the most of their childfree time after all). Faded stickers from Japan clinging to the sides in spots too. Thankfully they’d be dust free, unlike some of the stuff he’d hauled down under Freyja’s supervision – heavily pregnant women didn’t get to waddle anywhere with things that weighed almost as they did. That was the husband’s job, then and now.
Theo flipped off the radio, the hum thankfully fading right away. There’d been too many times when it had clung and even a moment’s static could leave that fear crawling up the back of his throat. He wasn’t intending on waking up in the middle of the woods or somewhere clear across town, or anything else that might derail the trip. This was their childfree anniversary, the few days they’d have to bask in the sun, to sleep in later than 6am, to wake up without hungry baby shrieks filling the air to demand breakfast and take a nibble or two of each other before they headed down to breakfast someone else had made. The knots in their stomachs over whether or not the kids were alright were gonna be secondary, cut like the Gordian knot the minute they got back.
He climbed out of the car, grabbing his bag on the way out – it was weighty with the reports his genetics class had handed in, but they wouldn’t be touched tonight. The suitcases, getting a start on packing after he hauled them down. Trying to get his fill of the kids before they flew out. He wasn’t about to believe that it was gonna be any easier leaving them this year than it had been last year when it’d just been Hazel to fret about. Dinner first though, cooked while he wrestled the minutiae of Freyja’s day with Bo out of her, each moment of that brand new life hoarded like those things he’d lugged down out of the loft. By the time their other four came along they’d be squeezing the kids and their memories in to every available space, closets and their hearts bursting at the seams with all they were lucky to have. A fairy tale house, a fairy tale life complete with those visits from the monsters.
The house was lit up, warmth spilling out to take the sting out of the tip of his nose and his fingers from that short walk to the door. Theo shut the door quickly behind him to keep it out. A dad’s concern – turn the lights off when you leave the room, you weren’t born in a barn (just conceived in one maybe, yikes). He grimaced faintly, dropping his bag in the hall, shrugging his coat off as Freyja called out. ”Hi. It’s cold out there, I think we’re gonna get another dusting of snow before…” They got away. Hopefully not enough to delay the flights or make driving back from the airport after a pain in the ass – that rush home to hug his kids was gonna seem long enough.
Boots kicked off into their usual spot out in the hall, Theo padded into the kitchen. He bent over, looking in on the pink cheeked bundle still snoozing in Hazel’s basinet, another attic retrieval. ”Hey bub. You been good for your mom?” Probably, they’d lucked out in the kid department twice over. ”Nice work,” he murmured, lifting his head to smile at his wife. ”Wait, they made a typo on her birth certificate? You sure? It was Japan, they would’ve noticed if there was a speck of ink out of place on there…” There’d been no hitches at the airport then though, they’d sailed right through, getting caught in a fierce hug from his parents on the other side of the luggage carousel.
Dark brows furrowed, hazel eyes narrowing as he straightened up to pick up the documents Freyja had slid towards him. All of it had been packed away carefully, everything always going back into the box when they got back from anywhere. Bits of paper had a tendency to vanish when you had kids, rainbows and unicorns appearing on the backs of essays, insurance papers cut into stars – so pretty daddy. ”Which mirrorverse did these come out of? We wouldn’t have left it that long to … we renewed them on time, I’m sure we did. Just in case. And Haze … maybe if it was Bo’s I would’ve said someone had just done a little day drinking at the court house, but none of this makes any sense.” They were those parents, the ones who always seemed to have their ducks in a row, turning up with cupcakes (made by dad) for the bake sales instead of dried out cookies picked up at the gas station on the way. He’d gotten Freyja to double check the spelling a dozen times for him before they’d gotten Hazel’s birth registered, just in case he’d lost his mind and landed the kid with some mortifying spelling of her name forever.
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FREYJA DAMASCA
Psychic
Posts: 184
Age:
28
Occupation:
Analyst at The Mystic Falls Courier
Status:
Married
Partner:
Theo Damasca
Played by:
Julia
“But it’s hard, when you’re hurt, to let somebody wreck you again.”
Last seen Nov 17, 2024 18:29:01 GMT
|
Post by FREYJA DAMASCA on Feb 20, 2023 19:42:05 GMT
━ they set me on fire, and i did a lot of burning ━
“Ain’t a typo.” Freyja puffed, frowning up at Theo. Something was wrong here━a typo would’ve stopped them at the border. A typo wouldn’t have bled to all their other documents. According to these, Hazel was still just a baby. “Why wouldn’t they notice?” She puffed. Any explanation she could muster up wasn’t good enough. They had a relatively normal life for two people with supernatural abilities, so that wasn’t the first thing to come to mind. Even then, it wasn’t as if she or Theo could meld reality, so what the hell was going on?
Cautiously, Freyja’s eyes shifted to Bo. No… he was still too young. And he wasn’t even alive when this seemed to be an issue, so…
“Right?” She sighed, reaching over to flick through a few pages. “But look, all our stamps are here. They’re the same passports we’ve been using.”
Digging back through the box, she tried to find another piece of evidence. “Is someone tryin’ t’tell me that that teenager━who looks just like us━who’s been livin’ in our house is supposed to be a toddler? This is ridiculous. I remember Hazel takin’ her first steps over there.” She looked up and pointed to the sunken living room, “And I remember havin’ her fifth birthday at this damn table. Don’t you?” Freyja asked, furrowed brows directed at Theo now. “Sure, it always felt like she sprouted up overnight, but I… ain’t that normal?”
Tears swam in her eyes, making little lily pads out of her green irises. Freyja frowned harder, flicking a few pieces of hair away from her face as though that was the problem. “I’m frustrated cryin’, not sad cryin’.” She grumbled, though it was a little bit of both━post-partum hormones and all.
She went back to digging, and produced the warranty from the fancy, six-in-one high chair her work friends bought for Hazel. God only knew why they’d kept it━unless the dates were right. Then it was still under warranty. “Theo.” Freyja stared in disbelief for a moment or two, then slowly brought her eyes up to him again. “What the hell is goin’ on?” She would’ve handed it over, but that would mean leaving her state of frozen shock.
THEO DAMASCA | |
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THEO DAMASCA
Banshee
Posts: 179
Status:
Married
Partner:
Freyja Damasca
Played by:
ANGE
Last seen Nov 11, 2024 20:33:58 GMT
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Post by THEO DAMASCA on Mar 10, 2023 21:08:50 GMT
With just Hazel in the house life had been a whirlwind – the rush of him leaving, Freyja finding out she was pregnant, his grand comeback, Hazel’s late night appearance and then new parenthood and the wedding, leaving his head spinning – doing it all over again with Bo felt like an F5 tornado. No matter how much you tried to barter with them babies refused to live on anybody else’s timetable. His birth had thrown chaos into the three settle schedules they’d been running from the moment he’d intervened in their t=Thanksgiving dinner plans. He wouldn’t have swapped it for the world, but how Freyja had even noticed something was hinky among the mess of dirty diapers, endless loads of laundry and nights they still weren’t getting to sleep all the way through was beyond him.
Maybe that was why she thought it was wrong. Your mind played tricks on you when you’d been walking the nursery at three a.m. with the adorable little terrorist holding restful sleep to ransom. He’d seen it at work, almost failing a kid who’d barely squeaked a pass with the one exam question he’d sworn had contained minuses instead of pluses just a moment before. Theo pushed that smug thought that it was soon gonna be Frank and Kit’s problem for a few days aside, the lines between his brows that echoed his wife’s cutting deep as she frowned up at him. ”It’s gotta be a typo. Kids shoot up over night, but not from zero to sixteen.” It just felt like it sometimes, the terrible twos giving way to tantrums of the teenaged sort with only a handful of beats between.
Theo hummed, his throat feeling tight as the sound drew out. If it’d been an airport here, maybe he would’ve just brushed it off, but Japan was all about efficiency. People there did their jobs and did it right. ”Millions of people through the airport every day, someone missed their annual eye exam … it could’ve been anything.” Except for time travel and the sort of ‘the aliens have landed’ crackpotness that was just impossible. It didn’t matter that he screamed over dead people or that Freyja could’ve had every document on the table bursting into flames in an instant, there had to be a normal explanation for it all.
He caught Freyja’s gaze lift to the baby and clucked his tongue, shaking his head at her. They weren’t going there, he wasn’t gonna blink and find out all of this was some whacked out dream. Looking back down, Theo shook his head. He set the right stuff to one side, frowning down at the wrong. ”Then it’s not ours that have a problem. Let’s do this logically…” Right and wrong, they’d filter through like this was just stages of an experiment proving the hypothesis that some bureaucrat somewhere had just typed the wrong thing into a computer, one error compounding until they thought they were losing their minds.
Straightening up, Theo aimed the pages in his hand at Freyja, like he was warding off her question. His head was already spinning, that tornado ready to scoop the two of them up and deposit them in Oz. ”I remember trying to scrub that bright pink icing off the table for a week after,” he agreed. ”And running into the living room a dozen times a day to try and stop her pitching headfirst onto the floor.” A sunk living room hadn’t seem like a great idea then, no amount of baby fencing keeping their intrepid little adventurer away from that cliff – another thing he had to retrieve from wherever they’d put them (if they’d kept them) before Bo got big enough to take those same wobbly first steps that would have him blubbing.
The nod was automatic, the scoot around the table to pull a chair out next to Freyja more purposeful. He set the documents down on the table, using the hand that had held them to cup the back of Freyja’s neck and draw her in close enough to press his lips against the side of her head in reassurance. ”Everybody thinks that about their kids. Three pairs of new shoes in a month is gonna make anybody belief they’ve got a future giant on their hands. Hazel didn’t actually do that. She grew up right here, with us, and when she gets home she’ll tell us we’re both losing our minds already.” Leave it to a teenager to tell the truth. Theo huffed out a breath, his lips curling. ”That’s gonna be both of us in a minute.” Only his would be the sorta tears that came to a man who’d lived a long, incredible life with the family he’d never expected to have, one who knew he still had a good long way to go with them – even if middle age was shooting past at an astonishing rate.
By the time Bo was heading to college, he’d be getting ready for retirement and years puttering around the house after the rest of the kids – he wasn’t to old to set aside that plan yet. ”We’re getting ourselves worked up over nothing, that’s what’s happening. We’ve gotta be.” He scrabbled around for a scrap piece of paper, making sure he wasn’t about to destroy something important in trying to work out just how all of this had happened. Theo dug a hand in his pocket for the little pen he kept there – a throwaway, unlike the one Freyja had bought him that’d sat on his desk for every one of the seventeen years since they’d had that Christmas. Pulling the piece of paper between them, he made a mark at the start. ”We go right from the start, you hitting on me at Whitmore…” The grin hit, beamed bright before he could dial it back. The day that had changed his life. ”June 28th, 20…” He paused like the batteries that ran him had suddenly lost all juice. It should’ve been 2004. Hazel had been born 2005, not much more than a year after her parents had met … in 2020.
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FREYJA DAMASCA
Psychic
Posts: 184
Age:
28
Occupation:
Analyst at The Mystic Falls Courier
Status:
Married
Partner:
Theo Damasca
Played by:
Julia
“But it’s hard, when you’re hurt, to let somebody wreck you again.”
Last seen Nov 17, 2024 18:29:01 GMT
|
Post by FREYJA DAMASCA on Apr 23, 2023 15:34:34 GMT
━ they set me on fire, and i did a lot of burning ━
On the other hand, if they were actually going crazy, neither would be left to take care of their babies.
She huffed out a breath as he sat next to Freyja and drew her in, melting into his side. “You’re right.” She puffed, almost defeatedly, and reached over to curl her fingers around the fabric covering his chest. Hazel would be home any minute now, and Theo was right, she’d give them a look like they had three heads each and they would feel stupid for getting themselves so worked up over it. Only… how could Hazel really know if it happened to her?
With the comfort of Theo next to her, Freyja went for another piece of paper, which, perhaps, was a big fucking mistake. The warranty was the final straw. If she didn’t start crying even harder, her head might just explode. “Did━did you even look at it?” She said (maybe too sharply), and finally shook the warranty at Theo.
They seemed to swap places for a moment. Freyja was the over-emotional one right now, while Theo decided to work off of facts. Numbers, data, all that. And it would make sense in the end, because the alternative was so much scarier.
She sniffed and wiped her eyes, focusing on the paper he started to scribble on. She smiled at the mention of it, too, eyes sparkling with more than just unshed tears. She couldn’t even deny it, either━that’s exactly what happened. “Twenty.” Freyja finished automatically, “June twenty-twenty, so…” She stopped when she realized it couldn’t be. That was two years ago, but she remembered what year she graduated. She remembered video-calling her parents (on her iPhone) a few weeks later and telling them all about her back-and-forth texts with the cute professor. None of that could’ve happened in two thousand and five.
“What the fuck.” She puffed, setting her elbows on the table and leaning forward with her head in her hands. “Why can I remember that day and every day since like it ain’t been that long, but I still remember that pink icin’ crystal fuckin’ clear?” Freyja reached across the table to where her laptop was sitting, pulled it closer, and then pushed up the top. “I’m gonna… log into work. I can check dates on files and…” Her fingers shook as she pulled up the website and logged in.
“Is there anyone…” She thought about asking him to call Di Marco’s and see if they even had a purchase record or could remember anything about their first dinner there, but it didn’t seem smart to involve non-family members. It would be a lot harder to brush it off when (if) they found out they weren’t actually crazy. “Call Frank, maybe?” Freyja asked, scrolling through her work profile. “See if he remembers… oh my gosh.” She pressed her finger to the screen, noting her “date of hire.” May fifteenth, twenty-twenty.
THEO DAMASCA | |
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THEO DAMASCA
Banshee
Posts: 179
Status:
Married
Partner:
Freyja Damasca
Played by:
ANGE
Last seen Nov 11, 2024 20:33:58 GMT
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Post by THEO DAMASCA on May 2, 2023 20:27:04 GMT
Hormones were a bitch and not just for the woman whose system was exploding with them. Empirical evidence hadn’t yet proved that men went through the same gauntlet of changes, but Theo was sure there was a change there too. Frazzled emotions – although he was a crier at any damn time, not just when Freyja was growing bigger and more beautiful with every day, or Bo was shrieking at three in the morning, nuzzling at whatever chest he’d been gathered against in search of something to soothe his hunger – weight gain, the total case of baby brain that had left him staring at his 9am class blankly as they’d asked what broccoli had to do with prokaryotic cells. He’d turned back to the board, staring for a good minute before he’d realised he’d drifted from the discussion points for that morning’s class to the groceries he was supposed to pick up on the way home. He hadn’t done that either, the suitcases, the impending vacation had knocked that clear out.
Maybe a couple of days of lazing late in bed and focusing on just one thing – his wife – would get both their brains set right and make all of this seem like just another symptom of parenthood. ”I’m always right,” he promised, covering Freyja’s hand with his for a moment. That should’ve got a momentary smile out of her at least before the next wave of confusion rolled in. That was how they had to go through this, with a joke at their own expense, because despite the fact that he regularly shrieked over dead people and Freyja could turn every document to ash, Hazel going from a new born baby to a sixteen year old in the blink of an eye wasn’t possible.
The snap of Freyja’s voice as he started scrambling for a scrap – one that wasn’t currently telling them they were certifiable – had a frown cutting through that brief smile. ”Hey!” he said, his voice rough at the edges. ”I’m gonna look, OK, baby? We’re gonna get this sorted out.” He took the warranty gently, his fingers squeezing her hand gently as he worked it out of her grip and set it down with the rest. Bile burned at the back of his throat. The date was right there too. The high chair that’d knocked little divots into one end of the table where they’d pulled it up close for Hazel to sit between them at dinner was still under warranty, when Hazel had outgrown it like fifteen years ago.
Calculations, formulas. He’d always been able to handle those. Dosage loads for medications, chemical formulas to induce a particular cellular reaction. Maybe he’d left the budgeting to Freyja, but she was way better with that stuff. She was organised and had seen what might’ve been staring them in the face this whole time.
His hand dropped to her thigh for a moment, squeezing lightly as she wiped at her eyes. Throat thick with just that first number, Theo froze, his hand still there, the other poised over the mark he’d just made. ”Almost three years,” Theo croaked, sucking in a breath that just stuck in his lungs as he looked slowly at his wife. He’d written down the time for their first date at Di Marco’s just a couple of weeks later, not wanting to risk leaving her standing there outside the restaurant waiting for him cause it’d slipped his mind. He wasn’t about to lose the most incredible woman he’d ever met because he pulled a jerk move.
Theo set the pen down, lifted his hand to smooth it over Freyja’s back as she hunched over the table, slow circles. Soothing. Or it was meant to be. ”Because we had all those days here. We went with white the next year so we didn’t have a repeat, with that unicorn horn and all the glitter on top of it. It … it feels like it’s going fast when they’re growing like weeds. I mean we’re gonna blink in eight months when he’s gonna be crawling around here so fast we can’t keep up with him and we’re gonna wonder where the time went.” Bo was two months old, there was no question about that. He’d been born Thanksgiving night, despite Freyja’s efforts to get him to stay put a little longer so she could get the sweet potato casserole. He’d registered the birth after, the same way he had done Hazel’s…
As Freyja opened her laptop, he was nudging through the documents again, looking for Hazel’s birth certificate, and Bo’s. The laughter that rolled out as Freyja suggested calling Frank. ”Hey big bro, do you remember if Hazel was born yesterday or seventeen years ago?” Oh there was definitely a little hysteria in that. He pulled his phone, setting it down on the table between them. A swoop of his finger over the lock screen, Freyja holding onto both their babies, right there, and the phone was ringing, each buzz tying a new knot in his gut.
”Hey.” Frank’s voice finally came down the line, faintly echoey. A metallic tap punctuated the greeting, like a spoon on the edge of a pan. ”Did you find the suitcases? I could probably dig something up if you couldn’t…”
Clearing his throat, Theo glanced at Freyja and frowned. His eyes ticked from her to the screen where she was pointing at another nail in his sanity. 2020. Again. Just a few weeks before they met. ”I’ve uh … I’ve not looked yet. We were sorting out the passports and you know … there’s just something a little weird with them. Do you remember when Hazel was born? Like the day? The date?” You know, in two-thousand-and-five.
Laughter rolled down the line, some mumbling going on in the background before Frank’s voice came clear again. ”You sure there weren’t some hallucinogens in the dust in your office? You hearing this? He’s asking me when his own kid was born.” That last part definitely hadn’t been aimed at him.
"Yeaaaah, Hazel's seventeen but my niece's just startin' t'talk in full sentences, huh?"
Kit.
Theo planted his elbows on the edge of the table, dragging his hands over his face and back into his hair. ”That’s crazy. You guys have been there since day one. You had Haze when we went for our honeymoon. She was just a baby then. You played tea party with her, you …” You know you’re talking crazy. He wasn’t about to say it out loud, cause that was a shitty low blow that he wasn’t gonna hit with just because this was scaring the crap out of him, but Kit hadn’t seen his niece since before he’d gone to jail for killing Kace. Another fist at his throat, squeezing as he heard both Kit and Frank laugh, although Frank’s sounded a little strained at the edges.
”Everybody thinks everythin’s aaaaall normal. It ain’t. Somethin’ is up in Mystic Falls man. Maybe it’s in the water.”
”It … biology doesn’t work that day. We… we didn’t wake up one more and Hazel was … what if we did?” Theo puffed his question at Freyja, confusion giving his eyes that sheen again. ”Crazier things have happened, but…” Screaming. Fire. Kace back from the dead. How was this weirder than all of that? Because he couldn’t imagine waking up tomorrow to find a teenaged boy slouching out of Bo’s bedroom, acne and bum fluff scattered over his jaw, his voice already breaking.
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FREYJA DAMASCA
Psychic
Posts: 184
Age:
28
Occupation:
Analyst at The Mystic Falls Courier
Status:
Married
Partner:
Theo Damasca
Played by:
Julia
“But it’s hard, when you’re hurt, to let somebody wreck you again.”
Last seen Nov 17, 2024 18:29:01 GMT
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Post by FREYJA DAMASCA on May 30, 2023 16:57:04 GMT
━ they set me on fire, and i did a lot of burning ━
Three years. Not sixteen. All those days she could remember felt like a lie. Sure, Freyja could “remember” every day since, but could she really? And was it normal for a few to blur in between? How about more than that? She couldn’t remember every single day. Could anybody, really, if it’d been sixteen years? And if it hadn’t?
Fuck. She felt like one of those teenagers on the news who didn’t know up from down and talked in circles. None of this made any sense.
As Theo talked about Bo, Freyja’s eyes flicked to their son, still asleep in his bassinet, and thought about interrupting his nap just to snuggle him. She couldn’t, though, no matter how much she thought she might need it. He wouldn’t suffer just because she wanted to feel his squishy cheeks against her lips like that would prove nothing was wrong. “Or in eight months when he’s stomping around because we won’t give him some leeway with his curfew.” Freyja muttered pessimistically, green eyes slowly slipping away from Bo and back to her husband.
She went for her laptop next, desperate for some hard evidence instead of Theo’s reassurances. Freyja loved him, but it just wasn’t doing anything but providing a temporary balm this time. She had to get to the bottom of this, and Theo could call Frank for someone else to double-check with. Or... something. Either way, Theo’s sarcasm didn’t help her feel at ease.
“Well, you can start with not callin’ him ‘big bro,’ ‘cause that’s weird.” Freyja grumbled. He sounded like a teenager in a badly-written movie━and, well, she wasn’t in the best of moods.
Frank answered, and Freyja found the proof she was looking for. Or maybe wasn’t. Her date of hire, clear on the screen, and solid evidence that something had been changed here… including their daughter’s fucking age.
Tears pricked her eyes as Frank started to laugh, and Freyja thought she could reach through the phone and fucking strangle him. If their daughter went from six months to sixteen overnight, then that was possible, right?
Kit’s voice rang through the phone and, at first, Freyja had absolutely no clue what the words meant. It was like he was speaking another language. After what felt like a long, drawn-out moment, she sucked in a breath and looked from the phone to Theo and back again.
“Yeah, tea party when she was still a baby. ‘Bout, what, a year ago? Now she’s seventeen; happened overnight, huh? Everybody thinks everythin’s aaaaall normal…” He continued on his spiel about Mystic Falls’ water supply, and Freyja looped her arm around Theo’s, holding on like he was the only thing keeping her afloat━like they weren’t both drifting now.
Theo, endlessly searching for a better answer than just “everything in Mystic Falls is crazy,” finally started to give in. Her tear-filled green eyes flicked up to his, searching for the last crumbs of stubbornness that normally belonged to her. “What if we did?” Freyja repeated in nothing more than a croak, “You… you were brought back to life━after months of stayin’ with me as a ghost━but our daughter couldn’t have magically aged up without any of us askin’ for it?” It would only be the next weird thing in a long line of them; it wasn’t out of the ordinary, no matter how much it seemed to be.
Kit’s voice broke her soft conversation with Theo. “Yeeeaaah, all I’m sayin’ is, my niece is still a toddler while Hazel’s a teenager now. Shit don’t make much sense. Seems like y’all got a lot to discuss…” She could hear his voice begin to fade away, like he was taking that as his sign to run off as quickly as possible.
“What’re we gonna do?” She whispered, pressing her lips to Theo’s shoulder to muffle the sob that never materialized. Freyja pulled back a few inches after a moment, turning her head to look at Bo. “What if he… when’s it gonna happen for him? We’re gonna lose all those good moments… they’ll just get replaced with all the fake shit. Did she even really have any of those cakes?” Freyja’s eyes flicked back to Theo once more, desperation in her expression. “What’re we gonna tell Hazel? Are we gonna tell ‘er?” And what would it do to their baby girl when she found out most of her life was a lie?
THEO DAMASCA | wrap soon? |
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THEO DAMASCA
Banshee
Posts: 179
Status:
Married
Partner:
Freyja Damasca
Played by:
ANGE
Last seen Nov 11, 2024 20:33:58 GMT
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Post by THEO DAMASCA on Jun 23, 2023 22:14:00 GMT
 Life wasn’t supposed to run perfectly smooth. Even if they hadn’t suffered through those humps and barricades and potholes the size of freaking Rhode Island, then they’d heard about it at least once a month in the sermon at church. It was a tough pill to swallow when you were the one falling into those potholes. How could God do that to good people? The same way he could allow one of those good people to come back, for him to find a woman who loved him with every cell of her body, the same way he did her, the way he could give the two of them the chance to have a family together. Maybe there was some plan to it all that would become apparent later, but Theo knew that he hadn’t wanted to look too hard at the blessing they’d been given. He didn’t want to see if there were cracks to it, or some sort of expiry date that would come back to bite them on the ass at some point.
He didn’t want to think too hard about his son’s whole childhood passing by in a blink either. Hazel’s still felt real enough that he could’ve walked around the house, pulling a memory out of his head for each single inch of the place. Birthdays, toddler tantrums, the spot the dogs would sit in under this very table, waiting for their daughter to single mindedly drop bits of her lunch down for them to hoover up. They were going to have years of that with Bo. Theo sniffled faintly, some strained thread of amusement running through the sound at Freyja’s observation. ”In sixteen years,” he corrected her. ”And he won’t get it, we’re not gonna be those parents whose kids get more feral the younger they are in the pecking order.” One corner of his mouth lifted as Freyja glanced back at him, but the doubts had already found the cracks in his heart and mind and were working their way in their like fungus, just waiting to grow.
Frank was the one who could turn all of this confusion around for them, telling them this was just some sort of insanity brought on by sleep deprivation. Only he was the one with the medical degree. He could’ve named a dozen mostly innocuous things that could leave them feeling a little out of it. Theo pulled a face at his grumbling wife as he made the call. He’d take that sort of weird over this any day of the week.
Reassurance didn’t come rolling out of his brother the way he’d prayed it would. His amusement prickled at the back of his neck like a sunburn, the sensation only growing as Kit cut in, amused as hell over … No Theo’s heart fluttered at the base of his throat, his chin ticking back and forth as Freyja met his eye, desperately wishing all of this away. It was exhaustion, insanity (that was more understandable after all they’d been through), some dumbass practical joke Frank had set up because in a few days they were gonna be stretched out by a pool while he was stuck at home. Please let it be just that. He’d pay Frank and Kit back, would make them miserable, but things would be back to normal after that.
”Nothing like that happens just overnight. That’s crazy,” Theo bluffed, an invisible hand slowly closing around his throat, trying to steal the strength from his voice. Forget that Kit hadn’t actually seen that baby niece of his in forever, the man had taken enough mind altering substances that something had to have been fried at some point. After all that had happened, he wasn’t gonna condemn the guy for that, but it had to make a difference to his recall, right? Frank was on their side, even if he hadn’t been, it would’ve been easy enough to rationalise him not knowing with the explosion that had almost killed him.
Theo had to swallow back the sick feeling he was giving himself with his shitty attempts to invalidate what he was hearing. He drew Freyja closer, linking his fingers with hers to squeeze reassuringly. Dipping his head down, he pressed his lips to her hair. ”There’s gotta be some limits with what can happen right?” he asked Freyja. ”I’m back because Cory had some pull, he got me out because its his job to…” Ferry the souls of the dead. As a banshee it had been different for him, but at the end of the day he’d been in the right place still for there to be something of him for Cory to … put back. Theo swallowed convulsively, the sick feeling rising higher up his throat. ”What could do that to Hazel?” Something. It was s terrifying thought, but there was still so much out there that they probably didn’t have a damn clue about or control over.
Pressing his lips together to try and keep the tears back, Theo squeezed Freyja’s hand again. They’d work this out, whatever it was and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to anybody who loved their daughter. ”Thanks,” Theo muttered hoarsely to Kit as he started to bug out of the conversation. Frank muttered something about talking later, but then he was thumbing at the screen of his phone and setting it down on the table. He slowly eased his grip on Freyja as she kissed his shoulder and slowly drew back to look at their son. Theo followed her gaze, wondering how the kid had slept through all of that.
He pasted his tongue to the roof of his mouth like that would stave off the tears that were hovering on the brink of spilling over his lashes. ”What can we do?” he asked hoarsely. They didn’t have a clue how it had happened with Hazel, until they did they had no clue how to stop the same thing from happening to Bo. ”Baby, we’re not gonna drive ourselves crazy, hovering over him every minute of the day just in case.” This already had them questioning their sanity, they’d lose it completely with that sort of strain and they had two kids they needed to keep it together for.
Turning in his seat, he brought his hand up to cup his wife’s cheek. Theo met her eye, held it like he could will everything to be alright. ”It’s not fake while we do remember them. We’ve got them right here, Hazel does too and that makes them as real as everything else.” Theo let go of her hand to lay his hand over her heart while the index finger of his other hand tapped her temple lightly. ”We gave Hazel those birthdays she’s never gonna forget. All those moments she knew that we both loved unconditionally. She’s a happy kid, because of what we’ve all had together. Nothing is going to change that. I promise.”
Swallowing hard, Theo shook his head. ”Not now, maybe not ever. She’s already been too much and until she know what really happened, it’s just gonna scare her … the same way it did us. We’ll speak to Cory, OK? We’ll try and figure all of this out and until then, we just keep giving our kids those moments and all the love we can.” Dipping his head, he nuzzled at her cheek, pressing his lips to the corner of her mouth and then fully catching hers in a kiss that he hoped would stamp the promise that they were gonna be alright deeper into his wife’s heart than he felt it in his own.
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