Girl Trouble: The Missus Meets the Ex, and Then Some …
April Alice Apple, the Groovy Gecko-Gal: So, you’re supposed to be my fiancé’s ex-girlfriend, from a past life about a hundred years ago, back when he apparently played Peter Pan, and I’m supposed to be buying off on this?
Elisabeth “Bettie” Barrie, former lover of Robyn Reynard, the PuerAeternusPuckAtreides!: Yes, I suppose such an explanation must sound rather absurd to you, living as you do in an eminently sensible modern era, in which so many people choose to costume as “super-heroes,” a concept so poorly defined that it could conceivably include practically any character, in fiction or in real life. If you’ve remained this closed-minded in a world of wonders, I doubt your marriage to him will last long.
Meggan Foxxx, Action Figure: Okay, you two, enough. I’m willing to cut you both some slack, here, because as gals, our tempers tend to run high where our guys are concerned, but Dream is my guy, too, and from what each of you is saying, he ain’t done wrong by either one of you, so since he’s been clocking weeks at a time without sleep, on account of literally saving the world, he don’t deserve your drama.
Priestess Pelopia, the Disciple of Logos: On the contrary, regardless of the measure of responsibility that your son bears for this conflict, I cannot comprehend why he should not be required to contribute to its resolution, since it revolves completely around him.
Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove, the Agent of Chaos, CrazySugarFreakBoy!: Hey, gang! Guess what I found out? I can get drunk off maple syrup now! Granted, maybe chugging a dozen bottles of Aunt Jemima, to test out my hypothesis, represented something of a minor flaw in my cunning plan, but I am feeling no pain right now! Whoa … my hands are huge … and yet, they can touch everything except for themselves …
Meg: Hopefully that answers your question, Pelopia? Wendy, can you help me put your exhausted brother back to bed, where he belongs, and make sure he stays there this time, for at least the next several hours?
Gwendolyn “Wendy” Leslie, the other Agent of Chaos, PsychoAcidPervGirl!: Oh, no way! I’ve never seen him drunk before. I can already tell this is gonna be hilarious.
Bettie: Hm. All these young women, here to mother him … he even has a real mother, who’s younger than me. It’s certainly a far cry from the orphaned child I flew with …
Dream: I’ve always had a huge family, though. There’s my mom, my dad …
Wendy: Our mom, who gave me up for adoption when I was born … our dad, who skipped out on our family for about 14 years …
Dream: My mom’s coworkers, most of whom are actually pretty cool, once you get to know them … my dad’s girlfriend, who I can’t stand …
Wendy: Of course, his positive opinion of our mom’s fellow porn performers was probably helped by the fact that one of them was a stripper, later turned Spice Girl, to whom he lost his virginity at the age of 14 …
Dream: My grandma and grandpa, who are dead … my other grandma and grandpa, who are also dead, but who might stop by and say hi at my wedding anyway …
Wendy: A prediction he’s basing on a conversation that he’s convinced that he had with our grandpa’s ghost, during a drug-induced near-death hallucination …
Dream: My aunt, who’s a witch … my uncle, who’s a vampire … my aunt and uncle’s friends, who are a werewolf and a mage …
Wendy: His dead ex-girlfriend, whose ghost also appears to him in hallucinations …
Dream: My friends from school, who I always try to hook back up with, for our semi-regular sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, in addition to our steady stream of online correspondence, about each week’s episodes of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica …
Wendy: One of those friends being his other ex-girlfriend, whose cherry he popped, before she broke up with him, and started having sex with his roommate …
Anna Kensington, the Blacksmith: Hey! Not that it’s any of your business, but we’re saving ourselves for marriage!
Wendy: Saving yourselves for … ? What are you, Justice and Firestar?
Dream: My friends from Odyssey Opportunities … Mr. Book, who’s been recovering ever since they finally found him in the remains of the Odyssey Obelisk tower … Dr. Day-Vincent, who went off to Faerie to fight the Parody Master …
Wendy: Not to mention Dr. Day-Vincent’s ex-wife, Sydney St. Sylvain, a superhero whom he temped for as a sidekick for a few months, but never worked up the nerve to hit on …
Dream: My teammates on the Lair Legion …
Wendy: Including his best friend, who Tracy Turnblad over there types one-handed online stories about him having teh hawt boi-on-boi sexxorz with …
April: Okay, first off, Siouxsie Sioux, you’ve already abused the Ricki-Lake-from-Hairspray jokes through terminal overuse, even more severely than most Saturday Night Live skits run their catchphrases into the ground, and secondly, I’ve only posted a few slashfics about the two of them on my site …
Wendy: Yeah, try a few dozen, Miss Fatty-Face Fag-Hag …
Dream: My infant daughter …
Wendy: Who’s actually pretty awesome, I have to admit, even though her mom is his other, other ex-girlfriend, the one who didn’t even give him a heads-up that he’d knocked her up, until she needed a hand-out from him …
Pelopia: I warn you, my tolerance toward your insolent interruptions is wearing thin …
Wendy: Yeah? Bring it on, Kwai Chang Caine …
Dream: My kid sister … my baby brother …
Wendy: The latter of whom was conceived shortly after our mom broke up with one of her boyfriends, and she shacked back up with our dad for a one-night stand on the rebound, and as for the former … well, I’m the long-lost black sheep and bad seed of the family, and the first time I met my big brother, we alternated between trading blows as arch-enemies, and … heh, trading blows of a different sort …
April: Hold on … Dream, you didn’t actually … not with your sister?
Wendy: Oh, you can’t blame him. He didn’t know for sure that we were related yet, and besides, he was half-conscious and drugged anyway, so if anything, I’m the one who took advantage of him …
Dream: Wait, what? No, I’m pretty sure that story isn’t even entirely in continuity anymore …
Wendy: I don’t care if it was in continuity or not, because it was definitely in my body.
Meg: Baby, maybe we should all wait to sit down and have this conversation a little bit later …
Dream: No, no … Screw it, let’s just get everything out in the open, here and now. Besides, I think I might be sobering up, since I’m starting to feel seriously hung over. April, do you still want to get married?
April: Don’t you, anymore?
Dream: Of course I do! The only reason I wouldn’t is because it’s painfully obvious, even to me in my current state of altered perception, that you’re seriously freaking out over this, and I don’t want to discount or dismiss the validity of what’s bothering you by presuming that whatever plans we might have made before are still on schedule. I absolutely want to do this, but not if there’s gonna be this … big cloud, hanging over our heads, so if you need to wait, we can wait, until …
April: Until what? Until the world isn’t ending anymore? The only reason you haven’t seen me seriously freak out over stuff like this before is because you’ve always been busy, gone or both … when I had to hear, over the news, that you’d been lost and presumed dead, about a million miles away from Earth … or, when we spent the holidays at Sir Mumphrey Wilton’s supposedly haunted homestead in England, and because you and your super-buddies had to sleuth after a supernatural murderer, I was left on my lonesome to chat with someone, or something, who claimed to be the Ghost of Girlfriends Past … or, when Pelopia showed up at the front door to the Lair Legion Mansion, carrying the child you’d fathered on her, but whose existence she’d concealed from you, like Wendy said, until she had no choice but to impose upon your charity … or, when your teammates told me that you’d died, for real this time, and been reborn as some sort of leet Super Saiyan … every single time, I lost my grip, but only as a means of getting it back, getting over it, and moving on, all as part of my coping process. Unlike you and your sister, I don’t freak out for fun …
Dream: But … I don’t …
April: Yeah, actually, you do. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone, in my entire life, who’s more genuinely happy to be mad than you two. You and Wendy both, whenever you get yourselves all worked up, these gleefully anticipatory grins spread all across your faces, like giggling little kids … like you’ve been waiting your whole lives for anyone, or anything, to give you whatever excuse you think you need, to justify your going off, going nuts and losing whatever final fraction of self-control has been holding you back, and it’s like what watching the movie Network might have been like, if Sam Kinison had been playing Howard Beale … and as infuriating as it can be sometimes, I’m willing to put up with it, even when you start taking it to the extreme of acting like Mugen from Samurai Champloo, and do you know why?
Bettie: Because of his fidelity.
Dream: Because of my sound quality?
April: Because of how faithful you are. As opposed to how versatile your vocabulary is.
Bettie: When it came to girls, Robyn was as endearingly eager as a puppy dog, but also just as fiercely loyal. Oh, even as a child, I harbored no illusions of being the first of his string of little girlfriends, nor did I fail to notice, even when we were together as a couple, that I wasn’t the only pretty girl to catch his eye. On more than one occasion, it irritated me to the point of hostility, but for all my petty jealousies toward the other girls to whom he was so clearly attracted, it never occurred to me to doubt his devotion to me.
April: Heh. Even when Dream went wild with Lara …
Lara Night: I was kind of hoping that wouldn’t need to be brought up anymore …
Wendy: I’m kind of disappointed in myself for not bringing it up before she did …
April: *Ahem* As I was saying, even then, I couldn’t consider it cheating, because he didn’t do anything to her, nor did he let her do anything to him, to which I hadn’t explicitly extended my prior permission. As insecure as I can still be about this stuff, it was almost like … I wasn’t even worried, because I trusted him. I have faith in his faith.
Bettie: Hm. My Robyn was hardly inclined to allow anyone such close custody of his heart, unless he considered her someone special. If your Dream is at all similar in that regard, then I suspect I’ve unjustly misjudged you.
April: I suspect we’ve unjustly misjudged each other.
Dream: Does this mean you’re cool with me inviting her to join our family, too?
April: Hey, I’m fine with it if Meg is.
Dream: Can we keep her, Mom? Please?
Meg: *Sigh* She’s not a pet, baby. It’s up to her.
Bettie: Um, what exactly are you people proposing?
Dream: There’s another difference between me and most of the Agents of Chaos who came before me. Whether by their own choices, or by circumstances beyond their control, almost all of them eventually released their hold on the connections that mattered to them, when the time came for them to move on. The difference is, the time when I was supposed to move on already came and went … but I couldn’t, because I wouldn’t let go. I held onto my friends, my family, and everyone and everything else that I ever loved and cared about, and I refused to let go. Now, you’re back from Faerie, for the first time in nearly a century, and you’re on your own, in a brave new world that’s probably as alien to you as another planet would be to any of us, so, if you could use a friend, if only to lean on, then you’ve got one, and if you could use a family, if only to come back to … well, then you’ve got one of those, too, if you want.
Bettie: This is about as sane and as safe as it’s bound to be with you lot, isn’t it?
Dream: You can trust us! We’re responsible people!
April: That line might sound slightly more convincing, if you didn’t do your best impression of Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke, in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, every single time you delivered it …
Bettie: Well … why not? I don’t fancy the prospect of leading a boring life anyway …
