Jack had known Twi for years, since long before she had actually been known as Twilight, when she had been twelve and had just gotten into a fight with one of her classmates over the existence of Santa Claus. He hadn’t expected her to see him, after all no one else had ever been able to, no mortals at least, but he had not been able to let the bruised girl sit and mope about the trouble she was in for fighting back when she had tried to stop the kids in her class pushing her around.
Aella, which was her real name, had been a tiny child back then, with wide brown eyes and straight, chestnut brown hair that reached halfway down her back. All of her classmates had towered over her and while Aella had been top of her class material, she had never allowed herself to get there, if only so she could fit in better with the others and try and make friends even if it never seemed to work.
It was Aella’s need for friendship that had made Jack take the risk and try and cheer up the small twelve year old, creating creatures out of the ice he had formed on the windows and letting the girl play with them before they exploded into snow. Unlike other children her age, who seemed to grow up too fast these days, Aella had been delighted rather than freaked out by the icy critters and it had been about when the ice cat she had been playing with had exploded into snowflakes which had drifted around her hiding place when she had finally seen him properly.
That had been the start of a long lasting friendship that had lasted through more than a decade, long past the Age of Disbelief, when almost all children stopped believing and as such, seeing the spirits in the world around them, and not changed when Twi had gotten herself a job and joined the ‘adult world.’
Other than Jack, Aella had not had many friends until she had started at university, just Keighley, who unlike Aella had stopped believing years and years ago but was willing to let her friend live in her fantasy world if she wanted to as long Aella kept up with her school work. And between Kei and Jack, Aella had started pushing herself again, not fearing the reactions of her classmates and pushing herself to get the grades she knew she could achieve.
By the time Twi had reached University, she had already worked out a way around the problem of no one but her being able to see Jack, a small, wireless earpiece that was supposedly connected to her phone, but had never actually received a phone call in its entire life, lived on her ear, allowing her to talk to Jack without seeming like a crazy person. Not that Jack was around the entire year. He had duties to do after all and even if he hadn’t, he was too much of a free spirit to want to stay in one place the entire year, not to mention when Spring hadn’t been able to shift him, Summer had chased him away with brilliantly sunny skies and swelteringly hot days.
It had been disconcerting for Jack the first year Aella had gone to university, when he had been chased away by Summer only to come back that Winter to find that Aella had not only moved cities, which he had been expecting since she had warned him about university, but that she had finally managed to find other friends. Friends who didn’t call her Aella, but Twilight instead.
His book nerd of a friend hadn’t changed other than her suddenly increased collection of friends. Twilight, nicknamed after a certain book obsessed pony in what Jack had thought was a cartoon for little girls, had welcomed him back with open arms. Though none of her friends had been able to see him either, they had just assumed that since she was ‘on the phone’ with him a lot of the time, he was just some boyfriend from back home (a fact that had embarrassed Twi to no end), they had been the ones to encourage her to write a book using her ‘rather vivid imagination.’
She had not managed to write that book before graduation, but she had at least earned her honours degree in her chosen subject, something that was rather impressive considering that her final term had fallen in the Spring she and Jack had run into Bloody Bones, aka ‘Tommy Rawhead,’ one of the Bogeymen who hunted children for sport. It had cost Twi her 2:1 but they had saved several kidnapped children, something Twi reassured Jack, was much better than any degree classification she could have gotten.
Without a high classification Twi had moved back home, looking for a job related to her degree in Creative Writing and Journalism, even as she returned to her part time job in the local library, sorting books and helping the school groups when they came every week. It was a job she loved but one that gave her plenty of time to work on her book since most people didn’t bother going to the library any more.
Earning just enough to move out of her parents’ house and into a place of her own, which she got at a reduced rent in exchange for doing the place up, Twi slowly let it fill with books, until she had to move some of her bookcases down to her basement. Helpfully the attic had a skylight, which was always left open to allow Jack free access to the house, and Twi put boards down before putting a camp bed up there. It wasn’t exactly ideal, but it was somewhere extra for Jack to go when he needed to crash.
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