#i still dont know how to spell it i missed rabbit fest ok ;-;

[olivia-anderson-fanfic]

Unfamiliar

Part 6

Demon!Grim gets summoned by a bunch of kids accidentally and immediately decides to adopt them in retaliation

<P5

Grim poked his head into the kids’ room the moment he got home. He wasn’t sure why he did this – it was illogical. They were asleep and, even if they weren’t, they weren’t likely to disappear. But it still gave him some kind of relief, to poke his head in and see them all still in bed.

Ace blinked an eye open, curious, but not enough to lift his head. Seemingly content to lay there for a while longer.

Grim sent a short wave his way before closing the door. He walked over to his kitchenette, unpacking all of the items he didn’t really understand. He squinted, suspiciously, at the chicken. Wondered, absently, whether Ace could eat it raw – he was a dragon, after all, surely all of it would turn to ash in his stomach regardless. He unpacked the cauliflower, and was even less sure what to do with it.

Okay! He would do Deuce’s first! Maybe he would figure out what to do with the other things while he cut up the watermelon.

Ace wandered out of the room after around half an hour, Trinity and Deuce on his heels. This was more because of the hands dragging them along than any real want of their own. From the looks of things, Trinity and Deuce very much wished to be asleep. Trinity was half-stumbling behind Ace. Deuce hadn’t even bothered to open his eyes yet.

Ace was the one that Grim’s eyes focused on, though. Partially just because he was the one in front, but mostly because he was looking at the mess of foods in front of Grim with an expression that could only be described as ‘abject horror’.

“Um,” said Grim, smiling nervously. “Bon appetit?”

“Why is there an entire boiled cauliflower on the table?”

“It’s healthy!” said Grim. Though he was less sure about this when leveled with Ace’s unimpressed look. “It tastes bad, therefore it’s healthy!”

“It’s a vegetable, so you’re right about it being healthy, but why a whole cauliflower?”

Grim looked down at the cauliflower. “... bon appetit?” he tried, again.

Ace sighed, taking a moment to sit Deuce and Trinity down at the counter (Deuce immediately slumped over, head pillowed in his arms, trying to sleep again), before walking around the kitchen island, shooing Grim away from the food.

“Trinity, are you okay with riced cauliflower for now?”

Trinity, who had been staring endlessly at the counter as if trying (and failing) to discern the answers to life’s mysteries that lay within the marble pattern, squinted at Ace.

“... are you fine with –?” Ace started to repeat himself.

“Yes,” she decided, finally, nodding.

Ace looked so tired. But in a very different way than Deuce and Trinity were tired. This was a bone-deep kind of tiredness that only came when your friends were being stupid. He walked over to the fridge. Opened it. Immediately closed it again. He lifted his head to level a flat look Grim’s way.

“Why do you have a severed arm in here?”

“Because it would decompose if I left it out…?” Grim said.

This, apparently, was not the right answer. Ace closed his eyes, counting to ten.

And then he opened the fridge again, peering inside.

“Why do you have nothing but tuna?”

“I like tuna.”

“Tuna isn’t even supposed to go in the fridge!”

“It’s better when it’s kind of crunchy!” Grim defended himself.

Ace closed the fridge again. “How have you lived this long?”

“Can’t die.”

Ace sighed through his nose. “Are we doing anything today? Because we need to go food shopping.”

“Well… it’s come to my attention that you three have to go to school at some point…” Grim said, eyes flicking between each kid in turn. He was relieved to find that none of them seemed particularly against the idea (or, at least, no more against the idea than any other kid would be). “Deuce, I’m not sure what your mom will want to do on that front – or if you’ve already finished school – so I have to wait for her… but I assume you want to go to school with these two?”

Deuce nodded, firmly.

Grim sighed. “Then I definitely have to talk with your mom. In order to go to school, you need to prove your identity, and I’m not sure how it works for fae considering – you know – you can’t tell anyone your name.”

The three kids looked horrified.

“We have to use our real names?” Trinity asked.

Grim hesitated. “You have to write them down for the people who work at the BVS, yes. I don’t have to see it, and we can tell your teachers about your… situation before school.”

This did not seem to help with the impending anxiety attacks he was about to deal with.

The door to the kids’ bedroom slammed open.

“Why is my son so –?!” Delilah started, only to pause when she laid eyes on three devastated kids. She blinked a few times, processing, before looking at Grim, no longer mad, just very confused.

Grim sighed. “I told them that they have to go to school…”

“And…?” she prompted.

Grim shuffled from foot to foot. “Well, in order to go to school here, you have to prove your identity –” Delilah seemed to catch on, her eyes widening. Grim rushed to finish his sentence. “– whichmayormaynotrequiretellingpeopletheirNamesbutitshouldn’tbethatbad –.”

“Must they go to school here?” Delilah cut in.

Grim’s mouth snapped closed, and he could admit, privately, that he was glad she had stopped him before he had rambled for too long. But the thing she had distracted him with was... “Where else would they go to school?”

“In the fae realm,” Delilah said.

Grim supposed that made sense. Not using your real name would be expected there. And it wasn’t like fae were that different from demons when it came to randomly adopting children, though he was under the impression that the ‘adoptions’ were more like ‘stealing humans away’. The faerie that had stolen Ace, Deuce, and Trinity wasn’t exactly a rarity, outside of the choice to treat them terribly.

(Also, stealing Deuce, another faerie, was probably, if he had to guess, a faux pass.)

So, if it was common for faerie to steal random children, and common to treat those children as if they were your own kids, then it was fair to assume they would have a similar schooling system to demons – one focused on making sure that every species can get the education and life skills that they would one day need to get by.

It might work.

Unfortunately, Ace and Trinity still looked stressed. Probably because of the Trauma.

Deuce worried his lip. “Okay, I… have a plan.”

The two kids looked at him, identically confused expressions on their faces.

“If – if you Give me your Names –.”

Trinity jerked away from Deuce so suddenly that, had Grim not been as fast as he was, she would have fallen off of the barstool entirely. From the look on her face, she was half-tempted to fall anyway, just to get that much further from Deuce.

Deuce held up his hands placatingly. “If you Give them to me, then you can’t Give or Tell your Names to anyone else, they’ll be mine. Which means no one else can have you, okay?”

Trinity still looked nervous, but less so.

Ace, however, narrowed his eyes at him. “Will you give them back after?”

“... if you want me to, I will,” Deuce said, more than a little sulky at the prospect.

Strangely, this did seem to comfort Ace somewhat. Maybe it was just the knowledge that a faerie can’t lie, but Grim suspected that Ace was more comforted by the fact that Deuce wasn’t hiding that he wanted to keep their Names.

Less than a minute later, the door to Grim’s apartment slammed shut behind him and Delilah.

He turned to look at the woman, his eyes wide. “Did I just get kicked out of my own house?”

She looked amused. “Think so, yes.”

“... alright.”

He pulled out his own phone and started frantically downloading as many books on codependence and childhood trauma as he could. Because Deuce literally owning their Names sounded like a recipe for disaster codependency-wise. He couldn’t really stop them, Giving someone your Name only took a few seconds and it wasn’t as if he could watch the kids every minute of every day (he had to go back to work at some point), so… he would just have to mitigate the damage…

Hm. So, codependency was not what he thought it was. He scratched his head. Apparently, it was the specific kind of enabling relationships that form when one party is addicted to a substance. That… might be helpful at some point, he supposed, as a precaution, he wasn’t intent on offloading the books from his phone (he had already paid for them, anyways), but it still raised the question of what to do.

He leaned closer to Delilah to whisper, “Do faeries have therapists?”

Delilah shook her head. “Not really. When you live as long as we do, it’s better to self-actualize on your own.”

Demons were much the same.

Well, they didn’t self-actualize. They tended to look at their problems, go ‘hm’, and then get used to it because they had millions of years to do so. But he could see the appeal.

Hm. Welp. That was unfortunate.

Maybe he could get tips from the other school kids’ parents in a PTA meeting or something? But they were likely to all be faerie, who didn’t have therapists, so…

Looks like Grim was going to have to get a degree in psychology. On top of working and raising kids.

At least he wouldn’t be bored anytime soon, he supposed.

The door opened to reveal Deuce, who looked like he was vibrating in place. Which was… certainly interesting.

“Can we come back in?” Grim asked.

Deuce stepped aside, still beaming widely.

Trinity seemed fine. She had plopped herself down on the couch and started flipping through TV channels. Grim felt a strange sense of solidarity when she chose a romcom, and then grimaced when he remembered that she was a child and romcoms weren’t always child-friendly.

But, first…

Ace was seated next to her, but not slumped into the cushions like she was. He was sat bold-upright, staring at his hands. Not quite in a daze, but certainly weirded out.

“This is so weird,” Ace whispered. “It’s just… gone.”

(Trinity slid the remote into one of the pockets of her robes, which would make subtly changing the channel much more difficult for Grim.)

“It’s fine, you get used to it. Honestly, I thought it was weirder having my name again…”

“Your names aren’t gone,” Deuce sighed. Then, he jabbed his thumb into his own chest, not quite pointing at where his heart was but certainly near it. “They’re right here.”

Aw.

“Ace, yours is all… warm. Trinity, yours is kinda fluffy.”

Oh, that wasn’t a metaphor.

“What does mine feel like?” Grim asked, mildly curious. He didn’t have a soul, so his Name was pretty much the closest thing to it he had. He wanted to know more about it.

“... big,” decided Deuce.

Ah, children are always so eloquent.

But, everything seemed to have been settled, so he was happy to leave it be.

Within the week, the kids had been sent to school. Apparently the bureaucracy in the fae realm was extremely efficient. Grim was almost jealous.

He was actually jealous when the ground beneath his feet began to glow.

He was being Summoned.

And, unfortunately, he suspected he was being summoned to court.

His lips pressed into a thin line when he blinked his eyes open and found himself in a courtroom, being peered down at by a judge clad all in black.

Someone’s been watching too many human court dramas, what kind of demon wears clothes? Grim thought, rolling his eyes internally. Not externally, though, because he was currently standing trial.

Not that he was sure it would help.

See, there was a reason why demons refrained from making deals, even if it was an easy way to get rich in a short amount of time.

Only a few higher-ups had a license to make a Deal for someone’s soul. Everyone else was sent out to actually follow up on the terms of the Deals that they made (to make sure that people got their money, or that whoever it was died, or whoever it was didn’t die… that kind of thing).

The only way someone like Grim could make a Deal was if it had been an accident. Something that the demon simply stumbled into, rather than something they purposefully sought out.

Which was, more or less, what had happened.

However, the demonic justice system wasn’t particularly fair. Not exactly because they were all ‘evil’, it was just that no one involved in a court case – be it the defendant or the actual judge – wanted to be there in the slightest. Which meant that people were incentivized to get a case over with as quickly as possible.

… they weren’t prone to getting it over with by dismissing a case or declaring the defendant innocent.

Grim slammed his forehead against the desk in front of him, over and over. Maybe if he tried hard enough, God would get annoyed by the sound and smite him.

But he was a demon and God wasn’t merciful to demons, so Grim suffered:

“I was summoned by them, I had no choice in the matter.”

“It says here that you were Summoned multiple times, and even pushed a few people out of the way of the Summoning Circle to ensure you would be sent back.”

“They insulted me,” Grim said, so very close to snapping. “I had to defend my honor.”

“If they insulted you, then why did you take them in?”

“They grew on me,” said Grim. “Like mold.”

Silently, he wondered if asking Delilah to bring the kids over once school ended was too exploitative. Demons think kids are cute, and he does not want to rot in jail for the next hundred years or so for the high crime of wanting to be able to afford said kids. He can make a play for sympathy points…

And then his phone rang.

Grim rushed to pull it to his ear, ignoring the offended looks on the judge and jury’s faces. Surely that wouldn’t become a problem later.

“Hello?” he said, uncaring of whether it might be a scam call or not.

“Is this Ace’s guardian?”

Grim’s smile faded slightly. “Yes?”

“He got in a fight with one of the werewolves in his class and –.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Grim said, sighing.

The judge gave him an incredulous look. “You can’t just –.”

“Something has come up. I’d say that it was nice to meet you, but it wasn’t. Hope to never see you again! Bye!”

And then he left. Some people tried to stop him, but he was faster, so who cares? You can get out of anything if you’re fast enough.

He might have looked a little frazzled by the time he reached the principal’s office, but that was fine. So long as he didn’t have blood on him, who cares?

The faerie at the desk wrinkled her nose at him.

Ah. Riiiiight. Faerie actually care about appearances…

Eh.

“What happened?” Grim said, taking a seat by Ace.

The werewolf kid’s parent wasn’t there, suggesting that Ace was at fault for the fight, but Grim wanted to hear it from his mouth.

The werewolf kid, though, answered for him: “He said I was annoying!”

“No, I said you were annoying as hell,” Ace sniffed. “Get it right.”

Grim sighed. “Ace. You live in Hell.”

The principal gave him an incredulous look. “Is that really what you’re focusing on?”

Grim shrugged. He had suspected from the beginning that Ace and Trinity might get in trouble today, they had been on edge regardless of what Deuce had done to protect their Names. Frankly, they had lasted longer than expected (Trinity was still doing well, good for her), so he was going to take this as an overall win.

The door swung open, revealing a teacher, who was holding Deuce and another kid by the back of their uniform shirts.

Grim stared. Okay. That wasn’t expected –.

“He asked for Trinity’s Name,” Deuce said, his expression dark.

Grim stiffened. That was kind of messed up. Sure, they were kids, but –.

“I did NOT! I simply asked what I should call her! And! I’m not even a full faerie, I wouldn’t be able to DO anything with her Name if I had it!”

Oh. Okay.

Ace, though, either hadn’t heard the boy’s explanation or didn’t care, because he launched himself at the child, knocking them out of the teacher’s hands and sending them both to the floor. The werewolf child tried to pull Ace off of him, probably out of a sense of solidarity, but then Deuce kicked him in the head – something he was only able to do because he was still hanging from the teacher’s hand. Not that the faerie’s grip on Deuce lasted long. The teacher let go of Deuce in their surprise, and Deuce quickly joined the writhing mass of limbs on the floor.

Grim pressed his face into his hands. He strongly suspected that was not going to be getting much information from the PTA members. Or maybe they would have too eager suggestions as to where the kids could get therapists.

“Deal with your children,” the principal said, horrified.

Ughhhhhh fineeeeeee.

“If you two are here, how is Trinity doing?”

Ace and Deuce froze. Which wasn’t a particularly good thing to do in the middle of a scuffle. But it allowed the adults enough time to drag the kids to different parts of the room.

“I’m fine,” Trinity’s voice chimed.

She stood in the doorway, her hand interlaced with a small child’s. Human-esque, save for the slight pallor to his cheeks and fangs poking out from between his lips, a little too long for his current height.

Trinity’s neck was bleeding. There was blood dripping from the vampire child’s mouth. Grim could put the pieces together.

Trinity didn’t seem to mind that she had, probably, been attacked. She was used to ‘losing’ blood for the sake of rituals, so she was used to the feeling of having more blood outside of her body than in it. Witches are made to lose large amounts of blood over time, even if seeing it in person was always more than a little horrifying.

This, of course, did not matter to Ace and Deuce, who immediately tried to jump the vampire.

Grim suspected that he had a long few years ahead of him.

But, as he knelt by Trinity to wipe at her neck and make sure the damage wasn’t too bad, he quietly thought that he didn’t mind all that much.