forthedog | (no subject)

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When the sun sets, they light the torches.

It's nothing large, nothing much besides a standard barbecue - which had been insisted upon. There's a grill hot and a fire burning in the pit, and the marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate the girls had begged for are laid out on the long folding table with the rest of the food. Multiple coolers are fully stocked and the smell of smoke and cooking meat floats deliciously through the air.

In truth, a lot of this is Mack and Flo's doing, insisting on a real birthday party because not having one is some kind of unbearable abomination. So there's cake - chocolate - and there are even some balloons, and the girls - with help - have flung streamers haphazardly into some of the smaller trees. They're very pleased with themselves. Daddy may not care hugely about this, but it's the principle of the thing, and Daddy's opinion ultimately doesn't matter much.

Which is fine. As far as Mike is concerned this isn't even necessarily just a birthday party. It's a last goodbye to another summer, which feels like an achievement in itself. So in the flickering torchlight, with the moon rising through the trees, everyone is welcome.

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The truth - and he has no problem being honest about this, to himself or anyone else - is that Mike never thought he'd make it to forty. Another truth is that technically he didn't. Another truth - and he's sure of this - is that he's a hell of a lot older than that.

But the technicalities don't matter. Once he would have rolled his eyes at it, but this is what matters, friends and family, people he loves, Mack and Flo chasing the last of the fireflies through the dusk and shrieking with the joy that comes with the knowledge that they'll get to stay up a little past their bedtime, despite it being a school night.

Done with a short shift at the grill, he grabs a beer and turns his attention toward saying proper hellos. Once he would have hung back on the edges of something like this, but that was another time.

He's come a long way.

Castiel has been eyeing the grill. It is Dean's responsibility to pick the grill they will register for and to 'man' the grill but he would still like to learn. He could at least learn to grill vegetables in hopes that they might entice Dean more than any of his less successful attempts.

"Hello Mike, Happy Birthday," he announces, raising his eyes to give a proper greeting. "Congratulations on being forty. My vessel is also forty. It is not all that old, in the grand scheme of things."

"Yeah, I don't even know how old I actually am." He flashes a grin, gives Castiel's shoulder a brief squeeze. "Either way, I didn't think I'd still be here now."

He nods at the grill. "What's so interesting?"

"Dean is much the same, as far as age goes," he says, hesitating for a moment before reaching out to reciprocate the gesture.

"The grill, Dean wants one. I thought we might register for one, for the wedding. It is all we really want as neither of us feels comfortable asking for multiple gifts. Perhaps we can get one and then make food at the wedding."

"You wanna be worrying about feeding people at your own wedding?" He arches a brow. He can actually see how that might appeal to some, but. "Unless you get someone else to deal with that for you. Pretty great present, though. We'd kick in."

"Dean wants to do it," he explains with a serious nod. "I think it appeals to some sort of male, provider instinct. Also, the wedding will be a casual affair and we want to thank our guests by feeding them meat."

"Yeah, Dean is a male provider," he says, not even trying to hide his amusement. "Well, if you wanna feed us meat, I'm sure as he'll not gonna try to stop you." He nods over at Neil, who has both twins practically wrapped around his legs. "We didn't even have an actual wedding, second time around. I get wanting it casual."

"Oh," he breathes, frowning as he realizes he did not know that. "Did you want to? Have a wedding, I mean? You could have made your friends buy you a present."

"Nah, we did the whole wedding thing the first time around. Seemed like kind of a lot to go through it all again." Which is part of the truth. A relatively small part. He's not going to talk about the disease, about slamming his fist into the side of Neil's face, about looking down the barrel of Dean's gun. About the sheer terror of those days and what it drove him to.

They're better left out of this.

"It was... it was kind of a rough time, anyway. I didn't really have many friends."

The smell of the cooking food is making her sick, but she's here because it's Mike's birthday and even if she's almost entirely certain his daughters were in charge of all the planning, it's a big deal whether he thinks it is or not. She's completely on Mack and Flo's side in this.

But she passes by the cake and gets a whiff of the chocolate and her stomach turns. Mike is nearby and she goes to him, grabbing his arm and tugging him away from the crowd, away from the smells of the food. She hasn't told anyone yet that she's pregnant and she doesn't want to start throwing up in the middle of Mike's party. "Come with me," she begs.

"Hey, what-" But he doesn't protest as she pulls at him. The look of distress on her face seems genuine, and he feels a pang of concern. He wasn't a hypochondriac-by-proxy with Eostre and he's certainly not going to be one now, but that doesn't mean he isn't keeping a closer than normal eye on this.

When she pauses he lays a hand on her arm, studying her carefully. "What's wrong?"

"The food smells are killing me," she says after she takes a few deep breaths and when she thinks she feels the worst of it pass, she looks up again and offers Mike a smile. It's not the end of the world, really, she's never been a big eater, but she has to try and put away more food now for the baby.

"But I'm okay," she says. "I just needed to get away so I didn't throw up on you when I wish you a happy birthday." She smiles again and wraps her arms around him. "Happy birthday."

"Oh." He huffs a laugh of realization, hugging her back. "Yeah, pretty sure Eostre went through that. It goes away."

He turns his head, presses a quick kiss to the corner of her mouth. "Thanks." Just having the thing is good, but when he looks around and sees the people like her, the people who mean everything, it's even better.

"I read only half of women get over it by week fourteen, which means I really only have a fifty-fifty chance of getting over it in the next seven weeks." She smiles at him and says, "Seven weeks sounds like a really long time sometimes." She's dealt with worse by far and it's actually kind of nice to be worrying about something as normal as morning sickness, but that doesn't mean she's not going to take full advantage of the right to complain.

"So how much did your daughters have to do with this?" she asks, looking around.

"Almost everything." He shrugs, smiles. "I wasn't gonna tell 'em no. Birthdays mean so much more when you're six. I wasn't really thinking of doing much of anything."

He nods back toward the party. "Think you can go back, or you wanna stay away a little longer?"

She pauses, taking stock of how she feels, then nods. "I think I'm okay," she says. And if she isn't, if she has to retreat again, she will.

"Just don't try to make me eat any cake," she warns, giving him a look before she loops her arm through his. "So forty, huh?" She remembers being in her early twenties and thinking that forty was so old, but now, only twenty-seven herself, she's realized making it to forty will be a gift.

"Technically. Sort of. I dunno." He shrugs. She hasn't changed, not outwardly, and he knows the precise angle and degree at which Neil would roll his eyes, but being near her does feel different now. He remembers it being this way with Eostre, looking at her and marveling at how such a thing could even be.

She was always special. Now she's special in a whole new way.

"Part of me was one age in the Realm, the part of me that died on the island was older than that, and then I got these... flashes of memory..." He shakes his head, smiling slightly. "I know this is fucking cliche, but age is just a number."

"No arguments here," she agrees and she's beginning to think maybe she has a very specific type. The night with Mike in the alley, Dale, Spike, Rick; all of them significantly older than she is and yet it's the type of thing she'd only given thought to because of Donna. The way she'd made Andrea and Dale's relationship her business because she'd been concerned about the age difference.

"I think I'm twenty-seven, but I don't actually know," she admits, smiling. "So, you know, it really is just a number."

Slipping up behind him, I slide an arm across his collarbones, pulling him back against my chest. My chin hooked over his shoulder, I press a sloppy kiss to his cheek. I'm not drunk, not yet, not even close, but I'm loose and happy and this is a good thing. A good day.

"Hey."

He presses back, letting out a sigh. This is something else that hasn't changed - and yet, it has, in all kinds of ways that they're both still discovering.

"Hey, yourself."

"How you feelin', old man?" I ask, pushing a hand through his hair, which might be just a little thinner than it was when we first met. There are other differences, too. More lines on his face. His knees a little stiffer, maybe. But I know I've changed, too.

We might not be given the chance to get old together, but time's passing, in its convoluted, fucked up sorta way.

"Not old." He laughs quietly, catching Neil's hand in his and holding on, pressing his lips briefly to the back of it. Except that's not quite accurate. He feels no older than he normally does, which is something beyond age itself, something numbers don't touch.

"Happy."

"Bullshit, you're old as fuck. Neither of us can even keep track anymore, man," I point out, because I feel like forty was picked kind of arbitrarily.

"Fuck. Don't say that, you're bound to fuckin' jinx it, the sky'll start fallin' down on us."

"Like either of us have any control one way or the other." He turns in Neil's arms, settles a hand against the side of his throat - this could be another one of those moments that gets an eyeroll, and it's actually kind of funny exactly how he doesn't care.

"The sky is not gonna fall." He glances upward. "See?"

Letting out a low rumble of a laugh, I say, "Yeah, not right now. Later, who fuckin' knows."

If it does, though, we'll deal with it. We always do.

"Hey man," says Dean, idling up with a beer in his own hands. It's a nice party, low key despite the occasional haphazard decorations by the girls, and Dean can't help but look around the backyard and think that it's exactly the kind of life he wants. It's even the kind of life he's ready to try for, for as long as it will last, and he smiles, tapping his bottle faintly against Mike's.

"Happy birthday. I got a gift for you in the car."

"Oh, really." He gives Dean a slightly crooked grin - he wasn't expecting presents, though Mack and Flo seemed excited by the prospect, but it's not like he's about to turn them down. "I'd say you shouldn't have, but no one ever means that."

"It's Scotch," says Dean. "And I didn't wrap it unless you count the box. Nicer than I ever bother with, too," he adds, thinking of the rotgut waiting for him at home, "So you better give me a taste. I always wanted to know how the other half lived."

"Jesus." The grin widens and he pulls Dean into a quick half-hug. It hits him now and then, the strangeness of the trajectory of what he now considers a real friendship, the utterly bizarre places it began and the utterly bizarre places it's gone to.

"Best your ass, you can have more than a taste."

"Well if you insist," Dean laughs. "Figured I shouldn't bring it out in case the girls wanted to watch you unwrap it or something. How old are you now, anyway? Or should I wait and count the candles?"

"That's actually kind of an interesting question." Interesting and funny, at least to him. Age never mattered before, but it was because he never assumed he would live through another day, and then because he fully believed his own death was foretold, imminent.

Now he simply no longer believes there's an end.

"Forty. Technically."

"Still my elder, then," says Dean. "Technically. No, you look good for forty." Dean grins. "I'm already getting gray in my temples. I think it's making Cas paranoid about dating a senior in the near future, but it goes awesome with the stupid red in my beard."

Lisbeth felt more comfortable once the sun set and the place was lit by flickering torchlight. She sat at the edge of it all, with a Coke and a cigarette, watching the girls play and the adults converse. Though to most she looked as distant as ever, she was fully present within the moment.

She waited until most of the crowd had cleared, and then she wandered up to Mike. She dared to brace herself on his arm and lean up to kiss him and tell him Happy Birthday in Swedish.

He doesn't need translation. He cups her face, lingering for a moment, then transfers the kiss to her forehead for a few seconds. She's still healing, he can tell, but everything is better.

"How you doin'?"

"Good," she answered, and smiled. She had waited until most of the party had cleared away, but she still felt all too visible. People would see her, she thought, but the idea no longer panicked her.

"It was a nice party," she acknowledged, though she was never sure of those things in the same ways others were. Everyone had seemed to enjoy themselves, though.

"Nice enough." He takes her hand - a simple gesture for most people, but she's not most people, and he knows that for her it's not nearly so simple. He still feels like he has to be... not careful. That's not the right word. But he knows what it's like to have scar tissue.

"Better with you at it."

"Yeah?" That really did provoke a grin, an almost careless and glad expression that lingered for a few seconds. "Someday, I'm going to want to meet your friends." Be more than the dark, sullen girl in the corner.

It was a comment that could be taken more than one way; for Lisbeth, it was a simple acknowledgement that she would want such a thing. To be acknowledged.

He knows Neil better than he knows Mike, but Jax is here with a couple six packs as his offering. The boys are home with a sitter and the dog to keep them company, leaving him free for the evening.

It's a hell of a change from the parties he's used to. More happy kids, less leather, far fewer treats of violence. He's okay with all of that.

Putting the beers down, he waves over at Neil and Mike so they know he's here.

"Hey." He heads over almost as soon as he catches sight of the wave - the coolers have been hit a little hard in the last bit, and he figures they could use some restocking anyway, while he's saying hello. "Thanks for coming. Need a hand?"

"Nah, just didn't know what to bring, figured the age old gift of beer would be a good start," Jax explains, smiling easily. "Happy birthday, man."

"Yourself is fine. No expectations. Or cover charge." He nods at Flo, who's currently occupied with tying a complex series of streamers into Mack's blond curls. "I think they're about three times as excited about it as I am."

Jax grins, looking a little softer when he watches the girls. Maybe that's what he and Tara will have soon, a little girl with her fingers in her brothers' hair.

"Birthdays are kids' shit. Doesn't surprise me."

"I barely remember being that excited about anything." Which isn't true, not exactly. Not that purely excited, maybe. But since his life started including children... He's recovered a number of things he'd thought were lost forever.

"So can I offer you a beer?"

"offering something I already got. I see how it is." Jax laughs and grabs two of the ones he'd just unpacked, handing one back to Mike before hunting around for a bottle opener.

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