I Like Long Walks on the Beach

"Well, you gotta give us a break on that. We go through a bit more pain than other humans because we shoot lasers, spit fire, create dimension shattering illusions, o'course we're insane." Mal would stick his tongue out at Eli. "Thank you darling that's very flattering. You're beautiful, but you already know that."

He'd take a few moments, the mental battle to say something snarky instead evident on his face. After more moments he;d say, "Of course dear, you're a goddess, my goddess."

Looking up for a moment, he'd give it a few seconds of thought before he started to talk. "I have a necklace, in my dorm room with the rest of my clothing, a silver pendant my mother once gave to my father, that I've never worn."

"I think I do want to wear it some day, but I think I can't right now because of what it means." His face would go downcast as he spoke a bit softer with his next sentence, "Well, he couldn't pay for the apartment he had while in the hospital, so my mother went by it and retrieved some of his things. I pulled it from one of the boxes and looked at it and my mother told me about when she gave it to him."

"And she said if I wanted it, I should take it or it was going to get sold with some of the other stuff."

"Well, my mother was raised poor and hard working just as I, kinda family tradition by now. So this necklace has a pendant, a silver sculpture of a wheel, the center of which inlaid with a bloodstone, it's ornate and costed a pretty penny. Weird, I know, but just listen." Mal would take a breath and wrap an arm around Eli, looking up at the ceiling.

"She told me, once upon a time, Tom was a good man, he never had much like them and did small crimes but he had good intentions. He treated her nice, spent every spare coin on her, was a gentleman to her but always seemed to have severely bad luck." He'd sigh softly, almost empathetic with his genetic father at the moment.

"So she's been reading books and looking for good luck charms for him and she comes across this, a wheel symbolizing good karma and good luck and the bloodstone, actually called heliotrope, which was supposed to supply protection and good fortune and has had a long history of good things. So she saved up for months and buys it, wraps it and gets ready to give it to him but is prevented to do so, for weeks in fact."

"She was a patient lady though, well girl, this was in highschool for them, and she saw an opportunity on the worst day ever for him, she didn't go into detail, but she told me he was having a terrible day like all the cards were stacked against him. So she ambushes him at the end of the day and corners him in a secluded part of a park, and she gives this huge speech about how every dark cloud has a silver lining and that even his darkest moments, she'd be there to try and brighten his days. It seems that that was the moment that cemented their relationship, made them an actual couple."

Mal would turn his gaze from the ceiling to Eli, "And I keep it as a reminder to not let things keep me down, to not let the bad drag me down."