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meadow-roses · 3 months

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Meet the Family - Part 4

This scene is around three years old, and was started as a character study/exploration for Grace and her friends to get a feel for how they are involved in Felix’s backstory plot. This is not a scene in the actual story and a lot of the “plot” is not canon, but I thought it would be fun to share with you guys! Enjoy!

Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

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The den was comfortable and well decorated. Well decorated in the sense that there was a lot of decorations but not in the sense that any of them went well together. It looked like a thrift store had vomited out all the items that no one seems to ever buy over the walls, floor, and hodgepodge of mismatched sofas.

The group of people filtered into the room, each going to what looked like designated seating by how the decor matched the individual's fashion taste like in a cartoon. Before he could give more than a thought to where would be appropriate for him to sit, Grace indicated for him to take a seat on a slouchy old sofa covered in pillows.

"Oh, and watch out for Piggy," she cautioned as an afterthought.

"Piggy?" Felix asked, but he was too far committed into sitting down to reverse the motion.

The cushion was considerably more supple than he was expecting, and once he had actually sat, he continued to sink alarmingly farther into the depths of lumpy upholstery.

Piggy, it turned out, was not actually a shaggy pillow, but an aged miniature schnauzer that looked very sad at his unexpected eviction from the depths of the couch. He turned his gaze slowly to Felix and gave him a long, uncomfortably intense stare.

"Ope! There he is!" Grace said with a laugh, plopping onto the couch between him and the dog and disrupting Piggy again. The unfortunate dog faltered a moment in the shifting landscape, then gave up and settled against Grace's leg with a disgruntled yawn.

"Technically this is Piggy's couch but he can share," Grace informed Felix with a wink.

Felix nodded, or rather attempted to nod, his neck hunched into his shoulders from the angle he was scrunched into.

"Okay!" The tall blonde man from earlier exclaimed. He leaned forward in his seat and clapped his hands together, his elbows resting on his knees. The freckled woman sitting next to him smirked and adjusted her glasses further up her nose.

"Tell me, Felix, what do you like to do for fun?"

"For fun?" Felix responded, caught off guard by the unexpected question. He didn't have an answer readily prepared for this one.

The man's smile dropped from his face. "You do like having fun, right?" He asked with genuine concern.

Grace burst into a fit of laughter unsuccessfully smothered behind her hand.

"Uh, of course I do," Felix said, trying and failing to adjust how he was sitting so he would be more upright.

"But what do you do for fun?"

"You know," the woman sitting next to him said. "Usually you start out a conversation by introducing yourself. Like with your name."

"Well yeah," he responded dismissively, "But I don't know man, that's pretty weird. You've got to have something -”

"My name is Erin," the woman said before he had a chance to continue. "This dummy is Tychus."

Tychus willingly followed the topic change. "We're her cousins," he said with a knowing smile and a gesture in Grace's direction.

"Nice to meet you," Felix said with a little wave.

"You too! Grace has been telling us a lot about you," Tychus grinned.

Felix tried not to read too much into the statement.

Before Tychus could continue, a third person joined the conversation, leaning over the arm of the couch and smugly resting her chin in her hand. She had short, magenta colored hair and skin so pale Felix wondered if she was anemic.

"Sooooooo," she said, "What do you think about frogs?"

"F-frogs?"

There it was again, the frogs. It could be just that- frogs- but instinctively Felix knew it must be code for something. From the way Grace had acted during their conversation in the diner, his initial guess was something rebel based, but he was becoming increasingly confused and increasingly unsure what he had gotten himself into. Was "frogs" a common code used by the gangs?

"Grace invited you on a year long research trip on frogs," Hessie continued, clearly trying to keep a straight face and ultimately failing. "And you accepted. So clearly you gotta be someone who crazy loves frogs."

"Well, uh, I like frogs, but I don't think I like them any more than a normal person. I mainly accepted because I got the impression she was trying to find someone to go with her and I'm not really doing anything else." He tried to shrug as he spoke, but found the action to be difficult while half swallowed by the sofa.

"Ohhh so less that you like frogs and more that you like Grace." Hessie smirked.

"Is that bad?" Felix asked, feeling his face begin to heat up.

"Not at all." She looked around the room full of people as they nodded in agreement with her. "I think it's great you like your girlfriend that much you'll study an extinct species with her."

She grinned a strangely lopsided smile as Grace lunged over Piggy to thwack her with one of the couch pillows.

"Tone it down, Hessie! You literally just met him today!"

Hessie retreated from the couch, laughing. "You're only saying that cause I'm embarrassing you too."

"Tychus and Hessie are the mean ones,'' a deep voice said at Felix's shoulder. "You can pretty much ignore them."

With a jolt of adrenaline Felix turned as quickly as possible to the speaker, a tall young man with long dark hair and a thin nose. His vision obscured by the couch and a missing eye, Felix hadn't been able to see him walk up.

He was wearing eyeshadow and black lipstick, and had an intricate snake tattoo twining up his arm where it disappeared into his sleeve.

He sniffed and swiped a lock of hair to the side of his face, then held out his hand to Felix.

"Morgan," he said, his face completely blank.

Awkwardly, Felix took his hand. At first it was the most uncommitted handshake he had ever engaged in, but at the last second Morgan's hand tightened and he leaned forwards. Without any change in his expression or added tone to his voice he whispered, "Break her heart and I'll break your neck."

Caught entirely off guard, Felix reflexively shrank away into the couch cushion.

"Okay." He said, unsure how else to respond.

Morgan gave him a warm smile, then stepped backwards out of his field of vision.

Grace entirely missed this exchange while trying to hit Hessie with at least one of the plentiful couch pillows within her grasp. Despite Grace's aim, Hessie caught the majority of them and dodged the rest, laughing.

Kate had not missed it, and caught Felix's eye from across the room with her keen gaze. As soon as she had his attention, she smiled at him.

Felix was almost certain she did not mean for it to feel threatening, but he still felt a jolt of nerves he tried to hide behind a smile of his own.

"Why don't you tell us about yourself?" She said pleasantly. "What do you do for a living? Do you have any pets? Family?"

"Well, uh, my father and I run a mechanic shop in the [district]. I have two older siblings; they work with my mother in the medical field."

"He has the prettiest cat I've ever seen!" Grace interjected, leaping into the conversation and out from the depths of the couch. "His name is Puddleglum!"

"You named your cat Puddleglum?" The girl on the couch next to Kate asked.

"Come on, Lyra, it's cute!" Grace protested.

"Some friends and I found him in a gutter when he was a very small kitten," Felix explained. "He had such a funny face and looked like he was always miserable, so I named him that for a joke. I uh, usually just call him Puddles."

He attempted leaning forward as well, but ultimately failed against the couch's grappling abilities. It felt uncomfortable holding a conversation at such a reclined angle, and did not help at all with the feeling of being interrogated. He had been interrogated before- he kept reminding himself- and it was nothing like this. This was okay. They had every right to know the information they were asking for, even if there was information he was withholding. Information they probably wanted to know.

He saw in their eyes and could hear the questions they were asking without directly asking.

"Are you who you say you are? Are you keeping any secrets from us? Can we trust you?"

He was lying to them.

The evening continued mostly uneventfully with the occasional roughhousing sessions sprinkled throughout. On one of these occasions Tychus attempted to get Felix involved to see what kind of a fighter he was, which Kate gracefully intervened on.

Just before dinner the final member arrived, a little boy with dark curls and a bright smile who Grace introduced as Donald. After exchanging what had all the earmarks of a secret handshake with Tychus, he shed his jacket of primary color blue and red and was chased out of the room to wash his hands by Lyra.

The pair of headphones he was wearing around his neck remained there as they all took seats around the table.

Donald took the chair next to Felix. Grace, sitting on his other side, passed him a dish of baked veggies of some sort after serving a helping onto her own plate.

As he dropped a scoop onto his plate trying to figure out what it might be made from, Donald turned to him.

“I have an important question for you,” he said, folding his hands on the table in front of him.

“Okay. Shoot.” Felix replied.

“Have you thought about how you want to be embalmed?”

“Embalmed?” Felix echoed as Donald casually accepted the dish from his hands, obviously assuming he was finished serving and not that this was a result of his unexpected question.

He plopped a serving of indeterminate green on his plate, and passed the dish to Tychus who seemed very interested in their exchange.

“I- no, I hadn't really thought about it.” He wondered if this was somehow connected to Morgan's threat earlier in the evening.

“Well, you probably better!” Donald replied. “You never know when it'll be too late so you'd better decide before you die and can't have a say anymore. I know all about the different options so we-”

Grace interrupted, reaching across Felix and patting the tabletop to get his attention.

“Donald- Donald, maybe you could talk about embalming after dinner, okay? You're going to make him lose his appetite.”

Donald shrugged easily. “Sure, but remember that death doesn't wait until you're ready,” he said casually.

Felix was pretty sure his lack of appetite was not exactly Donald's fault. Everyone was curious, observant and mostly friendly, but entirely failing at hiding the fact they didn't fully trust him. The anxiety he had brought with him into this situation was stomach turning enough.

As the evening went on he had noticed more and more little details scattered around that could mean nothing, but all together led to a distinct conclusion.

There were several unoccupied spaces in the room- faces missing in the group that were in the family pictures on the walls.

One of these faces he thought he recognized, but wasn't given enough time to study the wall to be able to place him. The floorplan schematic of a nearby office complex with time annotations on the side marking the shift changes. Gear belts full of curious instruments that could not in any stretch of imagination be used as common trade tools. An assortment of antique weapons stored in an umbrella stand. A lockpick kit hanging alongside the coats and car keys. A pair of obviously used knuckle dusters on the hall table.

They were also not telling him everything.

"So, uh," Felix said. He had gathered his thoughts, he had to ask it. No matter the consequences.

"You guys are a gang, aren't you? Like a criminal gang."

The room grew suddenly silent as everyone looked at him with varied faces of alarm.

"W-why do you think that?" Hessie asked with a glance at Kate. Kate's face was drawn stiff and serious, making it hard to tell what she was thinking.

Felix avoided eye contact with anyone in the room, and gestured with his thumb to the fireplace.

"You have an A-36 charging on the mantle. Anyone who's familiar with firearms knows all quick charge firearms are banned, and anyone who has one in their possession should turn it in for smelting or be arrested. You're charging it. Which means that you're planning on using it."

He fiddled with his fingers in his lap.

"That's not everything I'm going off of, but it's definitely telling."

The silence stretched on painfully until Felix risked a glance up at Grace, but he couldn't tell what she was thinking behind the tense mask she'd pulled onto her face.

He swiped aside a lock of his bang that had slipped past his nose and over his eye, then continued.

"You all certainly don't seem like the type that are in any way deserving of being arrested," he said in an attempt to ease the sudden tension. "I'm sure the gun is meant to be used for self-defense, I'm not going to report you. I just," he paused and looked up, catching Grace in the eye and holding her gaze as everyone around them visibly relaxed.

"I needed to know, before we kept going. This trip you're going on; you're not researching frogs, are you?"

Grace opened her mouth and immediately shut it again as Felix finished.

"I'm guessing that's what you brought me here to explain, right?"

"Dang, Felix…" Tychus said softly, holding his chin in his hand so tightly his knuckles had turned white.

"Yeah," Grace said, her hand slipping up to grab her arm.

"Hey," Felix said, feeling a sudden surge of regret. In his effort to make sure he didn't get laughed off and got an honest answer he might have gone too serious.

Hesitantly he put his hand on her arm. Grace relaxed slightly, and looked up at him, her eyes swimming with thoughts.

"It's- it's okay, I just need to know the truth. This is your family, but none of you look related. There's a lot of stuff around the house that could get you in serious trouble if an officer saw it. You do realize how dangerous things are right now?"

"Wait, wait," Erin interjected. "You know that we're a criminal gang and you're okay with that?"

"With the current state of our government you don't have to have done anything actually bad to be a criminal. You could be a group that feeds homeless people or finds families for stray cats and still be on the run from the authorities."

"How do you know we haven't done anything wrong?" Grace asked.

"Well, I trust you." Felix said.

"How come you know so much about guns?" Tychus asked, moving to cross his arms over his chest.

Felix shrugged. "I think they're cool. I like building things and putting things back together, so I read a bunch of books about them."

It was true, but it wasn't the full answer, and Felix felt a stab of guilt for lying to them again while calling them out on their secrets.

"We're all orphans," Grace said. "Made that way by the government who didn't like our parents. Kate took us all in and gave us a home, her and this other guy. He's not here tonight, but… We're already technically breaking the law, simply by being raised here instead of in corrective facilities, so we decided, why not be vigilantes?"

She gave an awkward laugh and scratched at her chin with her free hand, looking up at the patterned ceiling instead of Felix's face.

"So, what do you do?" Felix asked.

"Mostly track with the local gangs and stop them from committing crimes." Tychus said with a grin.

"Which is also technically a crime," Hessie said through the corner of her mouth, "but the real law enforcement is too busy enforcing dumb laws like lawn height to be saving people from actual threats."

"You know like the [team]?" Grace said.

Felix felt an involuntary surge of adrenaline at her directly mentioning his secret, but she continued, squeezing his hand back after he accidentally squeezed hers.

"We're being vigilantes like them."

"That's really cool." Was all he managed to force out in response.

"Um," Grace fiddled with her fingers in her lap. "You're okay with that?"

He nodded awkwardly. Now would be a fantastic time to mention that he was already a wanted criminal for vigilante crimes. Maybe even let them know he was actually a well known vigilante. That they had clearly heard of. But his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

He wasn't really Dauntless anymore, not after he had given up. Not after he'd failed to save his friends. He wasn't really even sure why he was here. He'd promised [mustache] he'd stay out of trouble, promised his family he'd stay safe, but then had jumped at the first opportunity that looked like possibly resuming vigilante work? He was glad to know his hunch was correct, but now he had to make a decision.

"I was a little worried you wouldn't, since I know following the law is important to you," Grace was saying. She was grinning, looking away from him and up to the ceiling, clearly embarrassed and clearly excited.

"But I also thought, you like helping people, so maybe-" she cut herself off, looking down at the floor and jiggling her leg.

"Well, I mean. I think it's important to follow the law when you can, but it's supposed to be there to protect the people that live under it. If the *law* is what's hurting people, and it's not that it's just being misapplied-"

He stopped himself before he went any further into fully treasonous territory. He wanted to be careful to only say what he thought was true, but not say so much it would make him seem suspiciously enthusiastic. It was hard, he felt very strongly about this topic.

"Say that around the wrong people and you'll get yourself incarcerated." Tychus said with a grin.

Felix grimaced, and the blonde man laughed.

Kate was watching him with those unreadable, sharp eyes.

"What are you going to do?" She asked.

What *was* he going to do? There were too many promises to keep.

To Hiro, who told him to not let them break him, Harley who made him promise they would win. His mother who begged him to never do something like that again. If he said no he'd stay where he was, hiding away while others finished the fight he started. There had to be another option, a way he could not let anyone down.

He took a deep breath to steady his nerves, then met Kate's gaze.

"Are you asking if I'll join you?"

Kate smiled.

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