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Gabriel "Gabe" Fletcher
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After two years, the shift is easy. It's a simple matter of wanting to be, stepping into the water. The transformation is more fluid that it was in those early days; in the space of a breath there's a sea otter instead of a man. His eyes are bright and human and his thoughts are his own but Gabe always feels more liberated in this shape.

His siren form used to terrify him but now Gabe sees it as a gift. It's proof that the world isn't what the Bible told him, bigger than his parents let him believed. He's part of something ancient and magical and it comes from inside him rather than any contracts with the devil. It's like being gay, just a part of him and not inherently flawed. It's easier to believe both in these shape.

So he leaves his clothes and his fears in the sand and swims.

Gabe has never had to move house before. His parents had settled in their seven-bedroom dream home long ago and told Gabe over and over how they'd bought a condemned property for cheap and revamped it year by year until they'd been able to move in with their eight children at the time. It had been blood, sweat, and tears but they owned the property outright.

The fact that Gabe is renting, that he'll owe every month, would be their nightmare for him, to say nothing of the fact that he's living with an unmarried woman as well as his boyfriend. That would give them both heart attacks.

It's a good thing they'll never know, he thinks as he putters through the boxes in what will be his bedroom. There isn't much he has to unpack; the largest item is the bed that Caleb's boss sent over. A big queen mattress that's bigger than any bed Gabe has ever had all to himself but he supposes he knows it won't really be all to himself. Caleb will sleep there too, with or without Gabe in it.

Gabe walks around the mattress on its box spring again and then another time before finally letting himself flop forward onto the unmade bed and closing his eyes. At least for this afternoon, it's all his.

Ever since Mira's sister arrived, the Kazmi house has felt more busy and active than ever and Gabriel has felt increasingly in the way. There's nothing that any of them have done to say that he should go, but he knows he's been staying with them rent free for months longer than he'd intended. With Etta there he can only imagine that it must be the same as any family he's known back home; blood relatives take priority.

It's this certainty that sends him to the library today, seated nervously at one of the computers. He's never done this before, never used unfiltered internet without his parents supervising him. On other side, there are kids reading comics and playing games as if it means nothing, but for Gabe it's a quiet milestone. He could search for anything he wants, learn if it's true what Caleb suggested about their families versus the bigger world around him.

The idea is a little too intimidating and Gabe sticks to his original goal, searching for apartments. What he makes at the bar could, he thinks, just about cover a small place. One bedroom maybe. Maybe not. The more he searches, the more he lowers his expectations.

A studio seems more suitable anyway, really.

When there is nothing else, there is work. After falling into the ocean, Gabe has stopped sleepwalking but that's the least of his problems now. Everything feels like a punishment, even when he wishes he could feel safe. The ocean is half a place of comfort and also a void of mystery. He doesn't know if accepting that he is a siren means he'll have mastered his nature or succumbed to it.

But at least there's work. There are still plates and glasses to wash, counters to wipe down, his hands blistered ad aching. He knows split knuckles and dishpan hands, the endless reel of work that propels him on beyond his own confused thoughts.

It's where Sunday finds him. Not at church or taking a day of rest. At work, at the bar. Sometimes he thinks the bartenders hear more confessions than any priests in town.

Ever since Mira took him to the beach, he's dreamed and dreamed of waves and water and woken up with an aching heart. Some nights, the longing actually pulls him out of bed and Mira's parents have found him sleepwalking, gently turning their somnambulant guest back to their guest room and closing the door. He wakes disoriented, but at least he wakes in the bed her parents insist is his.

Tonight, his dreams are especially potent and Gabe dreams of a calm, moonlit ocean, the salt air, and the gentle crashing against the shore. It tugs him out of bed and unnoticed through the Kazmis' unattended doors. The people who know him are used to seeing a quiet Gabe who walks with his head down and don't think to engage him as he sleepwalks to the beach.

With instinctive knowledge, bare feet take him to the end of the slippery pier and over the edge. Halfway through falling into the distant, low-tide ocean, Gabe wakes and his heart thuds in panic as he braces himself. The water is so cold his lungs feel like ice and he thinks he'll drown as a riptide pulls him out further. Thrashing, Gabe tries to make it to the surface, afraid and panicked because he can't swim.

Then suddenly he stops being cold and the water turns clear in his vision. Dark, silty water is as bright as daylight and Gabe blinks as instinct drives him to swim sideways, out of the current. His hands stroke in front of him and Gabe shouts, filling his throat and lungs with sea water. These aren't his hands. These are webbed, clawed paws, animal and inhuman.

Panicking, he thrashes again into the shallows.

It's Mira's mother, he thinks. She's left things in the guest room for him in the past. Little things, really, like a packet of cookies or a book he's never been allowed to read. Today it's a deck of cards with a sticky note explaining that shuffling them might help his nervous fidgeting. He'd been pleased, tentatively grateful, until realizing that these hadn't been normal playing cards.

They had been Tarot cards.

Shuffling them helps, certainly. Gabe cuts the deck, cascades it, shuffles the cards back and forth constantly in his little corner at Quill while he waits for his shift to start at Finn's. In all his shuffling, he's been avoiding actually looking at the cards or the booklet with them to explains their meanings. They're occult, pagan...Wrong. He shouldn't look.

Then a card falls out and Gabe's breath catches in surprise. A golden goblet crowned with a dove. It looks like something he'd see in church except that it's on a tarot card. His brain tries to reconcile the familiar symbolism and he can't help it, paging through the booklet to find the Ace of Cups.

Ace cards always mean new beginnings. The Ace of Cups are a new beginning in one's emotional life, finding love, trust, and blessings. This is a card of happiness.

Gabe is pretty sure it wrong to feel this way, but it's comforting that this is the card that's fallen out.

Curious, he spreads the cards on the table and starts reading through their meanings.

[[Find him at Quill all by his lonesome]]

He hadn't meant to fall asleep in the church last night. To be honest, Gabe doesn't even think he wants to stay much longer here. His Baptist upbringing aside, there's something about St. Peter's Cathedral that makes his bones go cold. It's too beautiful and too ornate, made cold by the high ceilings and stone walls, and the stained glass has stories that he knows aren't in the Bible. Some of the stained glass windows have something deeply strange and pagan about them.

But it's the easiest church to find and hopefully God will forgive him for going into the wrong church in an effort to pray. It's why he'd gone in the night before, only to fall asleep curled up in the pew.

Now his neck aches unforgivably, refusing to let him quite turn his head all the way right before stopping him with a twinge of pain.

These days, Gabe feels increasingly grubby. He'd showered and washed his clothes in the motel sink during his first two nights, but that was before he'd run out of money. Before he'd slept in the bus station and the Wal-Mart furniture section after that and now the pew of the wrong kind of church.

"God, please," he whispers, kneeling without aid of the padded bench to ease the discomfort. His hands folded against the back of the pew in front of him, Gabe prays. "Please. I don't know what to do. I don't know what I'm doing here in this unfaithful town. Why am I like this? I know it's wrong...that what I did is wrong. I can be strong enough to overcome it but you gotta help me."

He doesn't know what the heck he's doing. The entire bus ride, he'd just sat there, barely focusing on anything as his head had buzzed, heavy with confusion. Occasionally a bit of memory rises up. Hot water, steam, lips crashing together, hands...Just remembering what he's done makes Gabe queasy. He'd sinned. He'd sinned in a deeply carnal, deeply wrong way. There's no going home after this. If Caleb tells his parents what they've done, there will be eleven Fletcher children, not twelve.

He can't go back. Gabe doesn't even know where he is. The fog around his head only barely cleared at the station and he doesn't even know what ticket he'd bought, only that the driver said this was the last stop of his route and Gabe had to leave.

A map on the wall says he's in Maine. This is the furthest he's ever, ever been from home.

Sliding down into a bench at the station, Gabe takes stock of himself. He has his phone (turned off) but no charger. His wallet contains his emergency credit card, his debit card, and two hundred dollars in cash.

He won't last long by himself.

OOC PREFERENCES: Permissions for OOC game activity.
CONTACT METHODS: Direct message me at Twitter (@BittyBiter) for my IM and e-mail. I like all of them.
THREADJACKING: Please give me prior warning
SLOWTAGGING/BACKTAGGING: Sure
NSFW: Depends on what we, as players, are comfortable with/the context of the scene.
AVOIDED SUBJECTS: Anything involving non-con
PREFERRED GENDER PRONOUN: She, her.

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