Addergoole, end of year 7.

Trigger warning: Pregnancy discussed & shown.

Phelen walked the halls of Addergoole alone.

He didn’t need to be alone; Shiva’s legacy in Addergoole was a close-knit crew that got along well with others, filling in for his own gaps in social networking.

But this was his last day as a Student in Addergoole, and it felt fitting to spend a moment here the way he’d first arrived – alone, no matter how many people were around him, wrapped in his trench-coat.

Alone. A Seventh Cohort, no longer skittering around nervous because they were new, but skittering and nervous nonetheless, slid past him. He was leaking shadows again, wasn’t he?

He pulled himself together. Leaving Addergoole was, as his Mentor liked to say, not only an ending, but a beginning. The school had grown comfortable for him (Having Kept had grown very comfortable for him). College, an apartment without his Crew, the greater world outside of the school – he’d never admit it to anyone, but he was as nervous about that as he had been about coming to Addergoole in the first place.

Considering how much worse, and better, than Addergoole had ended up being, he thought it was a perfectly justifiable concern. Four years ago, also, he hadn’t had three children to be concerned with.

“Phelen.” Kendra would have more than that to be concerned with, the way she was going. The heavily-pregnant mouse-girl nodded at him; she had another year to go, but looked as pensive as he felt.

If things had gone differently, she might have been his. He gave her his best not-a-creep smile. “Kendra. Number four, is it?”

“It is.” She held her hands protectively over her stomach. He might have to work on the not-a-creep thing. “Good luck, out there. Are you taking any of yours?”

“Not now, at least.” He wasn’t sure he could handle the real world and kids. “Their mothers all seem fairly attached.” In a year or two, he might try to talk Manira out of that. But not today.

“Good luck anyway.” Her smile was playful; he wondered when she’d learned that again. “I hear it’s a jungle out there.”

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