Year One:

Doug watched the new students coming in to the brand new school. They were fresh-faced, some of them, while others were already bitter and untrusting. They were so young, all of them, and so human-seeming.

His son was among them, Donegal, who he hadn’t gotten to raise. He watched the boy moving through the crowd, and found himself fading into the background. Now was not the time to try to raise the kid; now was the time to do his job.

Two tall, dark boys – brothers, Doug thought, but not twins – moved their way through the crowd as if they were pushing aside brush. Doug watched the way they moved, the shorter one aping the taller one’s movements. They were going to be trouble.

“First day of school.” The woman standing next to him finally spoke up. Laurel, Doug thought her name was. “This’ll be interesting.”

Doug cleared his throat, and found he had nothing to say. He settled for “yeah.”

Year Fourteen:

Ana was pregnant, and Doug was doing everything in his power not to glower, hover, growl, and in general act like (as more than one woman had called him) a royal pain in the ass.

He was fairly certain that he would have been a hovering, miserable, overprotective dinosaur (as Ana gently teased him) even if she hadn’t been carrying his child, his child, as well as the boy Teal’s, but he couldn’t guarantee it. Doug was in love, and it messed everything up.

He watched the fresh-faced new Cohort, just a month into the year and still looking so very young, so very human. A short, stocky irish boy – notable in that he was shorter than either Doug or his father – met Doug’s eyes and grinned, arrogant and insouciant.

“They’re shaping up to be interesting.” Laurel Valerian laid fingers on Doug’s arm in a way that would have, from another woman, seemed possessive. “I think this is going to be a good year.”

Doug shifted his weight onto his heels. The Irish kid was looking at Ana. Looking was fine. Looking was fine. He cleared his throat and made himself look at Laurel. “Yeah.”

I’m not really sure what to put in for context here…

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