Rainy days at the end of summer were special when Kevin was young and lived in the desert with his dad. They prepared a pitcher of cold lemonade, spread a big map of the States on the kitchen table, and pointed the finger at different cities all across the country. 

No matter which city Kevin pointed at, his father always had a story about it: he would spend hours on end telling him about the road trip he did when he was young and stupid, about the people he met, about the adventures he had.

Sometimes Kevin hoped to get stories about his mother, but no matter how long his father talked and talked, his eyes twinkling, only the pouring rain and Kevin’s chuckles as background noise, he never said anything about her.

From time to time, Kevin would point at Seattle, and his father’s eyes would soften, his mouth would flatten. “Well, there is something about Seattle”, he would say, after a long pause. “That’s all I can say on the matter.”

Kevin never cared if the stories were true or not. It was their ritual, their thing. Something else to pass the time, to forget that they were alone against the world, and Kevin wouldn’t have had it any way different.

After his father’s death, Seattle became somewhat of an obsession for Kevin. No matter how many excuses he tried to come up with, there was nothing sane about it. He spent every waking second of his life reading about the city whenever he wasn’t working, whenever he wasn’t trying to save money to move out of that damn desert.

It got worse after he found the box. A regular shoebox, stored under the desk in his father’s studio, filled with hundreds of pictures of a city swallowed by a fog so thick it seemed alive. No people, just buildings, blurred outlines and opaque smudges walking around on sidewalks, sitting on benches, looking out at sea, always in the rain or in the fog, as if the sun never shone. Mysterious little numbers in his father’s messy print on the back of each pic that weren’t dates nor coordinates.

There was something about Seattle, he was convinced about it. He drove into town to look up information in the library, on the internet, anywhere he could find mention of the city. Photography books, tourism guides, things to see and to do — pretty normal stuff. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for.

He listened to the rain falling in the middle of the desert, and he kept investigating.

The last piece of the puzzle unexpectedly fell into place while he was dicking around and clicking aimlessly on the internet, bored with everything and with himself. He was looking up some information about some old book a coworker had been talking about, when he inexplicably found himself scrolling through an old, eye-searingly ugly forum board on cheesy sci-fi movies, that was mostly clogged with drama about extra-terrestrial conspiracies. On the third page of a heated flame about which city was more likely to host under-cover aliens, a few pictures under some user’s signature caught Kevin’s eyes: three shots of a foggy city, captioned with strange numbers and a link, spelled in unreadable characters.

Kevin had never clicked anything faster.

The Seattle Cryptids Board was a well-modded, surprisingly well-designed forum full of people who claimed that cryptids were real and lived among humans, and that Seattle was full of them. A gallery full of pictures, diligently captioned with their own progressive numbers, supposedly offered evidence of it, although Kevin didn’t really distinguish anything besides fog and blurred shapes; dozens of threads detailed the best techniques to capture a cryptid on film, the best cryptid-friendly recipes, and bite-sized guides on how to recognize the signs that you were talking to a cryptid disguised as a human.

He registered to the website before he could stop himself, well aware that he’d gone past the edge of sanity a long time ago. He just wanted to know if these people knew his father, he told himself. He smothered the genuine curiosity and the fascination he felt with a pillow made out of guilt.

A few users immediately fell in love with the pictures from the shoebox; even through the shitty camera of Kevin's phone, they were higher quality than anything ever posted in the site’s gallery.

Kevin felt proud even though he hadn't been the one taking them.

He started saving up before the idea of the road trip to Seattle was fully formed in his mind, as though he already knew he was going to need that money at some point.

He worked two jobs during the week and fell asleep with the phone on his pillow, the Board blinking at him in the darkness as the conversations went on without him. He ended up taking a few classes to learn how to properly use his father’s camera, with their encouragement, and fell in love with the art. On weekends he took pictures at parties and weddings to make a few more dollars, and by the end of the year he managed to scrounge up enough to buy a battered bike that was probably older than him.

After the shortest two years of his life, which were spent working and fixing the bike until its engine purred like it was brand new, Kevin was ready.

The first week in Seattle felt like a dream; Kevin spent it touring around the city like he was sleepwalking, half-remembering streets and views from the pictures in the shoebox. They were simultaneously familiar and strange, like a distant memory. 

He thought he would've suffered from the foggy, humid atmosphere, used as he was to the desert hot and dry air, but he felt incredibly alive instead, as if he'd been dying of thirst and he'd finally taken his first sip of water in months. 

He felt like smiling for no reason, fog-drunk. He itched to walk up to people and ask questions, wanting to know why it seemed like he'd known them all his life and why nobody was weird about it. There was something about Seattle. 

Kevin didn't even remember how he got to the diner the very first time. 

He does remember seeing Lance, tall and lanky in a blue apron standing behind the counter with his back to the door, singing to himself, still a stranger. He remembers the restaurant being empty at ass o’clock in the morning, the feeling of being underwater, close to passing out. He thinks he was hungry. Tired from all the walking he did in the middle of the night.

He’d dropped in the closest stool and made Lance startle at the noise of its legs scraping against the floor. The singing stopped and Kevin’s mind cleared. Lance’s fingers were elegant and long, pressed against his own mouth, muffling an unintelligible apology.

Kevin had ordered pancakes and coffee, hoping that sugar and caffeine would bring him back to life, and had watched Shawn come in, a big shock of red hair on his head, a scar on his face and a too small grey peacoat buttoned wrong on his torso. He’d looked dead on his feet, the hospital smell clinging to him, but Lance had greeted him like he’d parted the fog and brought out the sunshine.

Kevin hadn’t known how fucked he had been back then.

Sharing an apartment with Lance and Shawn was sort of adventurous at first: they lived on a completely different timeline, with their night jobs, and they were both big on privacy and rules; but they were also fun and friendly and Kevin felt warm around them. Like when he’d gotten to Seattle first, he had the feeling he’d known them for a long time even before they actually met.

He didn’t know how happiness could be found in a freezer full of neatly labelled Tupperware containers, but Kevin felt it so strongly he could almost taste it. 

Before he knew, Kevin had built himself a life in the city. He had two or three jobs depending on the week, an apartment, roommates. Crushes. Butterflies in his stomach. The original reasons for which he had come to Seattle seemed so distant, so trivial. The Board seemed so irrelevant.

Cryptids didn’t exist. He didn’t know if his mother had been from Seattle, really. He didn’t even know what he was looking for, aside from a life for himself.

He kissed Lance one evening while they were drinking on the couch, watching some dumb movie on Netflix with the audio off, trying to come up with their own dialogue lines and laughing.

It was Lance’s night off, Kevin didn’t have to work on the weekend and they were waiting for Shawn to come back from his shift. It felt sleazy in hindsight, but Kevin was just drunk and a fool. Lance had stopped his wandering hands before they could roam further, pushed him away with an apologetic grimace.

It’s not a no, he tried to reassure him, kind but firm, but we need to talk to Shawn about this, but Kevin’s mind was spiraling already with regret and mortification because he always ruined everything he touched, he was just a desert kid who didn’t know how to act.

He locked himself in his room and didn’t come out until he had to go to work on Monday. Thankfully, it wasn’t hard avoiding people who mostly lived at night and slept during the day.

On Thursday, Shawn bit him. He grabbed Kevin by the shoulders and sank his fangs in Kevin’s neck, deep and confident. Lance kind of yelled at him afterwards, while Shawn looked distinctly sheepish and regretful, but Kevin felt pretty calm about the whole thing, sitting on the kitchen chair and staring at the wall.

Tendons made a noise when they were pierced. It was such a fascinating thing to learn. There was no pain, just noise. Squelch. A strange shfweep that resonated down in his gut.

His fingers were really funny shapes, they looked like spider legs.

I didn’t think it would hit him so hard, he’s a halfae after all.

I don’t fucking care if he’s the second coming of Christ, Shawn! What the fuck where you thinking?

I wasn’t thinking.

Shawn was pouting. It was kind of hilarious. Kevin chuckled. They looked at him like they were surprised to see him sitting there, although they had been the ones telling him to. As if they hadn’t been talking about him all this time. It was alright, though. Kevin didn’t mind.

Kevin at that moment didn't do much of anything, really.

Listen, I panicked. I didn’t want him to start screaming—

Oh, so you enthralled him? Wow, Shawn.

He’s not gonna remember anything.

What if he does? He is a halfae, after all.

We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

The frozen whole human leg kept thawing in the sink while they bickered, and Kevin's spider hands projected shadows on the wall. 

Friday was a very complicate day for Kevin. Even if he didn’t remember what happened (which he did, in gruesome detail, thank you very much) he would never forget the hangover from hell that he got afterwards. Not only his stomach was getting turned inside out like a glove, but it felt like his brain was being squeezed out of his nostrils.

He was too miserable to be shocked. He was rooming with two vampires, so what? At least they weren't actively trying to kill him, not like his own body at the moment.

Not a vampire. I’m merfolk. He’s the one who bit you, remember?

Kevin glared at Lance; he wasn’t feeling charitable enough to distinguish between flesh eating monsters right in that moment. Lance coughed awkwardly and shut the hell up.

There was something about Seattle alright, and that something was cryptids every-fucking-where. Everything made too much sense all of a sudden: how Lance stopped singing as soon as he realized Kevin was in range, the fact that they worked night shifts and categorically refused to do things during the day unless it was peak fog out, Shawn’s double shift at the morgue and ER.

There was nothing handier than medical disposal services to keep anthropophages well fed.

Even after the accident, Kevin refused to move out. He wasn’t afraid of them, and it was maybe the scariest part of the whole ordeal. Could he be in love with two beings who literally killed people in order to survive?

(We don’t kill anyone, you know? We just need human flesh from time to time — you’d be surprised how little amputated arms and legs and discarded organs are missed by people once they’re separated from their bodies — same thing for blood, really….)

The answer was apparently yes; there was something about Lance and Shawn that just screamed trust us at his deepest instincts.

He started going out of his way to conform to their sleep cycle, to spend more time with them, to know more about their culture. Kevin got to meet the other cryptids that lived in the area — which turned out to be a lot more than he would’ve ever suspected. 

There was Bex, who ran a 24/7 IT service on the third floor, was of fae descent, with a knock for technomancy; Henry, who worked as a cook in the same diner where Lance had shifts, was a wendigo; a pub for cryptids-only on the next block was the hottest spot in the area. 

Most humans at Shawn’s hospital knew about their existence and didn’t give much of a shit about it. They were convenient, in a way or the other. Kept the pests at bay.

Kevin eventually demanded to know what the hell a halfae was and Shawn and Lance looked at each other, dubious and hesitant, before telling him because well, not many people didn’t know about their ancestry, like Kevin was ignorant about his.

Also it’s sort of a rude word, please don’t say it outside the house unless you really mean it.

They’d recognized him by smell, they told him. Non-humans have a distinct aura about them.

Non-humans live much longer than regular humans and are harder to kill, to poison, to contaminate. Kevin tried to get drunk for the first time in his life to prove them wrong, and failed. 

Shawn offered to find his mother in a quiet voice, strangely colored eyes glinting in the darkness.

Kevin refused. He cut himself on Shawn’s fangs, begging him to enthrall him again, to let him forget for a while. The vampire held him as he sobbed in his shoulder.

That day Kevin slept between two monsters and never felt safer.

Posted on archiveofourown.org in a slightly different version, under a different pseudonym. Available upon request.