Dante had no idea why he suddenly felt so hungry, or why Opal Sanchez was on the verge of a mental breakdown, but he tried to push past both puzzles and align the well rusted, haphazardly trained, and poorly implemented war machine that was his mind towards the task at hand.

  He had neglected to consider that Opal Sanchez writes her name on exams at the beginning of testing sessions, and, after having imagined collegiate papers worthy mental strokes of calligraphy in a brand new just released half-assed plan to somehow turn “Opal” into “Dante”, he decided that he was summarily, beyond a doubt positively, lick a rump and call it candy, absolutely fucked.

  And it wasn’t like he could just stand up, waltz over, and give the shit back. He could feel the eyeballs of TA’s watching him more closely than the others after his little display. He was too swift for them to actually catch wise to what he did, but they certainly realized that his corner of the room required a lot more attention.

  So, he sat there, his head locked and mind focused on potential solutions to his predicament when he had an absolutely wonderful idea. Dante, still running hot after the previous Night and his run, absolutely drowned Opal’s penmanship in an ocean of sweat. He got it all nice and smudged up, and once the paper was something much closer to pulp, he tore the top of that first sheet off in its entirety, and then wrote his name and an apologetic note next to it, detailing his sweating and his running.

  His plan, so far perfectly executed, just needed the creme de la creme, this one last very crucial piece, and then there he’d have it. Heist of the century. Slap a title on it and keep it from Disney. He arose from his seat, and in a quickened, repeated series of 4 steps that he took on his way towards the center podium, where a good third of the students had already turned in their exams, he trekked his way, doing his best not to raise any suspicions.

  The professor, Dr. Lichter smiled at Dante as he watched him place his exam at the top of the most recent pile. Dante, heart pounding in his chest, smiled back, and promptly left the exam hall, and stood out in the hallway, trying to catch his breath. He decided to use the hall as a litmus test of sorts, and if Dr. Lichter didn’t come barging out of the exam hall by the time Dante had calmed his nerves, then undoubtedly the stars had deemed what he did as Written long ago, and he’d return home to get even drunker with Shallow, seeing as how he definitely aced these tests. He’d fix them eggs and bacon too, and make the latter extra crispy, just as Shallow liked it.

  As his heart rate lowered his mind did wander back to Opal Sanchez and the many potential reasons that she had been so clearly about to lose her shit right in the middle of the exam. His mind, still in its 5th gear, would have been able to surmise precisely how shitty things were about to get, if his heart wasn’t even the teensiest little bit pissed off that he could immediately tell, that Opal Sanchez had failed to recognize him at all.

  And sure, it’d been some time since they had actually interacted, and you don’t even want me to get started on their actual first meeting as budding playmates of Stranger Tots Day Academy. Even Dante himself doesn’t remember that one oh so clearly, it exists as this cobweb covered corner of his psyche he wouldn’t unlock until many years later, but unless you currently require a home remedy for bubblegum trapped in your hair, I think we can skip it for now, and I think Dante would be all the more happy to do so too.

  Nonetheless, his first memory of Opal definitely existed in that daycare somewhere. Back then, Dante just remembered her as one of the very few normal looking kids out of the class. Baby monster day cares were still just breaking into the market, so before things like food standards, food allergen standards, and direct species conflict studies, they used to just stick all the kids in there together.

  Dante had seen all manner of fey babies, werepups, lil' liches, chupacabra toddlers, kaiju spawn and much, much more. Most of them played rather rough, and sometimes he was up to meet the challenge, but he always considered it a rare day to see another child that only had a torso and only two arms and only two legs and most certainly just one head.

  Dante wasn’t at an age to have a true preference one or the other, but he did find the more mundane looking children like him incredibly interesting, and especially Opal. She was only a shade lighter than him, but her hair was completely straight. This was very puzzling stuff to a young Dante, and even as a pup he found himself skewing towards a more scientific view of the world, and conducted all sorts of experiments, one of them sneakily resulting in the thick wad of gum in Opal’s hair that took 2 days for her parents to completely remove once it was discovered.

  Unaware of the full scope of his initial treachery, Opal and Dante made fast friends, even though she had this pungent odor that seemed to fill the room, though few other pupils apart from Dante ever took notice. The other werewolf pups all stuck their nose up at Opal, though none of them were too sure why at first. Then Dante accidentally spilled the secret they shared over the water fountain when Dante noticed that Opal never took a turn after he’d had his fill, and the rest of the werewolf pups soon began to turn their noses at the mere sight of Opal. Dante, having thought nothing of it, absentmindedly chose the many over the few, and by the time Opal’s parents had pulled her from the rat race to be placed in greener pastures, she could hardly remember having met Dante at all.

  So, when Dante first noticed that Opal was standing across from him in the exam hall's lounge, and that she refused to stop looking at him, he believed that something had finally jogged her memory, and they could do some much needed catching up. They had been at the university for a few years now, and Dante hadn’t realized who Opal actually was until they shared an anthropology class together 8 months prior, but he didn’t want to just start bothering her out of nowhere, so he hoped for the universe to grant him an opportunity to jog her memory, and so he smiled at her as she sheepishly began to waltz over to him, confident that the stars had indeed aligned and the resurgence of their friendship would open up room for more than just Shallow to torture him. She was cute too, and single, if Dante had remembered correctly. Not that he had made a point to or anything of course.

  Opal tripped 4, not a quarter of twenty times, on her way over to Dante, who had made sure to count, and it was with that first trip that she looked back at his eyes, as if to watch in this anticipatory stare down to catch him jeering at her mistake, but where she gazed she found instead a pair of magic mirrors, and sufficiently under their spell, found herself taking on his same marks that would someday be their arrugas that were at the present moment harbingers and would finally find rest as griots, cherished flagships of well-fucked nights and even better spent days.

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  Dante, who had been experiencing something quite similar just across the way, unconsciously stepped towards Opal as he found himself enraptured in this smile of hers. He had no idea how he’d never noticed it before, but saw fit not to question and was halfway through calling it divine intervention when his train of thought was positively hijacked by those two little pearls of infinity he saw deep in the eyes of one Opal Sanchez. That’s why when Opal did trip that sixth minus one time, Dante was too stun-locked by the majesty for his brain to register it at all.

  And so there they were. The rest of their lives bucking heads like horses at the races, just waiting for that single, monumental, remarkable shot that gave them the go ahead to get real fuckin’ busy about this dying business. Opal would be the owner of those first heart pounding, blood pressure spiking, oxytocin drenched and soon to be incubating magical first words. Dante was too busy mentally checking how his hair and face looked last he remembered and for any presence of his usual conversational tics and the position of the muscles in his face to verify if he was doing anything at all similar to looking at Opal the way she was fucking looking at him right now.

  So no, Dante hadn’t gotten around to thinking of the word “Hey” just yet and instead lost himself roaming in a beautiful purgatory where the fields were rich in lilac and he couldn’t fuck up whatever came next, and he could rot in blissful oblivion for forevermore. Dante actually did end up staying there for a bit, long enough to win the Biggest Pig in Show 2 years in a row, much to Ulysses Grant’s chagrin, but whatever, fuck him, and he was in the very middle of securing his third when Opal’s lips parted and thrust him back into reality. Rosy red lips pulled back slightly, not having to go too far to reveal what Dante would only ever describe as her two pearly whites.

  It was then that Dante realized Opal, much to his relief, had taken the reigns in his stead, and he sat in antsy anticipation, eager to regain his honor with better footing, and positioned his hand above a mouth foaming pawn, just waiting for that oh so simple white to e-4, and then he’d have her.

  Opal, the note in her hand ready for trade-off, opened her mouth and uttered one beautiful, single syllable before having her proclamation cut off by the booming rush of doors thrown ajar. Dr. Lichter and a small coup of TA’s that moved like a bonafide unit, clearing corners and chucking ‘nades, were on the hunt. After 2 tours across the drink they found their quarry, and Dr. Lichter, though still having no definitive proof of nuclear weapons, knew what he fucking saw and began his interrogation thusly.

  “DANTE WILLIAMS, WHAT IS THIS?”

  Dante, more perplexed by how close Dr. Lichter sounded to Shallow when angry, stood in stupefied petrification for some time more, before eliminating his confusion altogether, agreeing to just pay more close attention to Shallow’s voice next time and spot the real differences in it, lest he go insane. Dr. Lichter, having grown bored watching the absolute spectacle that was Dante’s mental gymnastics, decided to up his ante, and try for a hostage. Like in one of those Bond movies?

  ”

  Oh, and grandpa. Well. Actually, excuse me sorry, this won’t happen again. I just have to mention this. At this point grandpa was probably about an hour or two into his story. All of us, blissfully unaware of just how long this motherfucker was going to talk, and still fully captivated, grandpa took a little pause in his story and gazed around at his children and his children’s children, and told us that he had this theory there truly was a little piece of him in each and every single one of them. And Baby Julius, with the glob of grandpa’s earlier loogie having since dried against the long, dusty crossroads that was this nigga’s forehead, looked up in awe and asked grandpa how they could possibly know for sure.

  Grandpa, with tears in his eyes, sent his senses far past the beeps of medical devices and the hums of failing ventilation, and looked around at the wonderful garden his wife had grown with him and said,

  “If it ever were to come down to two. Just two. And you’re there in the chair, and the lights are down real low, and your bruises are singing so loud you’ve got half an opera right there, and that car battery in the corner is definitely hooked up to your fucking balls. Ovaries. Eh, whatever ya got, those things are really fucking on there, and the man at the switch has been flippin' it on you all day. And that’s the light way of putting it. I mean, he’s been with you, blow after blow, slowly using every tool of pain in his disposal to weaken your mental defenses. A poke here. A knife through the armor there. Slowly, but surely, whittling you down to this one singular thread, getting ever so much thinner, until he’s eventually waned you down so much that you’re good and ready to just snap the thing in half yourself.

  But you hold on strong, you do, knowing that no matter what this man does to you, you’ll never give up the goods. You owe it to your yourself. You owe it to your family. You owe it to country. But then he pulls out the 3 seashells and you snap that damn string that was everything you once believed, with love in your heart, and in turn he asks you one last question. One last fucking time. Bond or Powers?"

  Baby Julius looked up at him, waiting for him to end the story.

  Grandpa repeated, “Bond or Powers?”

  Baby Julius, unsure of what he meant, but hoping to appease him regardless, puffed out his big boy chest and raised his voice like his father taught him and answered, “Bond.”

  Grandpa nodded and smiled, his faith in God restored, the affirmation of his great theory now already upon him, and he looked down, the proud patriarch, at Baby Julius and said,

  “Knew you were a goddamn bastard.”

  Uncle Otis looked at Aunt Sarah with a rage like nothing that corner of the world had ever seen, and Aunt Sarah was too busy running out of the room to notice. Grandpa simply reset his posture, cleared his throat, and hacked the resulting loogie, square and groovy, onto Baby Julius’s forehead before continuing his story. He thought it was looking a little dry.

  “

  So, when Dr. Lichter made the (first of many) worst mistake(s) of his life, he didn’t think much of it. He was still focused on getting an answer out of Dante, and grabbed Opal by the arm, before yelling in an almost growl, “IS THIS THE PARTNER IN CRIME?” And that's exactly when it hit poor, old Dr. Lichter. There’s no telling how long it took for Dr. Lichter’s body to hit the ground, but in recollection Dante has settled on four seconds.

  Opal’s got hers set on six. Usually, they really like to be on the same page about things, but the death(?) of Dr. Lichter was something that they never revisited together. They do both remember the thud with which he hit the ground, the now lost patterns of flight he discovered on his descent, and the really quite marvelous tapestry of red the exiting bullet wound painted across the old, plastered white brick walls that had to Dante, looked oddly groovy in a way.