Ready or not, here I go! And no, for those of you who might be wondering. No, I’m not ready. But I said I would start posting chapters of my (still incredibly unfinished) FNAF fanfiction today, and even I keep my promises once in a while.

Must be a blue moon.

So for those of you who have been hanging off a certain cliff in Mammon for the past…yikes, six months, I am pleased (and panicked) to announce the return of Everything Is All Right. The first chapter of Part Four: New Faces, Old Bones is up over at fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org. I’d actually forgotten how to create new works at both places, so there may be issues, enormously complicated by the fact that I was attempting to do it around a small dog who had decided that my face was the only honorable target to practice the ancient art of the Thousand Tongue Attack.

However, everything seems to be, er, all right. For me, anyway. For Ana, not so much…

[image error]

Snow fell over Mammon—fat, fluffy, white flakes to cover up the last dirty layer and make it all new again. Impatient children tried to play in it, slipping in slush and scraping their fingers on the crust of last week’s snow if they weren’t wearing mittens. Fathers and sons trudged around their yards, taking down lights and sparkly reindeer now, while these gently falling flakes could still be considered ‘good’ weather for it. Mothers and daughters kept busy on the inside, packing away decorations, maybe stirring pots of thick cocoa or fragrant cider in their kitchens to warm cold hands when the work and play was done.

Ana stood in the driveway with her arms hugged tight around the crinkly paper bag holding her clothes, watching it all and trying not to cry. Aunt Easter was late. She, who had never ever ever been late, who had sometimes been there before Ana was even out of bed, waking her with whispers and kisses, bundling her into her clothes and then out to the car where David waited, and they’d all go together up to the stone house on its high, lonely mountain and pretend they were a family until it was time for Ana to go home. That was how it should be, how it had always been. Something bad must have happened, if Aunt Easter wasn’t coming.

Was it her fault? She had spent the whole winter vacation at Aunt Easter’s, almost two weeks, but she didn’t think she’d been bad. She couldn’t always tell, but she didn’t think so. It had been a good visit, full of laughs and hugs, with a tree and lights and special dinner on fancy plates and opening presents on the floor while Aunt Easter and her friend sat together in one chair and watched them. She had cried when she had to go home again, secret tears into her pillow after David was asleep…had Aunt Easter heard her and gotten sick of her whining? David hadn’t been at school since Wednesday, or at least, he hadn’t come by the kiddie-garden playground at recess to see her. Was he mad at her too? What had she done wrong? Had she been messy, smelly, noisy, a bad girl, a stupid bitch, a rotten little shit? Whatever it was, she was sorry and would say so as many times as Aunt Easter wanted if only she had the chance.

Behind her, she could hear angry noises in the house Ana still thought of as new even though she’d been living there ever since coming home from the hospital in the summer. When the front door opened, she did not look around. Her mother didn’t always like to be ignored, but never liked to be stared at. After a long, tense moment, the door shut again, but only just long enough for Ana to sigh out her relief. Then it banged open and her mother’s feet came crunching out over the broken snow she had never shoveled.

“Come on,” she said, catching Ana’s arm.