Fandom: The Sandman
Characters: Rose, Jed, Miranda
Rating: PG
Word Count: 300
Summary: Just an ordinary evening at home.
Disc-laimer: Rose and Jed are Neil Gaiman's.
Notes: Written for Feywood's request on Fic-on-Demand. Spoilers for the entire series.

One Quest's End

Rose Walker thought herself writer, because she kept writing, year after year. She'd once stuck on a theme long enough to start a book on the Triple Goddess, but that had been on the back burner, if not abandoned, for years. She still wrote, journalled incessantly, but his constant recording of thoughts hardly felt like creation.

'Why don't you write about all the weird shit?' asked her brother, without taking his eyes off the TV screen or his fingers off the buttons. He was on his last life on the level twelve.

'Because I don't like the weird shit, Jed,' she said, testy, and closed Word. Nothing was going to happen tonight. She opened the solitaire instead.

'I'd read it.'

'No you wouldn't. Not unless it was a comic.'

'I might. If it's got space battles in it.'

Rose said nothing, but was pretty sure he wouldn't like real spaceships. They were clammy and the humming was enough to drive you nuts. They wouldn't let you fire any plasma cannons, either. Jed had grown up just enough to know life wasn't a fairytale: he now thought it was a video game.

'I'm going now, okay?' their mother called out from the hallway. They shouted their okays from the couch. Rose picked up another piece of pizza, feeling like a teenager for once, as well as looking like one. She still had a couple of months for that. Reminded, she put her hand on her belly, petting the strange roundness.

She closed her eyes and lay back, dozing with her computer in her lap, listening to the crackling explosions as Jed obliterated pixel warships. She'd nearly died looking for her brother. For this moment. It was a kind of a happy ending, wasn't it? Somehow it felt more like a beginning.