Sweethearts, are going to be okay

Chapter One

There are two things you should know about me before you hear my story. Firstly, I'm in love with my childhood friend, Jelly. She looks skinny, but really, she just hides muscle on her small frame, and her hair is short and curly. We realised our feelings for each other when we were still pre-teens in our last year of primary school. Back then most people thought Jelly was a boy or even those who knew she was a girl, well they thought of her as one of the boys. That wasn't true for me though. For me Jelly had always been a girl. Sure, she's athletic and doesn't act like a prissy girl but I could see things others couldn't.
The second thing you should know about me is that both Jelly and myself are from Hunter family's. Jelly is a descendent of Beowulf and myself, well, I'm the last heir of the Van Helsing line. My name is Silver Helsinger. Both Jelly and I are eighteen now, and we're beginning our training to fight on our own. Most people our age worry about college or part-time jobs. That's not what we worry about. For us, it's whether a knife will be thrown at us by one of our family members. It was a traditional part of training. Not to mention as we're part of one of the biggest monster hunter communities in the country and from two of the last lines of the old hunters, well we grew up with a target on our backs. It's for that reason why we have trouble trusting people from outside our community. The monster hunter community in our region, that is. I suppose that's probably part of the reason why Jelly and I became so close because we have always been able to rely completely on the other.
I'm not like Jelly. Where she is a head shorter than me, slim and an expert gymnast with a keen ability with dual butterfly knives. I'm more of an average shape. I'm still somewhat slim, but my family trained me more on hand to hand fighting, so my body is almost entirely muscle.
Since we were about fourteen, we started spending nights together. We weren't having sex of course. We'd told each other we wanted to wait till we were older. Even now, we still haven't done it. Jelly has been asking lately, but I'm just not that comfortable with my body. I have my own cabin on the community compound. The Helsingers own a majority of the land, and so traditionally, a new cabin is built when we turn seventeen. Jelly spends half of her nights with her own family and half with me. She hadn't decided on moving in with me yet. I think it's because it's easier to train with her family if she still stays there for half the week.
So what I've told you so far is only really half of the truth. You see, I'm transgender. I don't go by my birth name, which is Silver. I go by Sylvia. I use witch magic to appear how I feel on the inside. My aunt is a fully trained witch. She usually just uses her magic to heal injuries, deliver babies and to make tonics that make it easier to fight creatures faster and stronger than us. For me, though, my aunt gives me a potion that I take every full moon to change my appearance to how I feel on the inside. My hair is long, but I keep it braided so that I can fight without it affecting me. Where most of the community thinks Jelly is a boy, most think of me as a girl, which I am. To us, though, we're a lesbian couple, and that works for us. When we were twelve, our friend group had broken into a candy warehouse and run amok. Jelly and I had gotten away with it and after that we'd realised how we felt for one another. That had resulted in our first kiss and we've been going strong since then.
Now, here we are, both eighteen years old and getting closer to our hunter exams. After that, we could either join an existing hunter team or create our own. For now, though, Jelly and me were enjoying our night. We were laying under the stars on a picnic blanket in a forest clearing. To you that might sound like a romantic date but to us it was just another night on the job. You see, we're the bait. Two small framed people in the middle of nowhere with no one else around. What creature wouldn't be allured by us. Just to be sure though, we'd rubbed some virgin blood onto our thighs. Our families were staked out close by. Being hidden in trees and shrubbery for hours on end didn't sound as pleasant as laying here with Jelly. "I think I've perfect my black forest cake recipe" I told her casually. "You've gotta make me some" she said as she turned onto her stomach. It was a much more difficult position to react from however she trusts me enough to cover her if we were suddenly attacked. "You look cute" I told her. "You're getting distracted, Sylvie" she told me. "I'm a Singer" I said, stating my families codename. "We're never distracted" I told her, looking at a shape moving in the forest roughly fifteen feet away. I let out a pretend sneeze. That was our code for a monster watching us. "Bless you" Jelly said smiling. She always became overly excited when a fight was about to break out. I sat up and turned to a different direction. Jelly sat up and faced the way I'd been looking. We still looked like we were just two people talking to each other on a picnic rug. I saw four more shapes moving in the new direction I was facing. "That's my fourth sneeze tonight" I told her. Alerting her to the number I was seeing. "I think you might be coming down with something. You sneezed three times today as well. Oh gosh your legs are hairy Sylvie" she said pretending to brush her hand against my perfectly smooth legs. Hairy was code word for werewolves. So we had eight closing in on us. "Perimiter closed" came over the radio we had hidden. "That's our queue" I said standing up and throwing a silver dart between the eyes of the closest wolf. "Hunters," the closest wolf screamed. Jelly grabbed the two butterfly knives from the sides of her shoes. She flipped towards a wolf and, using precision strikes, stabbed through its major arteries. It dropped dead. "Really Jelly? Hairy legs. That's offensive" I said as I wrapped my arm around a werewolf's neck and snapped it. The other werewolves were angry and closing in but so was our families. They sprang into action, quickly slaying the rest of the wolves. Which turned out to be a pack of eleven in the end. Somehow, we'd missed three on our initial count.
Afterwards, on our drive back to the compound, Jelly said, "I'm sorry that I said your legs were hairy. They're smooth and sexy like always," she told me with a cute smile as she rubbed my outer thigh. I looked away from the road and at my girlfriend for a moment. Seeing that gorgeous smile. I felt myself light up as well. "Have I told you lately just how much I love you" I told her, smiling happily.