The Bear and Barnacle

"No," Jack says firmly as he pursues Val to drag him back from the dining room window.

"Wanna see!" Val protests with a hint of whine.

"You can see from back here."

"Phbbt," says Val.

They sit at the table -- well, Jacks sits at it, Val sits on it -- and watch over the hedge as the bodies shamble past, stiff-kneed, arms out straight and wrists limp.

"Zoooooombies."

"Put it in a sentence," Jack tells him automatically, as one of the stiff figures trips over a bottle in the street, goes down like a sack of rocks with no attempt to catch itself, and rolls out of view.

Val sighs dramatically. "They are zoooooombies."

"You think so?" Now that he thinks of it, he supposes they are a bit like that terrible Bela Lugosi picture Danny loved so much when they were in their twenties ... the blank stares, the directionless gait.

"Yup. Like berserkers only more rotten."

"They sure look rotten." Val scrambles off the table; Jack catches him and puts him back on it. "And just where do you think you're going?"

"To the roof to throw things at them."

"Fat chance," Jack says firmly, and redoubles his grip, avoiding a bash from Val's wing. They sit and stare through the window as the odd, morbid parade continues past.

Val says he will answer the door for alive people if anyone wishes to brave the zombie pub crawl.

A survivor type, that's what Val is, from the moment he hid beneath the wing of a dead uncle to escape the slaughter of his family to the moment a milennium later when he lost his world. He told Zelas-sama once, and Dolphin-sama multiple times, that that was why Gaav chose him.

“What on earth attracted my brother to you?” Zelas-sama asked brusquely, letting Val go so he overbalanced and fell on one hand in the pelts strewed at her feet.

“He should get fresh blood and let me keep you as a toy. What does he want to keep you for after all these years?” Dolphin-sama remarked absently as Val courteously untangled the yarn behind her knitting needles.

On both occasions (and all the times Dolphin asked again because she'd forgotten), Val laughed that musical, rather infectious chuckle of his and explained that after he'd survived two hundred years of every Golden Dragon in the world trying to kill him, he was ideally suited to his master's unique purposes.

Gaav, however, would probably say that it's deeper than that, that something in Val's nature knew his master before they ever laid eyes on one another. And perhaps Val's meteoric fall after Gaav died and the massive mushroom cloud of destruction it unleashed prove him right. Val came from the Mother Gaav's, and returned to her Gaav's, and came back from her Gaav's again.

So he's startled by this latest strange happening, but not actually surprised by the proof of his nature.

When he gets an ice cube out of the freezer to it vaporizes in a flaring instant of flame. When he touches the cold metal of the sink tap, it goes up too, and when he stares at his fingers for a moment and leans precariously to elbow the window pane, it too turns to fire.

By the time Jack and Zel get out of bed, Val has bundled into his clothes as best he can, considering the wings and the fact that his boots were on the porch and did not survive the touch of his feet. He is outside doing temperature tests. The ground, no. A rock, yes. A tree, no. The water in the outdoor bath, yes – and spectacularly so.

Everything cold he touches turns to fire. It's brilliant.

He goes back inside, opens the Plague's cage with a shirt wrapped around his hand, and lifts out the warm body of the rat. “We,” he informs the Plague cheerfully as he shovels him into his walking harness, “are going to have some fun.”

Val goes into Jack's workshop, starts to say something, then gets a funny look on his face and goes back out again.

Five minutes later he's back, having extensively rehearsed this. His mental vocabulary is still larger than the bank of words he knows and can say aloud without unintelligible blurring, so this latest Margate warpedness is intolerable.

"You should be crying," he tells Jack.

Jack looks up from the tiny screw he's fiddling with, expecting that he's taken overlong to notice the latest prank -- stolen mail, laundry soap in the coffee, the usual tricks. "What have you done?"

"'m dying."

"That's not fun," Jack says, not terribly impressed by his melodrama.

( Read more... )



This needed to happen as dialogue, I'm afraid, so there you have it.

“Of course it would be you,” Val says crabbily to the transparent figure. Crabbily because he's painfully aware of his smallness, of his still-faltering speech; also because on Val's personal list of favorite fellow-servants, Rigo is exactly two spaces from the bottom. “Couldn't be anyone else.”

Rigo stands with his arms folded and says nothing. He's a tall, dark man, lean and well-built with eyes that burn an uncanny deep red around diamond pupils. This is if one is lucky enough to see his eyes; he rarely makes eye contact, preferring usually a point in the vicinity of the left ear or shoulder of whoever he's speaking to.

Val crosses his chubby arms right back at him and at last Rigo sighs and speaks. “What happened to you, Val-san?”

“Got shrunk,” is the succinct answer. “So what? You're dead.”

Rigo nods, once, measuredly. And does not speak.

“This is gonna be a long month,” Val mourns softly, and hops off his bed to go tell Jack and Zel (and Amy, and Amelia) that they have yet more company.

Val has been four for rather more than half a year when he decides enough is enough. Each year he ages is one year closer to adulthood ... or as close as he ever got, anyway. Two hundred is maybe not quite adult for a dragon.

First he quells lurking fears by having Jack measure his height and wingspan to ensure that he actually is growing. Lacking any real idea of when he was born the first time beyond "when it was warm," he chooses Midsummer Day to serve as his birthday. In the incredibly convoluted calendar of this locale that falls on the twenty-first of June.

What he didn't expect was Dora's resistance to the idea.

"I'm going to grow up," he said at last, stubbornly, to she who had been five over two birthdays now. "If you want to stay older then you have to grow up too." He added generously: "I'll share my birthday with you this year." At last she agreed.

So a compromise cake was baked, lemon with pink icing on one side and chocolate on the other. The pink side has six blue candles and the chocolate side has five. The whole vast, sticky confection, grimly but perfectly iced by Ivonka, sits proudly in the center of the bar at the Pub.

Val thinks this is an incredibly bizarre way to mark the turning of age, but he's not about to argue with tradition ... or cake.

Val vaguely remembers crawling last night into Jack and Zel's bed, wanting the body heat (or so he would insist). He was expecting to be unceremoniously put out when his guardians decided they wanted their privacy back. This, though ... it's definitely unceremonious to suddenly have a tiny body struggling under his, but not at all expected.

( A YM thread. In which Zel is very small, Jack is very embarrassed, and Val is very wicked. )

Once he's fed his pet rat, Val dresses in Zelgadis's clothes (the jeans are too tight, but they're wearable, and the zippered sweatshirt fits) and walks down to the pub. He imagines Dora will have grown up just as he has. And everyone else ... well, this he ought to see.

Val weaves across the lawn at a dead run, dodging patches of sunlight that would make him more visible to aerial attackers. The disguised hole in the hedge is ahead; he reaches it, drops flat, folds his wings tight, and crawls through at the cost of a few feathers that were coming out anyway (he's almost too big for the hole now; it was a perfect fit when he discovered it). On the other side, he skulks along the hedge, surveying the area before he leaves cover and makes a mad dash to the neighbors' front porch. He wedges his arm through the hole and then there's a storm of barking -- damn it, he's been seen! He seizes the prize, tears his arm out of the opening and flees. No stealth this time -- he has to get to safety.

Back on his own turf, he pauses to take deep, calming breaths. The next stage of the mission is not so easy.

He sneaks around the corner of the house, slowly, carefully, trying to avoid the view of the neighbor's windows. Two enemies are within; a girl his own apparent age, and her mother. Either could chance to look out the window at any time. Stealth is of the essence.

Creeping along in the shadow of the front stoop, he watches for any sign of motion, then attacks. Adrenaline making his heart race, he drops back to the shadow, but he can't run this time; he must sneak back, darting low from tree to bush to flowerbed to hedge, sticking to the shade, moving only when he's sure he's unseen.

Mission accomplished, he plops down on the driveway and reviews his loot. From the family on the right, three flimsy envelopes of junk mail; from the elderly couple on the left, what looks like a greeting card and the real prize, their water bill.

He takes the contents of the neighbors' letter boxes inside and climbs on a chair to leave them in the coffee grounds, where they're sure to be found soon.

Stealing the post shows how low he's sunk, for a former priest of War, but it gives him something to do.

Seventy years ago, or seven thousand in the future, there’s no way to tell, this happened; now, it's a memory in a boy’s mind, too large a memory for him to cope with …

“What happens to us when we die?” Val asked his master once, idly because just then he was most focused on avoiding it, not speculating about it. ( Are mazoku reborn from the Mother like humans? )

Admittedly, Val was slightly alarmed when Dora handed him Mary Poppins' name, given that they've never actually spoken, but he spends a great deal of time in the pub, coloring with Dora and getting under Xel's feet and stealing Iago's liqueurs and staring at people until they get nervous and go away, so he knows what kind of tea she likes.

He weaves his way through the pub lugging a wicker basket, one of the ones with a handle and a double lid, perfectly sized for a small picnic, lined in cheery white and purple plaid. Inside the basket can be found a blanket and dishes for two. Val has occupied the remaining space with black currant tea; a jar of currant preserves; currant-flavored mustard, syrup, and balsamic vinegar; a black currant-scented candle; and a box of homemade black currant coffee cakes.



The basket is dragged to Mary's chair and Val plops down to sit next to it, looking up eagerly.

Val is very pleased with his pumpkin effort. Even though it didn't actually work to bite the design into the rind, it has a very nice effect now that Jack cautiously let him have a knife.



At first he sort of wished the fire were a different color, but since it's occurred to him that the pumpkin will perhaps catch alight, and will certainly eventually rot and shrivel, maybe that shade's all right after all. ^,^

FWUMP

ought to be the approximate sound made by a small body (say, four-or-five-years-sized) falling from a fair height and faceplanting semiconsciously into the soil.

In this case, it's more like

CRASH
*squeal*
crackle
snap!
thud

because there is a large rose trellis in the way.

He's still for a moment after he hits the ground, shocked -- not so much by the impact as by the presence of any ground to hit -- then he begins thrashing wildly. The winged boy claws his way half-upright. Golden eyes glimmer out at the world from behind a veil of dark feathers, a tangle of briars.

Not quite aware of what has happened, only knowing that what was supposed to be destroyed is still there, still obstinately existent, the last Ancient Dragon has arrived in Margate.

He stays tremblingly quiet for a few long seconds, staring through the ruined shrubbery at the grey and drizzling sky, then continues to fight the thorns caught in his black-feathered wings.