Work Text
Nanako walks back to the fancy school for lack of anywhere better to go. There is no wind and not a great deal of dust, which seems strange, and piles of things that she thinks might be bones, which she decides not to examine too closely. She knows she ought to be more scared, but everything is so strange and distant and disconnected that all she feels is her heart hammering in her chest.
And then someone runs out of the high school.
It's a girl in a black school uniform with a blue ribbon tied at her throat. She has long black hair and large dark eyes and a delicate porcelain-doll face that puts Nanako in mind of a certain kind of horror movie. But the other girl doesn't move like a ghost might - not that there's such a thing as
ghosts
, anyway - and when she spots Nanako she hurries over in a way that makes Nanako think that she, too, woke up alone in this place.
"Are you okay?" the girl asks. Her voice would be imperious if it wasn't shaking so badly.Nanako lets out a breath. "Maybe. I don't know.""Did you see anyone else? Do you know where we are?"She shakes her head.The girl looks back towards the school. A muscle in her jaw works. When she speaks again, her voice is steadier. "I need to get to the university. My brother's a professor there. He's a genius, he'll be able to..." Here she waves her hand as if to take in everything around them.
Nanako doesn't ask what might happen if the university is in the same state as everything else; she understands exactly what it's like to have unshakeable ironclad faith in an older brother. Instead, she tries to think of what
her
big brother would do in this situation and draws some strength from that. "We should find something we can use as a weapon," she says. "Just in case."
That gets a sharp look from the girl. "I thought you said there wasn't anyone else here.""I saw bones," she says as an explanation, and at that the girl's eyes widen and she nods in quick agreement.Nanako decides not to tell her that sometimes she has faint, half-remembered nightmares about the monsters in Heaven. She's never told her big brother; she's not about to share that with a stranger.The inside of the school covered in graffiti that starts out as generic obscenities and trails off into barely-coherent doomsday rambling. The only illumination the sunlight streaming in from the broken windows that line one side of the hallway. The first classroom she and the girl poke their heads into is a jumble: broken desks and chairs, yellowing papers, shredded books, pieces of a cracked blackboard yanked out of the wall by something that left gouges exactly like claw marks."I guess this isn't what your school normally looks like?" Nanako asks the girl, trying for levity and mostly failing.But the girl's brow is furrowed into a frown. "It...is, I think. Sort of. This was my homeroom two years ago." She points to an empty corner of the room. "There should be a television there. And there should be a smartboard here, not a blackboard." She takes a cautious step into the room, eyes darting back and forth. "Those are the old desks in the basement. And those loudspeakers are wrong."Abruptly she walks to the middle of the room, Nanako trailing her, and picks up a crumbling piece of paper. She holds it up for Nanako to inspect.It's a calendar from 1999.Nanako forces herself to take a deep breath. Hasn't she heard her cousin talk about the television world when he thinks she's out of earshot - about nightmares and worst fears made reality? Is that what this is?"Did something happen here in 1999?" she asks.
The girl frowns and shakes her head. "I don't think so. Not at Sevens. It's always been a regular school, never like…" She waves one hand around and then drops it, helpless. "Like
this
."
They explore the rest of the first floor in silence. In one of the classroom there is something that might once of have been a machine before it was gutted for parts. On the second floor the teachers' lounge is destroyed - desks and cabinets overturned, clocks smashed, more claw marks gouged into the walls. Nanako picks up bits and pieces of paper at random. None of the dates go past 1999."I'm sure this isn't my school," the girl says. She holds up a piece of paper that looks like a list of teachers' names. "If it was, my father's name would be on this. He was a teacher here back then."Nanako peers over her shoulder. "Is anything else different?""I don't know. I hardly know anything about Sevens back then." She sets the paper back down on one of the desks and gives Nanako a wide-eyed look. "What is this place?"Nanako can only shake her head. If this is someone's fear, it isn't the girl's.On the third floor, they find the creature.The good news is it probably didn't make the claw marks. The bad news is it's definitely not human. In fact, it mostly just looks like a mobile pile of spilled orange gelatin."Well," it says, and Nanako jumps back so quickly that she slams right into the girl and almost knocks them both over. "You're new."
Nanako blinks at it. She's gotten plenty of self-defense lessons from her big brother's friends over the years, but not one of them taught her what to do with sentient marmalade. "You
talk?
"
"You
are
new. That's unfortunate. Everyone's always winding up where they don't belong these days. It's a proper headache, let me tell you."
Oh good, Nanako thinks a bit hysterically, it's a
polite
jelly monster. "Where are we?"
The jelly monster makes a speculative
blorp
noise. "This is my world," it burbles. "Which is in your world, or at least it ought to be. This is all very confusing."
"Then where's
our
world?" the girl asks from behind Nanako in the sort of carefully rock-steady voice that's a very small step away from hysteria. "The part that isn't in your world, I mean?"
"Tricky, that. Very tricky. Not what they used to be, worlds." The jelly monster slouches a bit, or possibly just starts to melt. Nanako has the distinct impression that it's thinking very hard. "Tell you what," it says at last. "We'll make a deal. You give me something, and I'll help you figure out how to go back to your world. Sound fair?"It sounds like she's negotiating with jam, but she doesn't see how it can make her situation any worse. "Sure.""And what will you give me?""I've got Pocky?" the girl offers.
The enthusiastic
blorp
sounds suggest that this will do nicely.
*
They walk through the post-apocalyptic ruins of Sumaru, Nanako and the Sevens girl and the jelly monster. The great metal arc over their heads spins slowly and ponderously and casts strange shadows. There is still something
off
about the sunlight.
The bridge is broken and the riverbed is dry, so they scramble down one bank and up the other. On the other side they find a little boy with cracked black-rimmed glasses, perhaps seven or eight years old, sitting on the riverbank with his arms wrapped around his knees. He scrambles to his feet at the sight of them.
"What's going
on?
" he wails as he latches onto the Sevens girl. He is wearing gym sweats with
West Hirasaka Elementary School
embroidered on them. "None of the phones work, there's nobody here - "
"We're going to figure it out," the girl says quickly, crisply, as she tries to disentangle herself. "There has to be someone here who knows something." She darts a glance at Nanako and her lips thin. "More than you, anyway."The boy frowns at Nanako over the frames of his broken glasses. "You know where everyone went?""I know we're not where we're supposed to be. Something happened to us, not the world." She wills this to be true, because she can't make herself consider the alternative. "Everyone else is fine. We just have to get back to them."He nods like he doesn't quite believe her and then walks next to the jelly monster like it's his only source of comfort. Nanako tries not to find that just a little unfair.They walk on. There are no other signs of life, human or otherwise. The boy and the jelly monster talk in hushed voices, which is how Nanako learns that the boy is named Keito and that he wants to be a police officer like his father and uncle. The jelly monster dutifully admires his Coppy the Police Dog watch and expresses great amazement at a canine becoming a member of law enforcement.While Keito explains the concept of mascots, the Sevens girl falls into step beside Nanako, dropping her voice to something just above a whisper. "There's no animals, either. Did you notice that?"
"There's no
anything
," Nanako whispers back.
"Just bones." The girl shivers. "I think this is real. That jelly thing was talking about a different world, right? Maybe it's
somewhere else
, but it's real. The calendar in Sevens said 1999, so maybe..."
"Maybe something happened here and not in your Sumaru?" Nanako finishes for her.That gets a quick, grim nod, and then the girl's face does something complicated."Kashihara," she says suddenly.Nanako blinks at her."Kashihara Mihane. That's my name." She sets her jaw and looks right into Nanako's eyes with an intensity that's honestly kind of scary. "Someone has to tell my brother, in case you get back and I don't."
Nanako can't very well tell her that that's
not
going to happen, but she tries for positivity anyway.
Someone
needs to, clearly. "Someone will figure out where we are."
She glances back at Keito, who is trying to teach hirigana to the jelly monster. He blinks at her owlishly and gives her a careful wide-toothed grin before going back to his task.
At least she was only half-conscious in her Heaven, she thinks. At least she
knew
, in some deep-down subconscious way, that her big brother was out there looking for her.
"And if they don't," Nanako adds, pitching her voice low enough that it doesn't carry, "we'll just have to find our own way out."Kashihara nods once, quick and jerky, and drops the subject.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Minako's first impression of Inaba is a curtain of fine, misty rain.
The second impression is a general sense of
old
and
cramped
and
claustrophobic
, which she chooses to ignore. She clutches her umbrella in one hand and the strap of her bag in the other and turns to flash her prettiest and most winning smile at her twin brother.
"Cheaper than Okina!" she says brightly.Minato hasn't bothered to venture out of the train station and is instead peering through its open doors. He has his headphones over his ears, but his eyes aren't half-focused like they always are when he's actually listening to music, so she knows he's just wearing them to avoid having conversations with people who aren't his sister.
Because she
is
his sister and he knows better than to ignore her, he just looks around and says: "Smaller than Okina."
This is very true, but also quite beside the point. "It's not Iwatodai. So there." When he doesn't correct her, she waves her umbrella and bag dramatically. "Look up how to get to Shiroku-san's house. My hands are full."He retrieves a paper from his pocket, unfolds it, and holds out their soon-to-be-landlady's instructions so she can read it herself."Lazy," she mutters.
He doesn't correct her on
that
, either.
They wait forty-five minutes for the next bus to Inaba's shopping district, which turns out to be deserted save for one gas station attendant who is clearly so desperately bored she's willing to talk to anyone. Minako offers up her brother as a sacrificial lamb and abandons him to venture further down the road on her own, past shuttered windows and dusty display cases, until she finds Shiroku-san's little shop. She stands in the doorway - doing her best to radiate cheerfulness while clutching a clear plastic umbrella and a slightly tattered bag she's had since middle school, thank you very much - and scans the plump, round face behind the counter for signs of wavering or second-guessing from her hopefully soon-to-be-landlady.There aren't any. Minako has always been good at reading people. She's had to be.
Once introductions have been made and rooms assigned - Minako is sharing a bedroom with Shiroku-san's daughter; Minato has a glorified closet all to himself - she dumps her bag in her room, listens to Shiroku-san's short but very
emphatic
lecture about the care and handling of tropical fish, and wanders back through the empty shopping district to retrieve her missing sibling. He's still at the gas station, eating a candy bar he got from somewhere and very clearly not listening to the attendant talk his ear off. The shopping district's so quiet that Minako can hear the chatter all the way down the road.
It only stops when she draws closer and stands in the street, at which point the attendant
finally
stops talking and just
stares
.
"There's two of you" she says, the statement half a question.Minako huffs at her. This, at least, she's used to. "We're twins," she says with a grin that shows a lot of teeth. "Buy one, get one free." She waves off an attempt to shake her hand in favor of steering her brother away from the gas station and towards Shiroku-san's. He's still eating his candy bar."So which girlfriend is this one going to be?" she asks, light, teasing. "I've lost count."He does that thing where he doesn't quite roll his eyes, not really. "She's boring," he says, and then seems to consider something far more important. "I want croquettes."Minako swipes what's left of the candy bar out of his hand and punches him right on the shoulder, just gently enough to avoid leaving a bruise.*The thinking behind looking for work in Okina of all places goes something like this:
Okina is mediocre. In fact, it's spectacularly, gloriously mediocre, which is about what both Arisato twins are as well, what with them possessing a great deal of intelligence, but no money, time, or particular interest in furthering their education. It's close enough to Iwatodai to take occasional overnight trips home and make sure their father hasn't accidentally pickled himself in cheap alcohol, but not so close that they'll have to do this very often. It's not
quite
far enough away to guarantee that their mother won't swoop down from Tokyo to play happy families whenever she feels particularly guilty, but living in a tiny town further down the train line lessens the risk of surprise maternal visits by quite a lot and also makes rent seem a lot less intimidating.
Minako is the one who decides on Inaba, because Minako is noisy and pushy and deciding things is just what she does. Her brother agrees once he finds out it has hot springs.The name of the town itself is vaguely, naggingly familiar, but not in a way that triggers any alarm bells.Not until much too late, anyway.*Shiroku-san's daughter is named Ami. She is a student at Okina College, which is exactly as mediocre as the rest of Okina, and is the same age as the twins. She has dyed orange hair and wears so much blue eyeshadow that she looks a bit like a technicolor panda, but Minako compliments both because something about Ami's stance and the way she keeps pushing back her bangs suggests defensive pride. She takes Minako to the bookstore and the croquette stand and the forge, which has a lot of jewelry and replica armor and is generally warm and cozy enough that Minako lingers before allowing herself to be drawn back into the misty rain.Her brother remains in his tiny room, officially watching television on the little set Shiroku-san has somehow crammed in there but actually just napping. Minako ventures in long enough to poke him awake with her foot and tell him Shiroku-san has dinner ready for them and that also she needs their help moving shelving around. Inaba is so small, apparently, that at night her shop doubles as Japan's smallest and most depressing bar.
But it could be all right, Minako thinks. She's eating food that she hasn't had to cook herself. She has a roommate. No one in Inaba or even Okina knows about her parents' messy divorce or her father's inability to stay somewhere in the general neighborhood of sobriety or her mother's newer and better second family in Tokyo. No one knows exactly how many people she's punched for badmouthing her family or how close she came to being kicked out of Central Iwatodai High School. No one knows that she's
anything
but just another girl looking for a job.
It's going to be okay, she thinks, and grins at her brother across the table even though her mouth is full, then smirks when he very pointedly doesn't make a face back.
They're
going to be okay.
That night, as she dreams vague dreams of mist and fog, a woman is murdered.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
It's not until Rey retrieves the first of the Jedi tomes from their hiding place on the
Falcon
that a problem occurs to her: namely, that she has no idea how to
read
the blasted things.
She enlists Finn's help. Unfortunately, neither Jakku nor the First Order have done anything to prepare the two of them for the twists and curlicues and occasional wiggly things that make up ancient Jedi writing, not even when they hold the books sideways and squint. Finn suggests asking Rose, on the grounds that Rose won't rat them out for errant tome-smuggling. Rose, in turn, flips the books upside-down, stares at them until she goes cross-eyed, and then asks Rey if she's absolutely sure this is an actual writing system and not ancient tooka tracks.One escape from the medbay later, the three of them take the less hefty books and set about ambushing Poe, which is surprisingly difficult to accomplish despite the fact that the current Resistance base consists of little more than three prefab shelters and an ever-growing porg flock. Once they manage to track him down, he admits to recognizing the writing from a temple near his childhood home.
Not that he can
read
it, of course.
The four of them stand around the book for a moment, staring at it as if waiting for it to do something interesting."You could ask the Force?" Finn suggests. "That's a thing you can do with it, right?"*So Rey asks the Force.The Force, in its infinite wisdom, tells her to go to Hutt Space.*Chewie gets her and Finn clearance to leave because he is a war hero and a decorated veteran and also because he towers over everyone else on base and once folded a particularly unpleasant bounty hunter in half.
Once they're on the
Falcon
and have carefully removed a porg nest from the copilot's seat, he looks back at Rey and asks where exactly he's supposed to be taking them.
"Rakote," she says. "In Hutt Space."He gives her a deeply disappointed look, like she's just announced she's decided to quit being a Jedi in favor of dealing deathsticks."What's Rakote?" Finn asks. She can almost see him cycling through worlds in his head, courtesy of whatever rote training stormtroopers receive in the First Order; the name clearly isn't among them.Chewie answers. Rakote is rundown and abandoned and forgotten, a stopover point along one of the more dangerous and obscure hyperspace routes that lead, eventually, to Kessel. It's Ord Mantell and Nar Shaddaa, but worse. There is nothing there and never has been.But that is where the Force is leading her, so they go.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
There were probably worse ways to start a morning, but Chief Judy Hopps couldn't think of any off the top of her head. For one thing, "morning" for her had actually begun with a frantic and not entirely coherent phone call at two a.m. Four hours on, with the sun just creeping over the horizon, she had already been on the phone with the hospital, the county sheriff,
and
every other police chief in Deerbrooke County, plus she had spent way too much time at the scene of Podunk's very first savage predator attack. She was running on stubbornness, generalized undirected outrage, and far too much coffee with not nearly enough carrot-hazelnut creamer.
The
last
thing she needed was a new recruit. Especially
this
new recruit, who was standing in front of her, paws nervously tucked in his trouser pockets. His ears were plastered back against his head and he was smiling nervously, obviously aware of the fact that the other members of Podunk's finest - all two of them - were staring at him.
Judy sighed. "You're kidding me. Not today. No."
The young recruit - the red-furred, bushy-tailed,
unquestionably carnivorous
recruit - produced a much-folded piece of paper from a pocket. He pulled himself into something that wasn't even remotely attention. "Mayor Bellwether said you're the best cop there is, Chief Hopps. She said I could learn so much from you."
"Oh she did, did she?" Judy plucked the paper out of his waiting paw and unfolded it. It was a beautifully written letter of commendation and recommendation for one Robin Goodfellow Reynard, requesting that the first predator graduate the police academy had produced in years be allowed to work with her, what with Podunk being the only town in the tri-county area that was still
permissive
enough to let him on the force.
She fought the extremely unprofessional urge to crumple it into a ball and throw it in the wastebasket."I'm not under Mayor Bellwether's jurisdiction," she said instead as she handed it back. "I don't have space for a new officer and I'm under no obligation to take you.""He could help me make missing mammals calls!" one of her thin blue line called from over by the filing cabinets.
"Can it, Hassenfeffer," Judy snapped, but it was too late. Reynard was
beaming
.
"I can do that," he said eagerly. That was the overall impression she had of him: pure unfiltered keenness. "I'm really good at phone calls. I'm
exceptional
at phone calls."
Judy suspected that he would have said he was good at absolutely anything, up to and including sprouting wings and taking up orbit around Podunk's water tower, if it meant she would agree to let him stay. She recognized the expression on his face. Ten years ago - back when she had been a little younger and a whole lot more of a dumb bunny - she had seen it in the mirror every morning. That was probably why Bellwether had sicced him on her.Well, that and the whole fox thing - and, if Judy was in a particularly paranoid mood, the fact that there was an attack she had just spent the last four hours dealing with. And here she was, being handed a predator no one in Podunk knew or could vouch for.Which meant that it was probably at least a good idea to keep the overeager would-be cop close by, no matter how much Judy hated the idea. "No phone calls," she said at last. "I'm not putting you on any cases yet. But Burrows over there is going through our files, so you can help with that."
Sweet cheese and crackers, he actually
saluted
. "You got it, Chief! Thank you, Chief!"
"Just remember that it's probational!" she called after him as he sprinted for the filing cabinets.
Now that she was done with Reynard - and wasn't
that
going to be fun to explain to Podunk's one-mammal payroll office - she surveyed the rest of the officers. "Anything else, while I'm out here?"
Tom Burrows raised a tentative paw, not that he needed to. There were only three of them on the whole police force, Reynard very much not included yet, and in any case he was very tall and very wide and roughly the same shape as a bowling ball. "My mom just texted me and said she saw the ZNN van driving into town. What should we do?"
The spell Reynard's sudden arrival had cast over the police station broke. Tom exchanged a glance with his fellow officer and both shuffled nervously, as if suddenly reminded of
why
their tiny police force was operating at all paws on deck.
Judy rubbed a paw between her eyes, trying to fight off a headache. She had been on the Podunk police force for a grand total of a decade and chief for a little over half that, mostly by virtue of being the only cop who had stuck around long enough to get promoted. She knew that the two rabbits staring worriedly at her dealt with squabbles at football games and the occasional lost pet cricket. The victim discovered at the Ramsells' farm that morning was so far outside their experience that they looked like they were about to go into shock.At least neither of them were questioning her for letting a predator roam the station. She wasn't sure if that was a testament to their faith in her or a healthy fear of her wrath. Either way, she'd take it.
"I'll prepare a statement," she said, already steeling herself. She hated microphones and the press, in no small part because she didn't trust herself around either. "Nobody else answer any questions unless I tell them to. That means no texts, no Muzzlebook, no phone calls, and
no Instagoat
, Burrows." She waited until Tom's ears drooped. "You all know what your jobs are. I want the victim IDed by lunchtime. Move!"
Podunk's finest scrambled into action around her. Judy took one last look around to make sure they were all on task before ducking into her office, collapsing in her chair, and allowing herself exactly five seconds to sit at her desk in perfect silence, head in her paws. Then she took a deep breath and looked at the photos again.The victim was probably but not definitely some sort of wolf; she was still waiting on species confirmation from the hospital. Not that a positive species ID would help her, since there were no wolves in Deerbrooke County, and unless the old files Tom was going through produced some surprises, there hadn't been for years. A discreet check on the only predators in Podunk, surprise fox excepted, had already confirmed that they were all where they were supposed to be and all quite sane, albeit under unofficial orders to stay safely out of sight for the next few days for their own safety. The missing mammal database had turned up nothing promising so far, despite George's best efforts. Poor old Otis Ramsell, the farmer who had discovered the victim, was still too upset to give any statement at all, much less a helpful and coherent one.And then there was the problem with the crime scene itself.Someone knocked on her door and cracked it open without waiting for a response. Judy didn't look up from the photos. "What is it, Hassenfeffer?"George Hassenfeffer edged carefully into view, ears twitching and black-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose. "ZNN just called, Chief. And the mayor of Zootopia's offering assistance."Judy looked up at the wall across from her desk. It was completely covered by a huge map of the tri-county area surrounded by a small nebula of papers, printouts, clippings, and miscellaneous notes. The section that should have shown Zootopia proper was buried under a forest of pushpins. Chief's Project, her officers called it when they thought she wasn't listening. Chief's Big Case.The headache throbbing between her eyes was unmistakable now. "I'll be with ZNN in a minute. They can wait.""And the mayor, Chief?"She had a suspicion as to what the mayor would say. Something about forged letters and dangerous unstable foxes, maybe. That sounded exactly like the sort of thing Bellwether was capable of. "Have I ever talked to the mayor?"George sagged. "No, Chief. Sorry, Chief." He edged backwards out the door, closing it soundlessly, and Judy was once again left alone with her thoughts.She wasn't a great cop - she'd have gone so far to say that she was a pretty terrible cop - but she had spent the past ten years doing everything she could to protect Podunk, sometimes even from its own worst impulses. Once the details of the wolf's injuries became public knowledge, she was going to lose that battle. She knew it, her officers knew it, and she would have bet anything that Zootopia's mayor knew it, too.But Judy had already let a city down and the repercussions continued to be disastrous. She wasn't about to give up on the town she had worked so hard to protect.Especially not when whoever had attacked the wolf and staged the crime scene so obviously thought she was an idiot.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Noor Fairfield's husband is not a firefighter or a soldier or anything like that. He manages a petrol station. He lifts weights at the gym and watches terrible television and has endless lists of baby names that he keeps hidden in his sock drawer like a dragon hoarding secret treasure - and yes, all right, he has a bit of a silly obsession with myths and legends, but as peculiar hobbies go, he could certainly do worse.
He has a good life. Not the best, maybe. Not the most glamorous or exciting, but
good
all the same.
When he's two months shy of being a father, he dies alone in a burning building, clutching a sword he bought off the internet.Noor takes all of his overflowing notepads full of transcribed medieval folktales and throws them away. She rips the mythology books off his shelves and slams them down on the floor so hard that her downstairs neighbor forgets to be sympathetic and comes up to tell her to keep quiet already. She stands in the detritus of her husband's life and discovers that she is too angry to cry.Her husband dreamed of being a knight like in the old stories, and she knows deep down in her bones that this is what got him killed.*The man turns up on her doorstep several weeks after. Noor is three days overdue, is being avoided by work colleagues because talking about death makes them squeamish and uneasy, and just left an angry voicemail calling her mother-in-law an evil fucking cow for trying to claim she wasn't in her own husband's will."I'm here about Arthur Fairfield," the man says. He looks very old and very beaten-down and his cheap suit is so old it's starting to go shiny and hangs on his bone-thin frame.Noor doesn't like him already, but then again, Noor feels like she doesn't like anyone these days. "George," she corrects. "Not Arthur. He went by his middle name.""Not with me, I'm afraid." The man nods to the flat behind her. "May I come in? I was a friend of his.""From his little group." It's not a question.The man's shoulders sag. "Yes," he admits. "From his group on the internet.""Fuck you all then," she says, perfectly calm. "You're the reason he's dead."He opens his mouth to say something. She slams the door in his face.*George liked to play at being King Arthur sometimes. He talked with people on the internet about it. His little group, he called it. It was odd, but harmless.It's only now that he's dead that Noor realizes he might have believed it.*The baby's name is Alfred, which is the fifth name down on the third list in George's sock drawer. The small squalling thing has Noor's coloring - her black hair, her dark eyes. She already knows that her in-laws will hate him as much as they hated their son's marriage.She has no living family of her own except for some cousins in Egypt, no friends in this new city, no colleagues at work close enough to come see her even before she refused to be sad instead of furious. The only visitor to her hospital room is the old man from George's little group. He brings slightly wilted flowers he may or may not have stolen from someone's garden and stands there clutching them like he's not entirely sure what to do with them.Noor meets his eyes, slowly lifts the hand that isn't holding her nursing son, and extends her middle finger."It was a dragon," the man says. "That's what happened to Arthur.""George."The man just looks at her miserably. "It hardly matters now, does it?"
"There's no such thing," Noor says softly, all sweet reason, "as
dragons
. I don't fucking believe you."
"I know." He really does sound wretched. "That's the problem."*
She refuses to let him into her flat. She eventually agrees to meet him at the park, though. Everyone knows
how
George died; he might be the only one who can tell her
why
.
When she finds him, he's sitting on a bench with his hands folded in his lap, looking at nothing in particular. She stalks up to him and perches next to him. Her back is rigid and baby Alfred is held very firmly in her arms."Did he think he was King Arthur?" she asks instead of saying hello.The man doesn't look at her. "I'm afraid so, yes."
"Did
you?
"
His gnarled fingers clench and unclench in the fabric of his trousers. "I did. He wasn't."Noor hates him. She hates George too, almost as much as she misses him. There is no such thing as once and future kings, any more than dragons. "He thought it was real. I didn't know that. I would've stopped him if I had. Put a password on his laptop or something. Thrown away his books.""I was wrong about your husband," the man says. "That doesn't mean I was wrong about the king.""Oh fuck you," Noor says. "And who are you supposed to be, then?"The man smiles to himself. He extends one finger.Lights dance in front of her baby, like fireflies in snow. Right there, in the middle of the fucking park.Noor opens her mouth, but has to wait several seconds for her brain to bully her thoughts into order. What comes out is: "They're not radioactive, are they?"The old man laughs and then looks rather startled, as if he'd forgotten he could make that sound.
*
His name's Merlin.Of fucking course it is, Noor thinks.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
When Xiao Pingjing is four years old, he decides to approach learning to swim in the same direct manner he approaches everything else, which is to say he sneaks away from Changlin Manor's gaggle of servants and attendants, climbs a fence, and tips himself into an ornamental pond.
He's found on dry ground a short time later, waterlogged but otherwise unhurt, and doesn't feel any particular concern while he's cocooned in blankets and fussed over by doctors. It's only when he realizes that Pingzhang-dage is kneeling beside him, utterly still among the bustle, white-faced and rigid with fear and staring at him as if he's afraid that Pingjing will disappear if he so much as blinks, the Pingjing starts to realize that he might have done something really really wrong."This is why you shouldn't dump yourself in ponds," someone says.Pingjing opens his eyes - he doesn't remember closing them - and peers up at the man kneeling in his big brother's place. He is older than Pingzhang-dage but younger than Father, quiet and unfamiliar.
"I wasn't
playing
," he protests. "I was
swimming
."
The man ignores him, as adults who think they know better often do. "What if I hadn't fished you out, hm? Would you rather your brother had gone into the water to rescue you?"Pingjing's stomach does something uncomfortable. "No," he whispers.The man sighs and smooths out his twisted blankets. "Try not to do anything too brash, then. For your brother's sake if not for yours."Pingjing pulls the blankets over his head so he doesn't have to feel the man's disappointed eyes on him. Safe in the stuffy darkness, he presses his face against his arm and lets tears squeeze out of his eyes.When he peeks out again, the man is gone and Pingzhang-dage is back in his place, fast asleep beside him. Pingjing hiccups out one last sob, rolls off the bed in a small avalanche of blankets, and makes himself safely at home on the floor beside his brother.By the next morning he's more or less forgotten about the man, although he does avoid falling in ponds after that.*The next time he meets the man, he is ten years old and halfway up a very tall tree. This may or may not have anything to do with the ink he spilled all over Master Lin's manuscript; he admits nothing."Of all the places you could have hidden," the man mutters, as if he hasn't just appeared out of thin air and startled Pingjing so badly that only the man's strong hand on his back keeps him from toppling right off his branch.Pingjing makes a very un-princelike face at him. "Did Father send you?""I don't work for your father," the man says, sounding bemused. "Or for Langya Hall, Heaven forbid," he adds when Pingjing opens his mouth to ask the next obvious question. "I would have told Master Lin where to find you if I did."
"No you wouldn't have," Pingjing says with a bone-deep confidence he doesn't quite understand. He isn't frightened of this man - quite the opposite, really - and when the man just looks at him
exactly
like Father does when he's been caught halfway towards getting in real trouble, he even dares to reach up and poke the man's shoulder, hard.
This gets no reaction whatsoever; apparently the man expected this, too. "No, I'm not imaginary."
"Then what
are
you, Uncle?" Pingjing asks, but the man doesn't say anything else, doesn't even react to being labeled an uncle, not even when Pingjing repeats his question so loudly that the Langya scholars out searching for him are immediately able to locate him and pry him out of the tree.
That night there is a ferocious storm. When Pingjing investigates some days later, he finds that the tree he was sitting on has been felled and the branch he was perched on has been crushed into splinters. The man is sitting on the fallen trunk in a very dignified way, despite looking what Pingjing can only describe as deeply exasperated.(He asks Master Lin if he believes in ghosts. Master Lin in turn asks him if he believes in keeping away from perfectly good manuscripts and tells him to go back to copying out a replacement.)*
Eventually Pingjing decides the man means more good than harm. He doesn't appear very often - sometimes not for years at a time - and often when he does he lurks silently instead of actually saying anything. He's some sort of nobleman, possibly even some long-forgotten member of the royal clan. Whoever he is, he's quite young and far too fond of looking
smug
whenever he keeps Pingjing out of trouble.
He's also completely invisible to anyone else, which he claims isn't on purpose; from the clues pieced together from dozens of very short conversations, he finds the fact that even Pingjing can see him deeply unsettling.Whatever the truth of it is, he's good company on the long terrifying ride to the northern border to save Pingzhang-dage. He will discuss military strategies, if nothing else.Pingjing watches him carefully. The night is still and silent and dark save for his own campfire and other fires, perhaps those of farmers or other travelers, burning in the far distance."Uncle was a soldier," he decides.The man's lip quirks. "Briefly.""Did you serve in the north?"
"Briefly."
Pingjing makes a face at him through the flames, which is ignored.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The
Lady Tao Min
is an utterly average Fire Nation prison ship, which means that when Tabo sets foot on it, she already knows that she will be the only person from the remote Western colonies. She is thirteen years old and has never been on a boat of any kind before, because up until the colonies' governor decides to press her and her cousins and her uncle and half her village into service as a deckhand for The Glory of Fire Lady Azula, she is a koalasheep shepherd and perfectly content to stay that way.
She quickly begins to catalog all the ways she is wrong: her accent; her words; her stumbling over the loyalty oaths; how she holds her hands when she bows; the way she tries to eat her rice with her spoon. She adapts to most things quickly enough - she learns the words everyone else uses; she starts bowing correctly; she uses chopsticks; she stops shaving the front of her forehead and twists her hair up into a topknot - but some things are carved deeper into her than others. Even if she's bowing a little differently now, she greets the east in the morning and says farewell to the west at night, as the sun begins to dip below the horizon. She tucks crumbs into her pocket every full moon and scatters them over the side of the ship, the better to appease the deep dark lightless ocean.And every day, without fail, she remembers to thank the wind.Tabo was born a half-day's walk from the upside-down ruins of the Air Temple. She has spent a lifetime bowing to the steep drops and the echoing cliffs - bowing in the Western way, the proper way, with her fist pressed against her palm. She has grown up with her ears full of her grandfather's stories of finding wooden beads scattered like stones on the ground, and has timed her years by the way the Fire Nation's doctors tramping up the mountain paths to make a half-hearted show of checking the youngest children for signs of airbending before getting down to the more proper business of trading tinctures and herbs and passing along fourth-hand news from the distant seaport - not because anyone believes that airbenders still exist, but because it is a tradition, now.Airbenders are ghosts singing and dancing, and no one but the wind remembers how to hear them.*
"But what if there were?" Tabo's fellow deckhand asks suddenly, long months gone and far far away from the western colonies. His voice is hardly audible over the rumble of the prison ship's engines and the soft steady beat of the ocean against the hull. "What if there
were
airbenders somewhere?"
Tabo is fourteen now and she has not seen her village or her family or the Western colonies in a year. Lady Bei Fong's soldiers still control what used to be the far north of the Earth Kingdom and the great chief of the Water Tribe still holds the North Pole - and there are rumors, so many of them these days, that everything wasn't lost with the comet, that the Avatar has been reborn after all.The Fire Lady still needs deckhands far more than koalasheep shepherds.Tabo pushes short black hair out of her eyes and leans on her mop, sloshing soapy water all over her bare feet. "What're you talking about? There aren't any airbenders anymore."
"There might be," the other deckhand says, stubborn as ever. His name is Chiyu and he is a year older than her, and while he isn't mean, he is argumentative and evasive and collects odd facts and ideas until there's no room for them in his head and they all spill out of his mouth like an overfilled cup. He is also half Water Tribe. This is a well-known fact on the
Lady Tao Min
, regardless of whether or not it is actually true.
Tabo rolls her eyes at him. "Sure," she concedes. "Why not?" She dunks her mop back in their shared bucket, as if to emphasize how silly this conversation is. "What's gotten into you anyway?"
"Nothing," Chiyu mutters. "I was just
saying
." He looks away, as he often does when he's casting about for a way to change the subject, and his wide blue eyes narrow as he settles on the smear of dark clouds on the horizon. "We'd better finish up," he says, never mind that he's the one who isn't doing any mopping. "The storm'll be bad tonight."
Tabo feels the laughing wind on her face, heavy with the smell of the sea, and despite the summer warmth she clenches her hands on the mop handle and shivers and ducks her head - not a proper bow, but a quick acknowledgement to the power of the lost things the air carries with it.She also turns her attention back to the deck, because there are other chores she needs to finish before she has to go below.Chiyu is never wrong about storms.*She and Chiyu are drawn to each other in the way mutual outsiders often are, their friendship built out of all the peculiarities that separate them from their shipmates. However much Chiyu prickles at her, he isn't the one who asks if her village is full of secret Earthbender spies."We have to tell the wind we're still trying," she tells him once, when he asks why she thanks the wind. It's a risk, but not a huge one; anyone who's rumored to be half Water Tribe can't afford to hand her over for treasonous traditions. "We'll remember how to listen someday," she adds, solemn and serious, and his expression darkens and he folds his arms and stares at the deck."I don't believe in that sort of stuff," he says.He bites his lip. She learns later that he always does when he's lying.Once he shows her the red-hot engines that fuel the ship - he knows how to sneak past the engineers and unlock the doors; he knows many many things that he shouldn't - and she holds her hand up with her fingers spread wide, just far enough from the metal that she won't get burned. She remembers being very small, listening to her grandfather's stories of the desperate fires without hands to warm or food to cook weeping in the bellies of floating metal beasts and shivering in horror.
"My grandfather says that a fire that doesn't have a reason shouldn't exist," she says. "
Everyone
has to have a reason. Those are the rules."
"Tell that to the Fire Lady," Chiyu mutters.Tabo tilts her head to look at him - feels the air hot and thick and pressing down on her, the heat of the engine rolling past her in shimmering waves. "You don't think everyone has something they're supposed to do?""No," Chiyu says, "I don't," and this time the lie's so big and obvious that she wonders if he would fall in on himself, hollowed out, if someone took it away.*Away from the seaport, the women in the Western colonies wear their hair long and unbound. In the farthest villages like Tabo's - the ones that sit so close to the abandoned temple that they may as well have been built on its upside-down roots - they shave the front of their heads.Tabo remembers her mother on festival days, wooden beads worn smooth with age hanging around her neck. It is one of the few memories she has of either of her parents before the blood fever came to their village, and she carries it with her everywhere she goes, wrapped up as carefully as the traditions and stories of her home.People exist to remember, her grandfather says.
Chiyu's parents were soldiers - enemies of Glory to Fire Lady Azula, he says once with a certain fierce pride, and they were enemies of the Fire Lord that came before her and they were
good people
most of all. They died years ago, the same day as the previous Avatar, and although Tabo desperately wants to ask him if he ever met the very last airbender, she doesn't dare. She hardly ever talks about her own mother and father, after all.
They're very much the same sometimes, her and her enigmatic friend: her raised by her grandfather and his stories, him by the person he calls "my old man" with a certain amount of anxious, exasperated affection - a friend of the family, maybe, or a stranger who took in an orphan. But there the similarities end, because while Tabo's grandfather taught her to understand the importance of memory and bone-deep respect for the looming invisible presence of the Air Temple and the laughing wind's ghosts, Chiyu's guardian taught him how to read and write better than most of the Navy officers and how to rattle off regulations fast enough to make a bureaucrat's eyes cross and all the ways to disable a firebender, his movements quick and sure and his belt knife swung in an arc too fast to follow."I could teach you," he says instead of telling her why a Ba Sing Se runaway needs to know any of these things - who his old man really was, if he ever knew. "I wouldn't mind. I'd like to, I mean."There is something shy about him when he asks this, as if he is saying exactly what he means for once and isn't quite sure what to do about it.Tabo clenches her hands in her lap. "I don't want to learn how to fight," she says, "and I don't need anyone to protect me either."He sighs like the wind rushing through the upside-down temple. "But you could get hurt!""You're nicer when you say what you're really thinking," she says, a laugh bubbling up inside her. Chiyu mutters something about crazy colonist girls and stomp away.Tabo has always told the truth.*The storms get worse every year, the sailors whisper. The wind and water are angry, their rage made of towering thunderclouds and waves that rip holes in metal ships. Every new port brings news of another fleet half-destroyed, another shipyard turned into so much debris. Tabo listens and bows low and whispers her grandfather's rising-falling chants to the wind - the ones he learned from his mother, who learned it from her mother, who perhaps learned it from the ghosts - and she doesn't care if the other sailors find her treasonous or if Chiyu looks at her like she's a lost cause.It is a terrible thing to die in the dark and stillness of deep water, lost forever to the sun's fire and the open air.Chiyu is not frightened of the storms, not even when the ship seems ready to flip over. When the whole world tosses back and forth he sits with his shoulder pressed against hers, fingers laced with hers, and he tells her when the next wave will come - now and now and now, always a half-second before something heavy and wet and frightening crashes into the hull, so that she has time to brace herself."You're not a waterbender," she says with her hand pressed over her mouth; Chiyu doesn't get seasick, but she manages enough for both of them.His free hand - the one that holding hers - is raised ever so slightly, his fingers curled like he's grasping at the wind's long trailing robes. "No," he agrees. "I think I should be, but I'm not.""Then how do you know when the storms are coming?"She expects excuses, but he drops his hand and presses his palm flat on the deck beside him. "Because I do," he says. "Because I just can.""We all have a reason to be here," she says, as if suddenly she is the one supporting him.Sometimes she wonders exactly what her friend's purpose could possibly be, because he's not meant to be a Fire Nation deckhand - because she knows he isn't meant for solid ground.