Chapter Text
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On Saturday, Cody declares bankruptcy.
“I can’t just stand by anymore,” he declares, plucking at a handful of raspberry-leaves. “If I am going to put out that plate one more time with no one coming, I’m actually—“
“Actually what?” Fox asks deadpan from his own position at the edge of the raspberry bush. Rex is on his shoulders, doing their best to help them pluck the fresh sprigs of leaves.
That. Is entirely the question isn’t it. Cody sighs and Fox’ face turns sour.
“I’m going to do something, alright,” he mutters, sticking his hand right back into the thicket for another few leaves and ignoring Fox irritated tongue-click.
It’s not a secret that Alpha is a sol’buir – a Single Dad, as people from around their small town will whisper to each other behind held up hands.
Ms Weller three houses down likes to take her coffee on the porch in the warmer seasons, where Alpha will pass towards the end of their daily morning run, glistening in sweat and keeping up their perfect form.
Mr Wight from the hardware store somehow never has any of his employees around to ask instead of Alpha when he needs something lifted up or taken down from a shelf.
Ms Henley who owns the bakery they sometimes eat at, always has the time to push her well-endowed figure towards their table, and end up accidentally brushing against Alpha with one of her curves.
If Alpha wanted, all they would have to do, Cody thinks, is turn their head and smile at someone.
And maybe it’s a good thing they don’t.
People around here aren’t aware that Rex is their most precious Little because there are a lot of things they haven’t seen. They don’t know where Cody’s scar comes from or the white in Fox’ hair – and if they wonder about it, then it’s nowhere any of the small aliit can hear them. Around here, folks don’t seem to have heard about the implosion of a scientific compound a few states over.
That is, after all, why they’d come here.
People don’t know about the bespoke-bespelled beskar’gam in a box under Alpha’s double-bed, sleeping next to another box of similar make.
Just like the boxes keep a specific place each, so does Alpha in their bed – keeping to one side, as if expecting the other side to be lain in, when in fact every morning as they make their bed again, the side closer to the window remains immaculate and untouched.
Sometimes Cody wonders if these people even know about Magic, in a general sense. Although now and again a news-story will fuel the rumor mill and bring the older generation to dust off their even older stories. Termino is not exactly a bustling city full of urban mages with their full beards and runic tattoos; rather than a quaint fleck of greenery, quiet and harmony.
People wouldn’t ask, either, if they knew about Alpha’s tabling habits. About the one superfluous plate they keep putting up on the table whenever they set it for a meal. It’s always the same, silver-cutlery, white plate, brown earthenware cup that sits on one of the placemats right next to Alpha’buir – though always untouched. And thus always cleared away again.
They would assume, simply, that it is a Fae Plate, an offering plate, an invitation, a memorial to those that have come and gone before. Though Cody knows that even on the Sabbats it will sit next to Alpha – clean and unladen. Silent and judgmental.
When Fox and Cody had finally caught on to the Candle in the Window that Alpha would keep burning on all nights, and sometimes the days, before, during and after Sabbats, they had not even been curious anymore. At fifteen he’d understood that Alpha’buir is waiting for someone to come home.
That they’re waiting, even after five years.
…
“I have to admit that I did not think that you were actually serious,” Bly confesses the next morning, when Cody, the moment Alpha has left the house for groceries, starts hunting for the Divination Tools.
Rex dangles from Fox’ neck by their feet, bright curious eyes following Cody’s actions as he jiggles the lock open to their small cupboard of supplies.
“Too bad for you,” Cody mutters, stretching out his hand to hover over the array of Oracles, Cards, Pendulums and other Tools that happen to be used by Alpha.
Cody needs answers. He needs to know who, how, and how to fix it, and not everyone or everything can give him those answers.
“What is actually your plan?” Fox interrupts before Cody can stretch his senses into the depths of the cupboard in front of him and try to find the right Tool to help him.
“Find answers,” he replies shortly, about to turn back to the cupboard, but Fox’ pissy face stops him.
Cody sighs.
“We know there’s someone Alpha’s pining for, yes?”
Bly and Fox nod seriously.
“And we know Alpha has been waiting for years, yes?”
Again he receives nods.
“So… we’re going to get Alpha on a break to either get over it or find them or just… breathe a different air-- I don’t know. Get them out of this… mood.”
Admittedly, even thinking it Cody knows that this is easier said than done.
Getting Alpha’buir to do anything is tricky business. They might have taught them everything they know, but this does not mean that Alpha’s vast competence has been at all exhausted. Indeed, with every year, their respective parts in the Sabbats’ rituals are getting more intricate and their more particular homework more difficult as they near the end of their age restrictions.
“You know how Alpha is about taking breaks,” Bly argues carefully. Fox snorts.
“Asshole’s not gonna take the time to get their head screwed on right,” he acquiesces and Cody, reflexively, flicks his middle finger against Fox’ lower arm. Because no cursing around Rex.
It’s true is the thing.
While the Kaminii have equipped the lot of them with extraordinary observation skills, it also means that he is well aware that Alpha will smell a plot a mile away and against the wind. Convincing them to leave the house for anything more than a shopping trip or a stint to the public pool one village over is most likely register as ‘a trap’. Even if Cody means well.
Therefore, if any part of this plan is to be successful, Cody is going to have to play the only card he really has with great care.
“Look all it is at this stage is finding out what, and who, and where and why,” he counters. “I can’t make a reliable plan if I don’t have that information.”
“You’re gonna need all of that?” Fox queries shifty eyed. It’s not until Cody looks closer that he, too, realizes that Rex, somehow, has disappeared.
“I’m gonna need as much of it as possible,” he returns, swiveling his head to see if their youngest vod’ika is anywhere in their near vicinity.
In the corner of their living room, Rex falls from a shelf.
…
Their legs fold first upon impact with the soft but sturdy material, breath escaping abruptly as they collapse and let the bean-bag stop their descent. For a moment, the entire room is quiet and Rex can feel their prize digging its old, worn corners into their fingers and their chest.
They don’t know who it is that makes the noise, but when they’re popped up again, it’s Cody who’s checking them over for any immediate injury. Rex doesn’t feel even the smallest bump and their heart is beating with the excitement of success.
Fox’ phone is on the ground over by the cabinet and Bly is hovering, looking like he wants to touch when Cody is already skimming the skin of their joints and the longer stretches of their bones. Bly is also the one who discovers what it is that Rex has risked their neck for.
Carefully untangling from Cody, they present the small sturdy box, painted in reds and oranges and decorated with golden embellishments covering the corners and stretching out over the covers.
“I know who to ask,” they say, unable to explain how they’d known that the box had been there all along and in want of the words to tell their brothers how the cards whisper and thrum even now in their hold.
Fox, for one, turns his skeptical eye towards them. Rex knows that at the slightest show of hesitation, Fox will pull the box out of their hand and hide it away somewhere else – somewhere Rex will still find it, still feel the call and the pull – but somewhere their ori’vode will believe they are safe from the lure.
“You sure?”
Rex holds the box higher. “We need answers,” they decide to say. “This is the best shot we have at getting them.”
…
Cody doesn’t know how Rex has found Jango’s Tarot Deck.
The one that the old Dragon had made themselves, had painted with their own hands and claws, imbued with their own proper magic and carefully beset with precious metals from their own stores.
Looking at the cards alone is a marvel, but from the moment that Cody had lifted the lid on the box, he’d known that whatever Rex had felt, they weren’t exactly wrong. The Manda is strong in the deck – a torrent of magic just waiting, churning behind the wall of a dam that Cody knows will be broken the moment he holds the cards with intent.
A Torrent he’s not certain he will be able to navigate once it floods him.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Fox asks from his seat in the East.
They’ve taken up all their positions, though none of the candles or the incense has yet been lit. Cody knows he’s taking up precious time with his hesitance but—
“No,” he admits honestly. Even though he’s sitting in the chair of the Divinator, Cody is not actually certain he’ll be able to work with this particular Tool. Despite the fact that he’d love the ability to do so.
“Then why are we doing it,” Fox bites.
“Because,” Cody sighs, pulling the Jango’s box closer towards himself and swallowing with the new wave of power that laps over him like an eager wave at the shore. How come none of the others are feeling it? “You can’t tell me that it’s not going to work either.”
Fox, the karking shabuir, is right of course when he continues: “That is not reassuring.”
“If you’re not certain you want to be doing this, should you be in this circle?” Cody replies a bit hotly.
But it’s one of the big rules Alpha has ingrained in them until they could say them in their sleep and possibly even when drugged. If you’re uncertain about a ritual, don’t participate. There is no shame in stepping out of a circle and anyone who wants to tell you otherwise is likely uninformed of the impact conviction and intent can have on the outcome of a ritual and should therefore not be listened to.
Do it, or don’t do it. But don’t waffle around while doing it.
If you decide to do it, despite your uncertainty then know that you are doing it. No take-backsies.
“Shut your mouth,” Fox growls. “You’re not Alpha.”
“The sentiment prevails,” Cody shoots back, knowing that the caution Fox is voicing is nothing he isn’t feeling himself. Knowing too that what they are doing now is doing nothing for either of their decisiveness or their getting closer to any sort of goal.
“Big words, little man,” Fox snarls and Cody can’t stop the hot flame of anger in him, spitting and hissing and spurring him on.
“We’re the same height.”
“Kark you-“
“You’re not doing it right.”
It’s Rex’ika’s voice that breaks them up. A small moue of powerful disappointment directed at both Fox and Cody. Bly, for his part, is sitting with his feet and arms crossed, firmly keeping himself out of the squabble and out of any rescue attempts when Cody darts a look his way.
He sighs. “You’re right, vod’ika,” he agrees. Rubbing at his forehead. “We’re not doing it right.”
To be honest, Cody is not even certain if he should be in the circle, given his own admitted uncertainty whether or not this was going to work.
Fox may have argued, but it’s nothing he hasn’t heard in his own head. And Cody is still not sure he can actually read the cards. Unless…
“…Can you help us?”
Rex, for their part, looks daunted in the very first moment after the question. But they swallow, avert their eyes and something settles over them. Something like assurance, like a buir’s hands on their shoulders and Rex nods. “Yeah.”
They look up. “Yeah I can help you.”
It’s a matter of seconds to switch places, and Cody can barely fathom the sense of rightness as he settles on Fox’ other side and in the North. Rex, in true Alpha fashion, bids them all meditate on their intent before they light the candles and the incense. It’s cute and wholly correct and Cody can’t believe he wouldn’t even have thought of it.
But as he settles into his cushion and into the depth of himself, he also recognizes that this is now already past. And that Rex is right to sit in the spot of the Divinator.
Their candles brighten, dipping the somber reading room in an ethereal light, the sheen of the small flame catching in the faceted crystals adorning walls and windows, casting rainbows over objects and faces. Cody watches the fractals of the rainbow-spectrum dance on Rex’ brown arms as their vod’ika touches the deck for the first time.
Through the thick haze of freshly lit incense, he can barely smell the crisp warning of ozone until Rex carefully starts to shuffle the cards and the smell becomes powerful enough to hurt in his nose and push water into his eyes.
Cody closes them, allows the tears to slip down his cheek and listens to the even shuffle of Rex’ika’s fingers as they draw on the intent of Bly, first, then Fox, then Cody. And Cody gives, breathes it out in their direction and – as with Alpha – can tell near-precisely when it reaches them.
When he opens his eyes again, the cards have been laid out in the classical pattern of the Celtic Cross.
Cody doesn’t know what Alpha is seeing for Rex, but their vod’ika has a terrifyingly good grasp on Jango’s Tarot Deck and if that is not a big mark for a Future Divinator, then Cody would be even more curious to know what their Rex’ika will turn out to be.
The torrent of power that had first pressed against Cody’s shoulders like a dam threatening to break is an ocean in Rex’ hands. A near-steady rhythm of waves shlup-shlupping at the gentle slope of a sandy beach and bringing understanding like the water will bring seagrass and pebbles.
Cody knows when Rex flips the first card that they’ve made the right decision.
“If that isn’t Alpha then I don’t know what is,” Fox snorts through his first breath in the East, but Rex, curiously only hums contemplatively before their turn over the second Card. Cody echoes the hum.
“Not sure if that is Alpha,” they say carefully, inspecting The Tower.
The gold inlay of Jango’s cards flashes oddly in the sheen of the candles and something sparkles in Rex’ eye, even as they go to flip the rest of the cards with the same quiet reverence they’ve flipped the first card with.
It’s easier to see the answer, once the tableau has been revealed and Cody… Cody knew that there was someone else. He realizes now that he had not considered the ramifications of it.
“Alpha has a cyare,” Fox crosses his arms. “We knew that.”
Yes. And yet also No.
“We’ve been aware that they’re pining,” Cody corrects. That is not, he is rather convinced, the same as knowing that, tendentially, they are a person of clear thought and sharp intellect; someone who might be working as a consultant; someone who has varied interests and who is keen to explore several venues but who is also critical and cool.
Rex, copying Bly, has a writing pad sitting on their knees. Jotting down the pertinent details and making a small sketch of their layout. Fox, between Rex and Bly, smirks softly while he watches.
Bly is done sooner than Rex is, and when he looks up, Cody can already tell that this is hitting him close to home. Whatever it is that they’re going to do about Alpha, Cody can tell that Bly will back it with all he has. If only because Bly is the soft creature among them. Even now he’s accepting Fox’ hand as it creeps into his neck and holds him gently through the wetness in his eyes.
It’s no secret among them that Bly has been both blessed and cursed with a Ka’riduur – someone so beautifully special chosen by the Ka’ra that they would fit all of Bly.
[There’d been a fair amount of fretting on Bly’s side when he’d come out as generally disinterested in the physical aspects of relationships, the likes of which their age mates had started exploring.
In the end, physicality of a relationship is not why the Ka’ra send a Ka’riduur and when Bly had returned from the woods on Samhain with tear-tracks drying on his cheeks and a wide smile that had soothed Alpha’s instinctive rage towards an unknown, it had turned out that Bly’s Ka’riduur might not be as inclined towards bodily intimacies either.]
“Why aren’t they in contact?” Bly finally asks when he has accepted the tissues Rex had carefully passed towards him via Cody.
“I don’t know,” Rex shrugs. “I’m not certain that’s included in the answer. Maybe we should… uh, interpret first.”
“And note further questions while we go to be asked later,” Fox agrees. “Good thinking, kid.”
Rex, for all that they and Fox sometimes clash, preens quietly under the praise. Cody is already stretching for the Just-in-Case-Almanac on Tarot Cards.
…
At hour two, Fox groans with all the distaste he has to offer for someone who forgot something crucially important. His eyes roll so hard that his entire head rolls with it, and when the head sags, so does the rest of his body.
It’s a beautiful rendition of exasperation and Bly, ever the perfect audience, claps obediently from his seat.
“10-10,” he encourages, “Beautiful execution. Very emotive. Profound display. Could feel it in my own heart.”
Rex, climbing out of his interpretation hole where only the last two cards remain, seemingly only now registering the tired shenanigans of their older siblings. They blink at the slumped form of Fox. “Wha’?”
Cody himself groans when he finally sees it. Closing his hurting eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Of course.” Fox, next to him, only grunts.
“What.” Rex repeats.
“Litha,” Fox enunciates from where he’s trying to soak into the cross of his legs and the carpet. “Healing relationships.”
Bly groans. Sinking in on himself. “Of course.”
…
It’s not for nothing though, Rex thinks to themselves when they clear away the cards. Additional information is always a good thing and there’s no telling that they would have managed to figure out the business with Litha if they hadn’t asked The Cards either.
“The only question now is what to do about it,” Bly frets quietly in the doorway, watching Rex’ ascent to the erstwhile hiding spot of the Tarot Deck with shriek-hawk eyes.
Fox mumbles something intelligible from where he’s slumped against his shoulder. Cody, when Rex ventures a look, seems just as tired.
“We figure that out tomorrow,” he insists. “’m too think to even tired right now.”
Bly throws him a look. Cody, for enough time that Rex has put away the Deck and the Box, doesn’t respond, until finally tired eyes lift to hold Bly’s and Rex snorts, losing balance and deciding on the Bean Bag again when their sibling slumps further with the words: “I said what I said.”
…
Alpha swears that when they set out to raise their tiny hooligans, they did not mean to raise them as hooligans. Five years on the outside and all of Kamino’s terrifying discipline and brutal control has vanished into thin air as far as their ad’ike are concerned.
While, technically, that is precisely the reason why the Alpha-class homunculi had struck out independently with their smaller vode, Alpha has never had any delusions about their own ability to raise sentients who would be needed to seamlessly integrate with the general human populace and not cause a stir.
What it does come down to however is this:
Alpha… has no idea what happened.
They’d been busy with the botanical arrangement of the Public Park and the organization of the helpers that the Nursery had employed for the occasion. Most of them they’d known – regulars from the neighboring towns – and some had been brand new and headless as a chicken – students from the closest university. It’d been a production and a day of hard work and when they’d stepped into their car, all they’d really hoped for had been a not-destroyed home, a burning candle in their window, grub and then sleep.
When they come in through the kitchen door, Rex is asleep on their dining table. Covered with two blue table mats and hugging the teapot to their chest. Manda know where the rest is.
Sighing, they reach for the tiny body of the blond, extracting their cuddle-buddy – still luke-warm – from their embrace. Alpha shifts them gently in the cradle of their own arms until Rex sags against their warmer temperature like they had when Alpha had first held them as a Tubie. As long as Alpha can remember, Rex could never be too warm in their sleep.
They don’t think their kihne’vod actively remembers Kamino and its omnipresent, permeating, wet chill. But they’re also not dumb enough to believe that, smart as their ad’ike are, they don’t remember nothing of it at all. There is, however, a difference between what the brain remembers and what the instincts remember.
If all that Rex takes with them from The Compound is a general want for heat in the nights, Alpha will do their best not to ask for any more miracles.
It’s bad enough the rest of their ad’ike have battled nightmares that Alpha knows all too intimately.
[In kaysh last year, Jango had gone bad. Rapidly. The deterioration of the Dragon’s sanity and kaysh link to the vode had nearly signed the death-warrant for them all if it hadn’t been for the products from the other side of The Compound.
One of them who’d stolen down to the deepest cellar of The Compound to find Jango’s weakest spot and do kaysh a mercy. Alpha doesn’t know what has become of Boba.]
They find their older mir’shebse strewn around the living room, sleeping in various states of injuries waiting to happen. At least Fox is asleep, though, buried under Cody even if, right now, Fox is in lead in their competition to grow taller. Alpha has tried telling them that they’d all end up with the same height – just as they’d end up with the same hair, the same face, the same skin tone.
Rex is put to bed first, swaddled carefully into their blanket on the upper bunk, sighing when Alpha pulls their pillow at an odd angle just to allow the ad’ika to wrap their arms around something. They’re a touchy sort of sleeper and Alpha is fond of watching it, even as they brush their large hand over the blond buzz, parting to collect the rest of the boys.
Alpha is grateful for the youth of their own ad’ike. It means that, for all the horrors they’ve survived, for all the heartbreak they’ve lived, they hadn’t yet had the awareness to realize that their own Wing wasn’t all there was to The Compound.
After Jango’s Marching On, taking the ad’ike and making a break for it had been an executive decision of the Alpha Class Experiments and those who had shown enough promise and competence to be trained alongside with them.
It will never be a decision Alpha will regret.
As much as the little shits can be terrors of both the night and the day, Alpha could not have predicted the magnitude of what it meant to raise them in freedom – to allow them to be little shits, to allow them to go to school and learn the kinds of things in the kind of pace that ad’ike were meant to learn. They hadn’t been able to anticipate what it meant to teach them flavor and cooking.
And Magic.
Alpha had never thought of themselves as a potential buir, until they’d arrived in Termino and had assumed that very role with the three ten-year-olds and the tiny five-year-old. The sleepy town had watched them with fascination, but not the littlest amount of suspicion as Alpha had stumbled into buir’ook and the responsibilities of a ‘normal adult’.
There is one thing they’d have done differently, if they could have.
Finally stepping into their own room, Alpha swings the door almost-shut, leaving just enough of space that opening it would be noiseless – just in case. They wash, quickly, just to get rid of the dirt, and before they kneel down on their bed, their thumb brushes over the empty box under their bed.
It’s a white, bland thing, sitting next to their own box, filled with the beskar’gam they’d put down for the sake of their ad’ike and the promise of a more stable life than they’d had themselves. But Alpha had gotten it because there had been supposed to be a second set of gam under their bed.
And their bed had been supposed to be shared.
There hadn’t been, back when, a clear decision about what to do in the aftermath of fleeing The Compound. Things had had to move quickly. It had been decided that going their separate ways would be more beneficial to remaining hidden.
There had been one group dedicated to rooting out and hunting down the benefactors of the Kaminii. The sentients and people who had even made it possible to experiment in such a profoundly disturbing fashion even only on lab-grown homunculi. They had been agreed that those who had funded a Research Facility depraved enough to tie down a Mythodactylia Mandaloriana needed to be eradicated. For the sake of their ad’ike.
There’d been a signal, for when everything had been done and in the first year, Alpha had kept their Comm close by just in case a message would come through.
Nothing had come.
And so Alpha had put the vambrace away as well, and held on only to the mismatching cuff. A rust-red-eider-white thing that curves over their left wrist. It’s terribly scratched these days and Alpha has had to redo the paint more than once. Some days they forget why they’re holding on to it.
They check the Comm now and then, of course. But until the signal comes through, Alpha thinks they’d do best by keeping a low-ish profile. A normal life, nothing too big, though definitely none of the squalor that could be a reminder of The Compound.
When the signal comes, they tell themselves, they will do some hunting of their own.
…
Bly wakes up with the golden-faced glow of the well-rested. Cody, watching the shabuir stretch on his lower cot through gritty, heavy eyes, hates him on principle. Judged by the way Fox leans into him with a rumbling sound of distaste, he’s not alone in his sentiment.
Alpha herds them carefully towards the dining table and its breakfast, gentling Fox’ approach to the coffee when they push a cup of black tea into his hands first and watching with a sort of happy melancholy when Bly, gently, centered, awake at this hour, helps Rex pour their own tea.
It takes as long as the coffee needs to kick in before Cody realizes two things.
One: Bly is not just strategically sitting in a particularly sunny spot, he is glowing. Almost as if from the inside out, though perhaps rather as if a spotlight were set up behind him at all times, putting him in stark relief with a white-golden outline.
Two: Bly usually shines when he’s had A Dream.
They don’t know who Bly’s Ka’riduur might be, but considering the fact that Bly sometimes receives rather pointed dreams, Alpha has come to the preliminary conclusion that his Ka’riduur might just as well be versed in Magic.
Bly is also, usually, a bit shy about the dreams. Cody and Fox had tried to tickle a bit of information out of him for a while – out of sheer curiosity, it should be noted – and while Bly had remained tight-lipped and uncomfortable, Alpha had pulled them by their ears and forbade them from needling Bly ever again if he didn’t feel like sharing.
Incidentally, this is not what happens today.
Barely have they turned around on their way to the bathroom that Bly tucks himself between them with an arm over their shoulders and a wide grin.
“I,” he says with the obnoxious glee of those awake and planning, “need you shower cold and meet me in the tree-house.”
Rex is already in the bathroom when they come in, mouth foamy with toothpaste and carefully balanced on the small stepping stool and despite the impossibility of it, they’re smiling, with their toothbrush still doing its work.
Fox disagrees with the ratio between lunatics and the amount of coffee he’s had. He still hangs half-limply from Bly’s shoulder when he reaches for his toothbrush.
Getting ready is their usual affair and when Bly can, finally, usher them into the tree-house, he’s so bright Cody wonders if he could get away with wearing sunglasses in the shade of the tree and the somber cubicle of their tree-house.
“Spill,” Fox demands when Bly finally heaves himself up the planks. “If I have to watch your excitement vibrate you into another Prism of Light, I will do something drastic.”
“You’d get me back,” Bly says with the confidence of a vod who knows that he’s loved and understands the languages of those around him.
[It’s been a way to get here.]
When he sits down, it’s with Rex in his lap and with his larger hands cradling the notes that Rex had diligently made yesterday while they’d been working on the Tarot Spread for Alpha.
“There was The World somewhere in the Spread, Rex’ika, wasn’t there?”
Rex nods, serious and determined and is already flipping through their notes. “On the sixth position,” they finally agree. “The Near Future.”
Bly’s smile turns into a feral grin.
“You did pretty well this year, in school, didn’t you, Rex’ika?”
Rex, confused, drops the pages to tilt their head up, coming nose to nose with Bly whose head is tilted down just enough. “Yes?”
“And that deserves a treat, doesn’t it?” Bly asks again, head lifting to take in Cody and Fox.
“Yes?”
“And aren’t we old enough, now, to see a bit more of the world – as is?”
Cody, it must be said, has an odd feeling blooming right under his sternum. He can’t say if it’s trepidation or excitement. Bly doesn’t wait for an answer.
“All that said, gentlebeings, I have a proposal on how to interpret Position Six, The World, in a new light.”
It’s trepidation. The feeling is definitely trepidation. Bly’s eyes gleam.
“Road Trip.”
…
Rex has never really seen anything outside of Termino. Given Alpha’s protectiveness and general unwillingness to risk being seen, especially alongside the four of them, Rex had gathered that whatever it is that kept Alpha’buir paranoid – Fox’ words – is probably tied to the Cold Place.
They don’t have a lot of memories from the Cold Place. It had been wet, dark and they’d shivered even under their blankets. They have a feeling that behind that memory of coldness hide more of similar kind that will explain more of the Cold Place. But as with all ad’ike, Rex too has had to give Alpha a promise: No Poking Around until they’re eighteen at least.
[No Raising The Dead until you’re 21, Fox. No Teleportation until you’ve mastered all these books and exercises, Cody. No Riduurok until you’ve been with them at least three years, Bly. …Please, ad’ike, mercy on your old vod.]
It would be nice, they say quietly when the discussion about the Road Trip between the four of them and Alpha comes to an oddly tense lull, to be able to talk to the kids in their school about the new stuff they’ve seen. They’re the only kid who hasn’t been anywhere in the last four years.
And haven’t they been good? Bly hooks in. Rex has, after all, been working rather hard for their grades in order to have a go at the shiny water-pistols the school principal had promised whoever would turn out to be the best student this year. Rex wants them.
“You’ve thought about this,” Alpha finally declares, arms crossed as they swipe their thumb over their chin. Rex has a feeling they should disagree – they really haven’t thought about this any further than how to convince Alpha to do something they might not be keen on doing at first.
Fox cuts in. “As well as we could,” he admits instead and… it’s not a lie. Exactly.
Alpha sighs. “Let me think about it.”
“One day,” Cody says. Then: “Please?”
Buir nods again, short and brusque but never annoyed. “Give me a day to think about it, I’ll let you know about my answer the day after tomorrow.”
…
Alpha sighs as they step into the small living-hazel-tent they’ve trained and pruned for the last five years, arms laden with the velvet bag that holds their Tools. The large, green leaves of the hazel whisper in the wind, reaching towards the white-yellow sun and painting the light like the stained glass of cathedrals.
The very top of the tent is only sparsely green and the shadows of the first few leaves to grow the last stretch throw a fuzzy relief against the dense, packed earth underneath them. Alpha sits down.
They cannot deny that the ad’ike have thrown them for a soft kind of loop with their proposal for a Road Trip – of all things. They’re aware that Alpha doesn’t like putting them out in public where they cannot control the outcome but… that is not what they’re asking. And rearing ad’ike is not always about the comfort of the buir either. Alpha has learned that lesson.
But there is… a right to be concerned, they think.
It’s not just from anywhere that they come. The older ones know that. It’s probably why they put Rex forward as deserving both a reward as well as a break – smart, for ad’ike. It’s probably time Alpha introduced them to the finer points of their own education in Kamino. Rex is already showing a penchant for being a gunner and Alpha had sworn – if only to themselves – that they would do their best to polish the talents of their ad’ike.
[If all failed, Alpha didn’t want to be the reason their ad’ike wouldn’t know how to fend for themselves. At the very least the defense of themselves and each other was a necessity, everything else would come as a voluntary bonus if they were interested.]
Then again, if they push their littles towards greater knowledge, there would be no telling what Alpha would be facing in the coming years. Manda know, they themselves had found any opportunity to be a little sheb even within the confines of Kamino – their ad’ike have the freedom and audacity of nat-borns and Alpha can’t wait to complain to them about how their teenage antics had made them grey before their time.
For now, though, there is this particular request to think about.
Alpha knows what they want to do.
They want to agree.
It’s been years since they’ve seen anything else than the quiet-life garden-fronts of Termino and Alpha had certainly not moved away from Kamino only to confine themselves, and the ad’ike, to another prison. No matter its beauty.
Given the circumstances of their prison-break, however, Alpha finds it prudent – at the very least – to ask for a bit more intel.
Carefully setting out the altar cloth, Alpha fills a small chalice with water, another with earth, one they leave empty and one they light a candle in. They are attentive when they line their chalices up on the cloth, careful, too, when they put down four stones in their corresponding directions, until the small ritual site is sealed and the thrum of magic is like a vibration under their skin.
When they have pulled out the last of their Tools, Alpha sits down and empties their mind until nothing remains but the one question.
Is it a safe to go on a Road Trip with the ad’ike?
In their fingers, the pendulum swings a wide and certain. Y E S – it arcs firmly. Decisively.
Alpha hums, and slides their eyes back closed, noting the answer and tucking it away for later until their mind-space is once more quiet and empty. Except for one thing:
Is now a good time to go on the Road Trip with the ad’ike?
Again the pendulum swings, almost harder than before. Y E S.
A sensation of fondness creeps up at him, an exasperation Alpha knows isn’t theirs and the huff with soft sort of apologetic chagrin. The emotions come and go, leaving behind a warm impression that Alpha knows all too well from working with this Pendulum – it is a favored Tool after all.
Is there another matter I should be asking about? They query, as they do every time before closing a round of questioning.
M A Y B E, the Pendulum swings and Alpha hums at that too.
They know well that they’re not going to find ‘the right question’ in this very moment, but it is always a good idea to ask for help in regard to blind spots. Alpha may sometimes look like a brute but even they are not simple enough to believe that they have it all figured out. Another lesson taught by the way of their ad’ike.
Is it pressing? They ask carefully – wondering if they should take the time to dive deep in the next few days or whether the subject would find its way towards their consciousness at its own pace.
N O, the Pendulum advises.
Alpha will take it. Whatever it is they should be asking about, they will find it in the next few weeks with a bit of meditation and looking within. The summer-start has left them with more work-hours than they’re comfortable with and morning-meditations had been cut short in favor of more materialistic necessities of this world.
They pray their thanks, offer a fifth chalice of fresh flower blooms, and a small handful of vegetable offerings, and clean up their circle.
When they step out of the site, they don’t turn back to it.
…
The evening air is gentle on their skin, warmed from the day and just mellow enough to sit outside on the porch in a shirt and relish in the sounds of the birds around them, the occasional frog a few houses over, the scream of a fox somewhere further away and the chittering of Bats in the air.
When Alpha closes their eyes, they can still see the tender violets and pinks slowly gaining ground over the oranges on the horizon. It smells green around them, sweet freshness of grass, wet lawn from the neighbors and the gentle breeze carries the scent of hot candlewax.
Alpha swaddles themselves in the scents and sounds and sensations. Almost tempted to open their eyes and see the world sparkle just as brightly as it does right now.
Instead, on an exhale, they let go of it – bit by bit.
They loosen their hold on the smells first. They let go of the meaning of sounds, and finally, they pull away from the sensations as well. Until their Within is quiet and their focus is only on Being and Breath.
The Vision comes in pieces – flashes – that only make a whole afterwards.
A sense of deep peace, that spreads from their center outward, until Alpha becomes aware of the network they live in, the rapport they have with their environment, and even the one who hasn’t been there for five years.
It hurts, a moment, when they hear his voice. The soothing baritone accompanied by the sense-memory of a hand in their neck and a forehead against theirs and Alpha cradles the memory for a moment. Holds it tight with aching desperation that could threaten to break their meditation before, gradually, they let go of this as well.
First the hands and the forehead, then the baritone and then only the bare remains of their emotions remain. A sense of loneliness and if they can feel a tear or two on their cheeks then that is alright, Alpha doesn’t have to hide their feelings from anyone.
But they’ve let this sit for so long – clung to the one thing they had always been so certain would always accompany them. Five years are a long time though. And when they breathe through the pain this time, they gradually make themselves loosen their hold on this part of their identity as well.
It’s in the past, they tell themselves with no less gentleness than when they’re dealing with one of their ad’ike being upset. And this is the now.
And as the hold loosens and the space empties, Alpha breathes. And is.
…
Their breakfast is curiously quiet the next morning, even though it is a Sunday and the small feast has been quite a while in the making – if only because Alpha had stood up early to whisk up a simple cake along the lines of five ingredients and a small Kitchen-Spell and the ad’ike had woken up earlier than they’d thought they would.
Because they have raised a set of helpful hooligans, the four of them had set the table, made the tea and the coffee, found the juice and the bread and had worked together quickly to prepare the current spread that stretches between them.
It’s the first day Alpha has not set a sixth plate.
The table feels oddly wrong without he additional set next to them, and while Alpha is not above stealing looks at the space filled with the cooling cake instead of a waiting plate, they do not stand up to rectify this problem.
When the cake is finally being distributed, Alpha breaks the silence.
“If we go,” Alpha is careful in saying as they sit down, “it will be one week, and it will be up to you to find us new places to go.”
Predictably the ad’ike perk up in their chairs, curious and thoroughly awake. Bly’s eyes glint and Rex’ika looks like they might vibrate out of their skin already.
“There and back, or can it be there-only?” Cody asks for careful clarification.
Alpha knows what kind of batch they’ve picked from. Originally meant to be leaders, the mold that had made Bly, Fox and Cody had been meant for organizing larger amounts of vode.
Rex’ika is the one runt-of-the-litter that Alpha had picked first only because they’d known that the little Cadet might have tried to run on their own and Alpha hadn’t wanted to bear the potential failing of a kih’vod.
Cody and Fox, however, have always shown exceptionally intuitive skills for leading. Asking pertinent questions. Watchful and ruthless in defense of each other just and not among the Top 10 students of their college for nothing. Alpha has only very little to do with the way they’ve organized their learning.
[It’s a hold-over from Kamino. They’re aware. But freedom includes the freedom to choose what to keep from the past and what to let go of. Alpha is only there to guide them, not decide for them.]
“It can be one way,” they say at length. “But I will reserve a Veto in case you want me to drive out straight in one direction for one week and expect me to drive you straight back for another week.”
Car rides can be fun but Alpha doesn’t think they have the necessary patience to deal with the ad’ike in the car for two weeks straight. Not that they think that the ad’ike are yet aware of what a several hour ride can do to them.
“So… you’re willing to chauffeur us around for a week, but you’d like it better if at the end of the week we’re not further from home than maybe two three days,” Fox clarifies. More of a stickler to the precise wording of statements than Cody is.
“Accurate.”
For a moment the four are quiet, thinking the condition over until finally Cody speaks up again: “…No promises, but we’ll do our best.”
Alpha had anticipated something like that. Ad’ike could not well estimate how far out they would end up being if they’ve never been out at all. “Acceptable.”
Cody stretches his hand out and Alpha, smirking only softly enough to be able to hid it in a bite of their cake, reaches for it and shakes.
“Deal.”
Chapter Text
+++
Because Alpha is the best buir, they tack a packing list to their door the next morning while the four of them had gone to the cellar to unearth their backpacks. Those had been among the first things Alpha had gotten them new – knowing that there might be a moment when they’d need backpacks yet unwilling to keep the old ones from Kamino that could paint an unnecessary target on their backs.
While Rex is fishing for their fourth pair of socks, an odd thought comes to them.
“Do we even know where we want to go?”
The soft buzz of their vode around them, sifting for their favorite shirts, trying to find a pair of pants that will be comfortable enough yet pass in the eye of the public, doesn’t exactly come to a halt, even as Cody turns to them from where they’d lain out their clothing next to each other on Cody’s cot.
“We don’t have to,” their vod says with the quiet certainty that tells Rex that their vode have, in fact, thought about this and discussed it already. And left them out of it. Which is unfair.
“What do you mean?”
A large hand lands on their head, wide fingers almost spanning their entire skull and when they look up, Fox is still ruffling their hair with almost mechanical motions. “We just have to make Alpha believe that we know where we’re going,” he explains. “But no, we don’t know where we’re going. You remember the Cards?”
Rex dutifully even presents the small sheet they’ve decided to take with them. They don’t know why, yet.
“We need to trust that the journey will bring us where we need to go for Alpha to heal,” Fox continues. “And we don’t know where that is, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t tell them that there’s somewhere we want to go.”
That sounds… complicated. Fox huffs, ruffling their hair again.
“Don’t worry about it, vod’ika. Alpha would never leave us stranded in the middle of nowhere and I have a good feeling about this.”
Well… if Fox has a good feeling about this then it has to be true.
…
It couldn’t fall any better, he knows, that the night before their departure is a New Moon. Bly has watch over Rex, where Cody has come to supervise and be a second pair of eyes.
Fox doesn’t always like it, but he understands the need for it.
[Alpha had not been happy with him when they’d realized that their mayor’s untimely death might have been related to Fox’ heavy caff intake, sleepless nights and restless dabbling in his arts. The sanctions had hit hard and heavy and Fox won’t deny that he’d been angry at buir for a while until the situation had calmed down and they’d both managed to talk it out. Fox still thinks that the dude was skeevy and is still secretly unrepentant, but he’s learned his lesson.]
In the small hazel-tent, Cody comes to stand at his back, just behind the fourth direction stone and with a good view over what Fox is doing. It hasn’t happened yet, but in case something goes wrong, Cody will be there to pull him out of the blast zone of the ritual circle and into safety.
The circle has been cleaned, cleared and redrawn and when Fox is finally ready, the clock is just edging over midnight and into the new day. It’s exactly what he needs.
“Ni su'cuyi,” he says softly as he lights the first candle,
“gar kyr'adyc,” as he brings the match to the second,
“ni partayli” he continues despite the tightness in his throat as he goes for the third,
“gar darasuum” and finally as the wick of the fourth sparks flame.
“Ponds,” he croaks first – because he always does – and shudders through the next breath as he continues down his list. It’s only numbers from here.
Finally, “99 – because I know you’re still looking after all these di’kute even in the afterlife.”
A breeze plays with the candle in the East, the wax sizzles like a tittering laugh.
He’s more settled in himself now. Feels more centered now that the litany has been said and his vode remembered and called. Whether they will come is another thing entirely.
From his kneeling position, he carefully puts his hands on his knees palms up as if in supplication, the spread of his arms is just wide enough to encompass the width of the Board in front of him.
“Is anyone here?”
Unsurprisingly, the planchette moves. Fox has many vode, until now one of them has always been up to talk.
Hello
Having been practicing under the watchful eyes of Alpha for years – and on his own – he is well acquainted with the etiquette and the necessities of Ouija. Fox is gentle when he talks to the Board Spirits – more gentle than he is, sometimes, with his living vode.
Alpha hasn’t been able to explain it to him yet in terms that made sense to Fox, but over the time he has learned to accept that those vode who’ve marched on could sometimes tend to be of softer skin than those who’ve grown up with him. They needed softer words and softer tones than he was used to. Bly had sometimes joked that Fox saved up all his kindness for the Board.
“What’s your name?”
9, the planchette moves, then does a lemniscate before it returns to the number and stills. Fox waits for a few more breaths before he answers – it takes time to talk through a wooden board.
“99,” Fox breathes with a soft sigh, “Been a while since we talked.”
He wants to ask if 99 is okay. If he’s doing alright. But that’s a living-people-reflex born out of their society that those who’ve marched on don’t always know how to respond to.
“Is it alright if I ask you a few questions?”
Yes.
99 has always been one of the best vode, Fox remembers. Has always been prepared to help any and all of them at a moment’s notice. It’s true that 99 might have been decanted at what their makers had considered sub-standard and had carried with him the deformity of his body. But Fox also remembers that 99 had gone out with the glory of a true verd, defending the littlest among them and running a supply line as best as he could during the mutiny that had set them free.
“We’re going on a road trip. For Alpha,” he opens and the planchette is already moving, a lemniscate that indicates 99’s understanding, his desire to say something. Fox stops. The planchette jumps.
P – I – N – I – N – G, it spells and Fox huffs a laugh with something bittersweet and happy bubbling up under his chest. He absolutely does not have tears in his eyes.
“Yeah, vod,” he agrees, and before you ask, his voice is not shaky, shut up, “yeah it’s terrible.”
The planchette moves again. T – R – I – P – ?
“We don’t know where we should go,” Fox opens. “And we’ve never been out of here either. Do you know a good first stop to go to? Roughly a day’s ride in a car away?”
The planchette stays motionless.
Fox waits, politely, to see if maybe 99 needs some time to think, or to transfer the answer, but when it still doesn’t move, Fox nods.
“I will rephrase.”
Yes.
He huffs.
“Can you give me a good first pitstop roughly a day away from here for the Road Trip?”
Yes, the planchette answers, before it… dithers. Slips on the board as if undecided before it stills again and slides one lemniscate.
U – N – E – E – D – T – E – A
What?
Fox, in a quick preparation to facilitate better understanding, has looked up a good handful of places that are reachable with the car and a roughly eight-hour drive. The internet is a marvelous thing and he has it at his fingertips after all.
He’s very certain that a place called… Wait.
“We have tea.”
No, the planchette disagrees. Immediately. Like it knew that this was what he was going to say.
And Fox wants to argue. One because he is an argumentative bastard. But two, because they have a small army of tea-bags waiting in a lower cupboard where Rex can easily reach them – being the one among them to actually enjoy the stuff.
L – E – A – V – E – S, the planchette spells out for him and… Yeah. Fox is pretty certain they don’t have any leaf-tea. Alpha is not a big drinker of the stuff after all and until Rex learns better, they’re content with what they’re getting now.
Come to think of it, it’s probably a defense mechanism considering the cup of coffee everyone has at the breakfast table – except for Rex.
Fox doesn’t know where this is going, but he’s willing to humor a vod.
“Is there a particular blend we should get?”
It takes a while to spell out MILKY OOLONG because even when you say it it’s quite the mouthful, but Fox nods and acknowledges the answer.
“Do we need to get it from a specific place?”
9 – H – R – S – W – E – S – T, the planchette dictates. C – R – A – I – T.
“Like the dragon?”
C – L – O – S – E.
Fox makes a note. They need tea. In leaves. From Crait. Which is nine hours to the West of Termino. Bit long but it might be a good idea to listen to 99.
“So Crait is a good first stop on the Road Trip?”
Yes, the planchette agrees. Fox hums. His limbs feel cold, his eyes heavy. He knows that he’ll have to close the séance soon rather than find himself overwhelmed.
“Is there anything else, important, that we need to know?”
The planchette dithers in a lemniscate – Fox had likened it to the blue ring of death once and not even Alpha had been able to hide their snort. He’s fond now when he looks at it. Finally the planchette moves again.
N – O – T – P – R – E – S – S – I – N – G, it negates. Fox breathes a little sigh of relief. He’s tired.
“Is there something I can do for you as a thanks?”
It’s a part of his closing ritual. Fox knows that not every practitioner will ask this question and it’s entirely reasonable not to. Those who’ve marched on are not always as reasonable as his vode. At this point, Fox would like to say that he knows his vode, though. Those around him and those who come to him when he Calls. He has not yet heard an unreasonable request.
T – A – L – K – 2 – P – A – D – M – E, the planchette admonishes him. Fox knows exactly what this is about. He sighs.
“I’ll do my best, vod.”
Yes, the planchette slides and then stills.
Fox is careful when he repeats the remembrance, listing his vode as precisely as he has listed them at the start, before he thanks them and bids them return to their realm of rest. He claps into his hands three times, burns a chalice of Sage to clear the air and then waits for another few breaths.
The air is still and nothing moves. Fox nods and claps another three times.
When they exit the hazel-tent, Cody’s arm is already under his and the shoulder of his vod takes his weight like it always has – starting in their sims and down to that terrifyingly liberating night when they’d left only ashes behind them.
“You wanna conk in the lower cot tonight?”
Fox doesn’t remember what kind of answer he gives. His eyelids are heavy and his eyeballs gritty and he’s exhausted as if he’d held three séances in a row. He just wants to sleep.
Chapter Text
+++
It has to be said that Alpha is a good buir. Cody thinks they’ve got that going for them. Which is nice. Both for Alpha and for his vode and him.
However, when Alpha first went out to procure a vehicle, Cody doesn’t think that they thought much about the aesthetic of the thing. It had to be able to cart five people around, all of which either already tended or would, in the future, tend towards a bigger stature. And in case of an emergency it needed to be able to hold these five people as well as their most precious cargo. At least for a while.
Cody doesn’t know where Alpha got it, but when they first brought it to the garage, the owner – Mr Burglad – had wheezed a mighty laughter and had promptly listened to Alpha when they’d asked for a proper rehaul of the vehicle. Mr Burglad had even done it at a discounted price, seeing as they’d been new to town.
Ever since the car has been a good friend. It has carted around Fox and his debate team, Cody and a few of his Track co-runners and it has happily endured Rex’ insane friend-group for little lacrosse league (Cody will forever deny knowing that such a thing exists). It’s a patient vehicle. Enduring. Much like Alpha in that regard.
Which is maybe why they got it in the first place.
One look at the white and blue paint-job, chipped and hastily repaired in some places, a brief glance over the greenish patina over the rear windows and Alpha must have felt like they’d found someone who’d understand them.
This is not to say that there is much beauty to be found in their van.
It is, Cody has to confess, a regular eye-sore.
But Alpha loves it. Pets it sometimes when they pass it by, like it’s a stray Tooka standing still just long enough to have a hand run down its back. Murmurs praises at it when it runs smoothly up a winding mountain pass and doesn’t hold up the entire convoy lining up behind them. Two or three times a year Alpha will wash it, tend to its new boo-boos and whisper spells into its nooks and crevices. Bly has started to join them.
Mr Burglad still does smile when Alpha comes around with the van for their re-certification, but it’s an indulgent, kind smile these days. Lacking any of its ribbing nature from the first few years when Mr Burglad had still offered Alpha another car out of his own shop if only Alpha were to give up ‘that old clunker’.
One thing that Cody is looking forward to in the old van are the beautiful seats. He doesn’t know where they’ll end up going but he knows that the sitting row in the back is large enough to allow for optimal falling to the side and into sleep. He’s been there and he’s done that and while it’s not a 10/10 experience it certainly isn’t the harrowing torture he knows from falling asleep in other cars.
…
Alpha loves their little terrors. They are, they have to admit, the light of their own eyes and Alpha would die for them no questions asked.
It is, however, a bit worrying to be the buir in front of the car, enjoying the crisp morning air, the fresh, dewy morning just warm enough from the sun, looking forward to a few days on the road with the ad’ike and to watch said littles exit the house in a tight formation carrying a rattling trunk.
Alpha is certain that they haven’t acquired any cursed objects lately, but the large chest between Bly and Cody is giving its very best to make certain either of the ad’ike have to drop it. It’s a credit to their boys, probably, that their hold on it remains strong and unbothered.
Contrary to Alpha, who is very much bothered by the way Bly and Cody march their chest right to be back of the car and haul the thing in with only minimal conversation and what Alpha is certain is a muffled curse from the chest now sitting between their backpacks and assorted carry-ons.
Along with the morning, slow dread dawns on Alpha’s horizon.
They know that the toy-chest is difficult to escape once locked in. Rex had had a panic attack once because it had taken the boys too long to realize where they’d gone and it had taken Alpha to open the thing back up.
This time, however, there is a large, white sheet scotched to the lid of the chest, filled with Rex’ika’s dutiful writing and a small, creative drawing of a critter that they’re almost certain Cody put there.
“Cody,” they close their eyes and breathe very deeply, not turning towards the menace who, they are certain, is looking at them with the straightest of faces. If this is how the Road Trip starts do they really want to go through with this?
“Cody if I open that trunk, why is Fox going to be in it.”
“He said he wasn’t gonna come peacefully and we weren’t about to leave him behind,” their little mir’sheb reports dutifully.
The chest rattles dangerously close to the edge of the car, threatening to fall and Alpha has stepped forward with an ‘Osik’ on their lips, before they’ve realized what they’ve done.
Rex cropped blond hair pops up from behind Bly, mouth open in a shocked gasp that would do any old lady proud: “Alpha said a Bad Word!”
Little Shitstirrers.
The chest rattles. Alpha sighs. “It’s okay Fox’ika, I’m getting you out and then we can leave.”
And then, maybe, they’ll all find some sort of peace.
(They don’t know why they’re attempting to lie to themselves, this is already stressful and it’s only gonna get worse from now but the ad’ike want a Road Trip and by Manda that’s what they’re gonna have.)
…
With their first pit-stop being an eight- to nine-hour ride, it doesn’t take long before Rex realizes something terrible.
Road Trips mean sitting in the car for a long while.
“I’m just not certain my shebs were made for this,” they complain into the noogie that Fox is making them suffer – if only because Fox has been in a comparatively bad mood upon being released from the Toy Chest. Rex understands. They’re not very fond of being locked in that thing either.
“I feel like I have lightning in my butt-cheeks and ants in my legs and I don’t think this is what the Manda intended for my body.”
Bly quietly lifts a pad with a 9/10 written on it. Rex will take it.
“We’re only a few hours into the entire trip and you already wanna give up?” Fox gasps with feigned horror. Clutching at Rex’ shoulders as if terrified. “Have we taught you nothing?!”
“We have failed you,” Bly agrees monotonously.
Alpha shifts on the front seat. “Pitstop?”
“Pitstop!” Cody agrees immediately and with great fervor. “My bladder has not been made for this and I feel like an ant under a magnifying glass.”
Alpha snorts, but they pull off the road with the certainty of someone who knows where they’re going.
It would be believable too if not for the fact that there is not a single sign on the road. The tires of their old van roll off the smooth concrete and on to the grainy underground of an off-the-map-road before, soon enough, making further headway on a sand-sifty, packed-dirt road. Alpha drives.
Around them, the monotonous repetition of high-way rails and grey street interspersed with white and yellow lines of varying thickness makes way for thin clouds of dust as the car passes, small green heaps of salad poking out of the ochre-brown ground and fields of whey and barley moving and shaking in the wind. Tall sunflowers stretching towards the sky imitate the handful of towering white wind-towers with their gigantic propellers.
They pass under an overgrown bridge and through a small strip of wood, before they halt in front of two iron-wrought gates closing off an old stone-wall in the middle of nowhere.
When Alpha turns around in their seat, Rex can just catch the fleeting Haze of light from their eyes.
“I have no idea where we are, so all of you behave and keep your cellphones on you,” they warn right before taking off their seatbelt and opening the door with a great groan of relaxation upon stepping into the shade of the firs and out of the sticky heat in the car.
…
Fox pushes at the iron-wrought gates with a slightly less hesitant hand than Alpha would have preferred, but once the gates give, they are not surprised to find their ad’ika vanishing into the old forgotten graveyard beyond.
You can’t really keep a Necromancer away from the Dead after all.
Cody, they had been pleased to see, had recognized Rex hesitant steps towards the looming curve ahead of them and the promising sound of water beyond and had taken it upon himself to go with his vod. Bly had taken one look at the woods behind them and had gone nearly into the exactly opposite direction and it is when their third ad moves off into yet another near-cardinal-direction that Alpha sighs deeply before they set off into the remaining direction.
From here, the highway is barely audible. With wind sifting through the firs, all they have to do is focus on another source of noise rather than the cars passing about ten to fifteen minutes away. Their feet lumber evenly over the earth where the dark fertile soil of the wood passes into the lighter, sandier underground of the tilled and planted fields, interspersed with the occasional clover fields to balance the nitrogen levels in the soil. Alpha steps closer to the firs, breathes the deep, moist smell of shadowy wood and opens their eyes to take in the first, hesitant tips of these firs, stretching their fresh-green selves towards the sun.
Curious, they reach for a nearby tip with gentle fingers. It’s soft and malleable in their grip and comes away from the branch without nearly any tugging at all and when they put it into their mouth, the taste is buttery and a bit resin-y from where they plucked it. It’s good stock though, and in their minds’ eye, they can already tell that these tips would make an excellent syrup.
It’s pure coincidence, they’re certain, that the large overall they’ve chosen to wear for their leisure is an old working overall holding a small jute bag for the express purpose of collecting. Accident, Alpha’s certain of it. But they take it nevertheless and, reaching for another branch, don’t hesitate to pluck the fir tips that will come.
…
When Fox joins them, Bly is at his side, hand on his shoulder and it’s clear from the cobwebs in Fox’ hair and the hesitant specter a few paces behind them that he’s gone digging into a Mausoleum or something.
“’lo Fox’ika,” they say softly, putting their own hand on the other shoulder of their ad, feeling him relax under the breadth of their own paw. “Where are you?”
“’m with you,” their ad says softly. “Bumfuck nowhere,” he says, curling forward a bit and towards the breadth of their chest. “And there’s a spiderweb in my hair somewhere.”
Alpha has already found the offending streak of sticky grey-white in the hair of their ad’ika, gently brushing it out of his hair and off his skin while Bly plucks at a small leaf in Fox’ hair. Alpha smooths their hand over the head of their ad and breathes in with him. Fox shuffles closer.
“I’m with you and Bly and we’re standing under fir trees.”
When Fox finally makes the connection, Alpha is not hesitant to wrap their arm around both of their ade, watching with no small amount of satisfaction as the specter further away from them slowly loses shape and contour and the chill of something Other leaves the skin of their ad.
“I’m with you, and with Bly, under some fir trees. Your hand is on my shoulder and your arm is around me and Bly is at my back and you smell like you’ve gone digging in moss.”
Alpha snorts, pinching his ear, but they pull their ad’ike closer, feeling the ground underneath themselves, feeling the moss and the old needles and the dark, fertile soil under their boots and under their feet and feeling their own connection like they had roots as they’re holding their ad. Just a little while longer. Only until Fox feels like he can stand on his own again.
…
When Rex and Cody come find them, the small jute bag is three-quarters full and Alpha resolves to find a small store for glass-ware and sugar soon. It’ll be tricky to steep a syrup while on the road, but the fir tips won’t hold forever and the only good syrup comes from fresh produce. Also their old van is a former military model and if Alpha remembers anything about them at all then they have a false floor that’d be ideal for stashing the closed glassware in a dark spot. Temperature controlled might be another issue but they’d give it a try nevertheless.
Cody and Rex return with sticky hands and a few handfuls of fir resin from their own trip and Alpha sighs when their working overall coughs up a small round tin for resin but no rubbing alcohol to get rid of the brown, sticky spots on the fingers of their ade. They also quietly bemoan the existence of yet another pair of resin-pockets-pants because at this point none of the trousers they acquire for their ade are going to remain unscathed but there could probably be worse fates.
“Just make sure that at least one pair of trousers you took with you remains clean, okay?”
Rex nods enthusiastically. Cody, more realistic, maybe due to his age, looks a bit more daunted by the question but nods nevertheless. At least, Alpha supposes, he’s aware of his weaknesses. That’s a good step into the right direction.
Filling the jute bag with more fir tips goes faster when it’s the five of them and by the time the second hour has passed, they’re on their way back to the car.
“Ah’buir,” Rex says softly in a voice that tells them food is going to happen soon and then their kihne’vod is going to go out like a light-bulb whose sap has been taken, “c’n you tell us a story?”
Like many moments in their career as a buir, Alpha has no idea what is happening.
This does not make them any less capable of rolling with the punches.
That and, for all their geographical limitation, Alpha has actually had full a life at almost every moment of it. And they know that there is one thing that their ade can never quite agree on in regard to their stories: their veracity. [Yes, Alpha can be just as much of a mir’sheb as the terrors they’ve raised. And one day they might watch their absolute horror when they realize that Alpha has told them The Truth.]
“Have I ever told you of the time The Marine took out a Golem with nothing but their smart mouth and a Meiloroon?”
“No,” Rex gasps, immediately hooked on the possibility of a new story with one of their favorite heroes. Fox and Cody are more skeptic about the existence of The Marine and Alpha has had their fun yeeting Chuck Norris-ian jokes around with them.
[‘The Marine doesn’t read books; he stares them down until he gets the information he wants’.]
“Well, once there was a small squadron of fighters and they had a very bad day. There they were, besieged and beset on all sides, enemy fire from their right and their left, the way back was blocked and ahead… The Golem.”
…
Alpha plies the boys with water, pre-made gnocchi and cheese that they’re certain will sit heavy in their stomachs and a few muffins as they finish their story.
When they start driving again, they’re not surprised to find that, at some point past hour one, the four of them pile up in the backseats and drift off as the afternoon sun slowly loses its glare and makes way for the cool air of the night.
They don’t know how long it is that they’re driving. The road seems endless at times and the monotony breaks only thanks to the oddly placed towns that Alpha doesn’t drive around if only to break up the tedium of driving alone at night with no one in the seat next to them.
Instead they make a swift turn off the road at the first gas-station for a few ice-bags to keep the fir-tips cool. As the night stretches and the way behind them grows, Alpha veers off the highway every odd town to slow their pace, open the window for some fresh air and keep their brain engaged with the brightly lit streets and the duty to find the way back to the highway again.
It’s good enough to keep them awake until the radio clock reads 04:26 and the neon-bright lettering of a Motel comes like a sign that makes a decision for them.
Alpha checks in, moves their ade to huddle on the provided single-bed instead of the backseat and sits down in front of their door to watch the Sunrise from the open courtyard.
…
By the time Alpha wakes up, Cody, Fox and Bly have managed to avoid a no-breakfast-meltdown by steering Rex towards the singular pool, which is where three of them are currently splashing around, challenging each other to races and deep- or wide-diving contests in a bid to keep quiet in the relatively early morning.
Fox has the impression that the motel isn’t all that well booked either way, but the consideration hasn’t hurt them yet.
It had been Bly, for some reason, who’d woken up with a picture of a storefront in his mind and coupled with a quick search of The Internet, Fox had found out what tea-shop they were supposed to get their tea-in-leaves from.
He’d been surprised to learn that they opened as early as they did, though not as much when the wrinkly old man behind the counter needing a stool to even look over it and at him had relayed in a very convoluted manner that sleeping was something the young did. Fox is not exactly certain that’s what the mystical dude really did say, but he’d started with ‘When as old as me you are’ and Fox had done his best to keep up. So he’s pretty sure the man told him he’s an early bird not by choice but by biology and Fox had nodded and inquired if they had outlandish teas too.
The odd creature had squinted at him, large ears lifting minutely with a swallow, hummed and then asked him what it is he was looking for.
“Certain I am that have it I do,” he’d assured when Fox had asked and, indeed, it had turned out that the Milky Oolong was one of the old coot’s own favorites. A precious good, it appeared. But the creature had rung him up with his old, arthritic hands and his gimmer stick, squinted at him, hummed and nodded again and had hopped off the stool behind the counter to fish for something underneath it.
With a hoarse ‘a-hah’, he had returned and put another white packet next to the one Fox had rung up and pushed it towards Fox with the gimmer stick: “For the little one the second pack is. And convey my greetings, you will, to whomever gets the first.”
Dutifully, Fox had nodded and had received the packets of tea-in-leaves.
Only when he’d been outside again had he noticed that he hadn’t managed to ask the man for his name, but then had been distracted by the time. Or rather the fact that he still had enough of it to amble back to the motel with their new purchase at a most leisurely pace made for the early morning.
He doesn’t register the small runes that had been meticulously stitched into the border of the welcome mat. Doesn’t register the delighted cackle behind closed doors and the raising ears of the small troll behind the counter.
He remembers instead that if Alpha finds out he’s been out without supervision they’re going to revoke his caff-rights again. And Fox has been made for a lot of things, but all of those had involved a healthy dose of caffeine at some point in the day.
On his return, Rex, Bly and Cody are still in the pool, busy diving at the deep end and seeing how far they can go. Cody’s old scar hadn’t permitted him to dive as deep as That Place would have wanted him to and for all that he was a capable leader, the resulting pressure in his ear when he’d forced himself to perform to standard – at the least – had nearly had him decommissioned either way.
He’s gentler than their own instructors when he talks to Rex though, acknowledges the pressure in the ears, acknowledges their age and is careful when they sink down with him as far as they can go, just so that their littlest vod can at least have the experience.
Alpha is slumped on the open hallway overlooking the courtyard, shoulder half against the door-frame to their room and when Fox tilts a pair of sunglasses on their nose, they wake with a soft rumble and a sharp inhale.
It’s always a curiosity, he thinks, to watch Alpha’buir go from sleep to wakefulness within the span of minutes and when their eyes catch his, Fox carefully shifts aside to allow for a view of the other three down in the courtyard. Alpha squints as their fingers push the glasses further up their nose.
“Do I want to know what these cost?”
Fox grins. “What do you mean?”
Buir groans and shifts their shoulders down their back, circles their head and flexes something hard enough to make something else crack. “Do I even want to know where you got these?”
The lobby of the motel, but Fox shrugs instead: “Probably not. You good to go?”
Alpha’s eyes seem a bit stuck on the three in the pool. “Yeah, let’s get you monsters fed.”
…
The sun pours through the large road-side windows at an odd angle, illuminating the dust-motes and painting streaks of gold-yellow into the brown-orange shadows of the wood-panelled room.
Their corner is one of the darker ones, farther in the back and half of their table is in the shade of a wall rather than the exposure of a window. On the other end of their table and behind the long counter, the door to the kitchen swings open now and again, releasing a cloud of cooking perfume – old oil, fresh caff, the scent of sizzling meat and eggs. It’s a beautifully mouthwatering smell.
Somewhere ahead of them, the waitress is hopping tables at a leisurely pace – like she’s taking a morning stroll through the small diner, while carrying plates of breakfast and pots of caff. She’s friendly, but not unbearably chipper and the sound of her voice carries melodiously.
Alpha has vanished from their table for a short bit to wash up and change, though not before drawing a quick forget-met-rune on the ground before their booth with one of Rex’ soluble markers. Cody knows that Alpha wants them to have fun. He also knows that Alpha has reason to be paranoid, and that they would never forgive themselves if anything happened in the few minutes they’d let them out of their sight.
It is, however, impervious that Alpha do so. Because they need to plan.
“Where to next,” Fox is the first to ask, bending forward and over his coveted cup of caff. Cody shrugs.
“We should’ve maybe planned this better at home,” he moans quietly, trying to sift through a potential list of appropriate next destinations. He doesn’t even know where to start.
Bly moves closer, pulling Rex into his lap to allow their youngest vod to participate on a more equal level in the discussion. Not that their little blond is saying much at the moment, focused as they are on the surface of their cup of tea.
“We could try to see if we can get a hand on a Pendulum,” Cody suggests. He’s tired – Rex woke up early this morning and Fox had immediately pawned the responsibility off on Cody. Bly, blessed with the sleep of the innocent, had not woken through their debate of breakfast, having to wait for Alpha and then coming to bribe their little vod with the pool instead. If this is what Alpha has been going through the last few years, Cody has a newfound sense of respect for them. He doesn’t think he could’ve done that.
“We don’t really have a closed and consecrated space around here though,” Fox argues and… that’s not exactly wrong.
“We could make one though,” Cody returns. “Alpha already set the Forget-me-Rune, we’d just need to expand on that.”
Bly snorts, looking up from where he’d been focused on Rex, “Sure. Diner will be ecstatic to find a handful of unsupervised kids have turned one of their tables into a consecrate space. Not shifty at all.”
Cody hums.
“Also, I don’t think we could get it done, plus the divination, in the time ‘til Alpha is back,” Fox hooks in and… yeah, Cody sighs dejected, he doesn’t think they could pull that off either.
“What about you, Rex’ika,” Bly murmurs carefully into the hair of the blond, “any suggestions on a next stop?”
“Where’s the next mill?” Rex asks in return, blinking up from where they’d nearly sunken into their tea-cup, nose just barely not touching the surface. Their eyes are unfocused and Cody sucks in a quick breath.
“Were you scrying?”
Rex is safe in Bly’s hold, Cody knows this. With his connection to his Ka’riduur, Alpha has had Bly working the hardest on grounding himself in order not to have to cry after an ad who lost himself on the Other Plane and left a withering husk to mourn only.
Nevertheless he reaches out, hand against the cool cheek of their youngest, sifting over their cheek, their nose, into their hair. Rex sighs into the warmth of his palm, snuggles in like a Lothcat.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Cody chides carefully. “Not outside of a circle and not without warning us.”
It’s an argument Alpha has had with all of them. Except, it appears, with Rex. That honor just seems to have gone to them. Bly’s arms tighten around their vod.
“You didn’t even clear the space properly,” he admonishes softly.
“Clapped thrice,” Rex argues and… it hadn’t occurred to him then, but under the din of the kitchen-door opening and spitting out a cook about to stumble home and sleep off the night-shift, Rex had, indeed, clapped. Thrice.
“You do understand that it was not a consecrated or properly cleared space to do that though, do you?”
Rex nods. They’re dropping quickly and Cody is not surprised at all.
Magic in Consecrated Circles could be demanding on its own. But outside of Consecrated Circles, it was the caster who carried the brunt of stabilizing the energies of whichever environment they were in while, at the same time, focusing on their craft and the intricacies of the ritual. That aside, casting outside of a Circle could leave you open to an attack of whichever metaphysical nature – and Rex was, maybe, too young to properly defend themselves against those.
“Wha’ ‘bout th’ mill tho’,” they mumble, already turning sideways and into Bly’s embrace.
Fox hums. “There’s a place not that far from here, called the Glass Mill,” his fingers are tapping steadily on his phone.
“Pic-sh’res?” Rex yawns and opens their eyes only long enough to stare at the screen Fox shoves under their nose. They hum.
“White Mill,” they nod and when they turn into Bly’s embrace this time, their breathing evens out before they can ask anything more.
Bly bundles his responsibility closer to himself and nods at Fox. “How far away is it?”
Fox makes a face, tapping on the screen again, “Farther than I’d like,” he admits finally. “Maps says it’s about fifteen hours out and with the way Alpha’s driving I’d guess that’d make roughly two days travel – including today.”
Cody mournfully looks at the cooling rest of coffee in his cup. “We’re gonna be sittin’ sardines again aren’t we?”
“It’s not gonna be a supremely comfortable ride no,” Fox agrees. Rex sighs and cuddles closer into Bly’s shoulder. The frown on his vod’s face eases. “At least this one will get a bit more sleep though.”
…
Alpha thinks that they do an okay job at this whole raising their hooligans thing.
There wasn’t a proper manual for this when they first started – or none that they knew about – and while the folk of Termino was kind enough to let them find their feet in regard to raising their hellions, there was also never a shortage of always-contradicting-advice they didn’t ask for yet received from all sides.
All in all, they could have probably done a lot worse and Alpha is mostly content with the ever-changing-product of their ever-continuing effort to raise free sentients. It feels like an uphill struggle sometimes, but whenever they take the moment to look, the view is always gorgeous.
Knowing their own struggles, and knowing that they raised well-adjusted hooligans who have yet to master the art of the Sabbac-face, Alpha is also acutely aware that their ad’ike are desperately winging the entirety of their Road Trip.
Which is alright, in a way, they suppose.
They haven’t asked for a detailed itinerary at the beginning, after all. Had only offered to drive around for a week and then return in less than a week and had, otherwise, left their tiny terrors free reign. Considering their age and the lack of strategy-lessons the way the Kaminii had pushed them through, Alpha is actually pleasantly surprised.
There is very little bluster, once their ade have decided where to go, and Alpha is not senile enough yet to not notice when their littles sneak out in the middle of the night to hold a karking séance.
Again, there could be worse ways to find a destination and, at the very least, Fox had made certain that Cody would be there to pull him out in case something went sideways and he used the Tool he is most familiar with.
This is, however, not to say that they aren’t supremely unimpressed when they return from their quick wash-up and change – yes, they’re aware that their ad’ike need to decide where to next – to find that Rex is entirely conked out and Bly is Grounding like he’s pulling Alpha out of a Haze.
Alpha pinches the bridge of their nose and take a deep breath. “I don’t want to know what happened,” they say pre-emptively, “So long as the little one is okay, we’re okay. Just point me towards the next goal.”
Fox, dutiful and quiet, turns his screen to show Alpha their next stop.
“That’s a bit farther than this one,” they muse quietly, looking into the round. “We’re going to have to make a stop somewhere before we reach that.”
Their ade nod. “We thought so too,” Cody acquiesces. “Fox found a few places to stop during the day and a carpark to stop overnight.”
Alpha nods. “We do that then,” they agree, studying the road Fox has laid out of them on Maps. They’re a good group of heads, their hooligans. Learned from the day before that a pitstop is beneficial and calculated one in right away. It’s going to be a bit of a walk too, probably, and that is likely to tire Rex out – and the rest of their hooligans, if Alpha has anything to say about that.
Memorizing the most important routes and junctions, Alpha hands the phone back to their ad, brushing a hand over his head and repeating the caress with the rest of their ade. Even the sleeping little.
“Shall we go then?”
Alpha watches their tiny hooligans take a last swig of their cold caff, pass Rex around as they make for the restroom and cluster around them as they pay for their breakfast.
They’re having fun, Alpha knows. This is the first time they’re stretching their wings and Alpha had forgotten how they, themselves, had been exhilarated to know that they are now ‘grown enough’ to be able to cast and conjure by themselves, ‘old enough’ to be sent on their verd’goten and actually survive it.
They don’t deny that, at any moment, they’re ready to cast a handful of protective wards around their ade – they’ve been told that this is just how buir’e feel – but they also like to see them learn.
In the end, though, Alpha is just here for the damage control. They’re here for being tired, looking menacing when the weird creeps show up, and for pulling their ade out of any over-boarding shenangians.
Right… and the driving. Ade can’t drive yet.
…
Alpha makes good time in the period it takes for Rex to recuperate from whatever has knocked them out in the Breakfast Diner. It’s a good thing that this takes most of the first stretch and Alpha cannot deny that it might also be a good thing that Bly has availed himself to be the drool-pillow for their kihne’vod and thus alleviate most of the usual feeling of limb-dearth upon waking.
Rex is their youngest and, as such, technically a weak link in the chain of backseat-verd’ike determined to make the Road Trip and atin’la enough to sit out any amount of time it takes until they get where they get. To be fair this alleged weakness boils down to five years of biological difference in physical stamina. Which Alpha is convinced Rex will catch up on in nearly no time at all – if only because they’re reckless and stubborn.
They’re singing along to one of Bly’s Road Trip Mixes, pleasantly duetting Cody’s slightly higher voice and trying hard to hide their smile at the near-mindless way their ad seems to be singing along as they stare out of the window, watching the trees and the guard-rails streak by.
Rex is waking up just in time as it is – they’re closing in on their first pit-stop today. [Alpha doesn’t need to ask to know that this kind of exhaustion doesn’t just come from anything – Rex’ika had been dead to the world for the better part of almost four hours now. If that isn’t energetic exhaustion, Alpha is willing to do something drastic and embarrassing.]
By the time Alpha is taking the exit off the highway, Rex is starting to complain about a full bladder and Fox is already moving to distract him by being a mir’sheb.
It shouldn’t, maybe, but the dulcet tones of squabbling vode in the back as they send out Feelers for the right path to take brings an indulgent smile to their face nevertheless.
…
The Parking Lot doesn’t look like much. There’s white-gray gravel under their feet, the sides of the lot are hemmed in by lush, green mounds that have sprouted a dense amalgamation of trees in the last years. Cody can barely see beyond the third line of threes.
As he munches on the packed lunch Alpha has been certain to get them at the Diner, he can still hear the occasional white-noise of passing cars from the Highway, but it’s a removed sound in the small cocoon that they’re standing in. Here, the first birds are calling to each other, filling the air with bright songs both familiar and not and a few bright flowers are climbing the edges towards the wood.
There is still the slight sharpness of car exhaust in his nose, but already it is being soothed by the blanketing thickness of dark, fertile forest floor and the scent of fresh pine in the air.
Alpha has wolfed down their own lunch and lets them watch as they transfer the fir tips they’d collected a day ago into a few glasses, top the green up with a layer of sugar and then top up the sugar with fir tips again until the glasses are full.
Three and a half glasses do they fill this way, explaining quietly about the properties of both the sugar and the fir tips, before they close the last glass and smirk up at the four of them. “And the most beautiful thing of all is that it needs no magic or incantation whatsoever to make cough syrup right out of this,” they gesture towards the glasses. “All I need to do is put them in a dark place and leave them be.”
And Cody watches as, for the first time, a part of the mystery why Alpha would cling so tightly to their eyesore of a van is revealed – because it has a double floor.
“Did you put that there?”
“Didn’t have to,” Alpha replies quietly as they stash the glasses carefully into the double floor, buffering the space between with a few old rags and securing the glasses with a cardboard. “It’s an old military vehicle, they have a handful of these hidey-holes within easy reach.”
And then the glasses vanish again and Cody will promptly forget them in favor of the walk that Alpha takes them on that day.
He doesn’t think they’ve really covered gorges in geography, but even just walking to the starting-point of this one, he truly thinks that they should. Maybe he can make a bit of extra credit next year with a presentation on them.
The small path urges them to walk single-file, which makes communication difficult because Alpha is very much against yelling in the forest, but Cody finds himself too focused on his environments either way.
There is a river to the left of them, washing its gurgling body over all sizes of stones and the occasional log, turning into small, torrential waterfalls at times and then calming down to wide, shallow, calm bodies of flowing water.
Their path leads them through the tree-line at its edge, carrying them up on the high sides of breathtaking waterfalls that roar in his ears and close to the edge of the flat stretches until only a step to the side would take him off the path and towards the small pebbled stretch of land before the first lapping wavelets of water.
The sun paints shadows in varying outlines on their backs and faces. The sound of the cars vanishes completely maybe five minutes into their walk, overtaken by the permeating quiet of the forest and the song of the river.
There is moss on the trees and moss on the stones to the sides of them and moss even on the old, fallen branches and tree-trunks. Alpha points out the droppings of a marten and makes them be very quiet when they find a pair of Squirrels dancing up and down a tree and hunting each from branch to branch, jumping as if weightless. He makes them listen closely to the call of a Buzzard somewhere up high above the trees and makes them taste the fresh buttery leaves of blackberries while they step aside to collect a few glasses of the pure river water. Making them drink directly from the finger-numbingly-cold source that feels as if its travelling through his entire body.
Cody barely notices the passing of time until they come to the steepest part of their walk and he has to focus on his breathing and the cadence of his steps while Alpha slows down enough to walk next to Rex.
The end of their walk, however, is a most beautiful lookout point in the form of a weather-flattened top of rock on which Cody can still see the remnants of old walls – stacked stones and old, beleaguered grout drawing patterns of erstwhile rooms and outer walls into whatever space there was to be found – now taken over by shallow rooted pines that smell divine in the strong sun of the afternoon.
Alpha makes them eat again. Fills them with black bread, tomatoes, cheese and apples that make their fingers and cheeks sticky while the sun warms their heads and shoulders and the occasional breeze makes it just bearable enough as they feast and laugh and listen to Fox as he pulls up as much information on the gorge and the ruins as he can find.
When they turn around, Alpha is just strict enough to remind them to not break anything and not to disturb the local Spirits and Beings before they let them go. Rex is by Cody’s side just quickly enough for him to register before he steps off the path and onto a large rock sitting half-dry in the rush of the water. As he finds the next rock, Rex, cautiously, follows.
Whenever he turns to look, Alpha is just within sight, bending with large hands to reach for some kind of flower he’s certain they’ve had their eye on during the way up as well. Their dark pants are dirty with mud and hand-prints and the soft, blue shirt stretches over their wide shoulders as their head vanishes under the high growth of the flora lining the path they’re still mostly on. The jute bag looks laughably small against their thigh and Cody would wonder a bit longer, if Bly hadn’t found the biggest rock to climb and sit down on.
The boulder is large and rounded and Cody remembers it from the way up, a massive thing that had looked as if it could crush houses if it moved just right – but here it is still and peaceful, the mossy green top perfectly aligned with a ray of sun falling through the forest canopy.
It’s the perfect spot and Cody is gripped tight with the desire to join him – especially as he watches Fox already reach their vod.
Bly’s back is still and his figure unmoving, even as Fox joins and it hits something soft in Cody to realize, even as Fox sits down, that Bly must be meditating.
He looks to the side and behind him, trying to find Rex, and the panic at not finding him grips him just long enough to seek out Alpha, which is where he finds the blond top of his vod. Cody, soothed, moves forward to join his vode.
…
“That’s a bit big of a rock for you to climb,” Alpha groans when they finally join them on the even larger boulder Rex has found.
“I got up fine,” they shoot back instead, snorting a giggle when buir pokes their side in admonishment.
Their hands are warm and rough, the left of the fingertips dark-green with old sap from stems and flowers, as they pull them up from the soft cushion of moss and into their own lap. A handful of meters over, Bly, Fox and Cody have sunken into their own meditation and when they feel Alpha exhale in that cadence, Rex knows that it’s time to join them.
…
Alpha lets the ade run ahead for the car while they take their time to pluck more of the Creeping Jenny that is filling up every available spot it can find on the ground. Drying it might be a bit of a hassle, but if they do it right, it could still be done and Alpha hasn’t seen this much of the stuff in the wild before. They’re not passing up the chance to collect it.
Also, there is a marvelous advantage to having the ade run between them and their own current game somewhere ahead of them – it’ll tire them out that much quicker and Alpha knows that they still have a bit of a road ahead of them, before they can even just shut down the motor and catch a bit of rest themselves.
Rex’ blond hair reflects in the golden afternoon sun, and the laughter of their ade filters through the trees like the light as they make their way back to the van. Alpha is nearly reluctant to step out of the tree-line and only does so with a heavy sigh and an arm around Bly’s shoulders.
…
It’s a good thing the ade are knackered because the next part of their journey is a bit of a stretch, as far as Alpha is concerned. But it barely takes anything to feed the little terrors, convince them to perform all ablutions now rather than be woken by them and make them curl up on the backseat.
By the time even Fox has succumbed to the excitement of the day, the sun has barely started to set and Alpha folds the visor down to keep the road in better view. It lowers quickly, paints the farther away mountains and hills in varying shades of blue and grey until they vanish in the thick cover of night and Alpha still, stubbornly, drives on.
Driving by night had been an odd experience the first few times Alpha had done it. Maybe that had rooted in the fact that the first few times they had, the ade in the back of their car had been younger, the car had been stolen and they’d been on the run from a life that could barely be called that.
They’d avoided highways, had chosen to rely on their own craft instead and had let The Haze guide them until they’d arrived in Termino and hadn’t looked back since.
The highways seem less threatening now. Less of a solid obstacle that meant they weren’t far enough away yet and more of an ethereal opportunity to see more. Alpha knows why they haven’t gone on many trips away from the home that they’ve built for the ade, but this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a tiny sliver of something like regret that sits under their sternum.
Fox’ phone shines brightly in a holder on the console and even on screen the highway stretches ahead of them – no exits, barely any stops. Only the dark road ahead of them, a few cars to their left or right, mostly trucks, carefully keeping their lane, and the trees that line the slopes to the left and the right of the road.
The radio plays quietly – some outlandish station with the oddest music Alpha has heard in a while, but who are they to judge the taste of their ade.
They make it a point not to look at the clock when they finally pull into the abandoned, but well maintained, parking lot somewhere closer to their goal than they’d been before. It’s barely anything more than a bay of gravel behind a thick stripe of trees, but when Alpha finally turns off the motor and shifts to lean against the A-column for some well-earned rest, they couldn’t care less.
…
“Alpha,” the whisper is hesitant and quiet and it rings all sorts of alarm-bells. They rock up too quickly from their slumped seat, pulling something in the side of their neck and the moment they turn their head they realize why they’d been woken.
Someone’s outside.
“’second,” they rumble, wiping at their eyes and trying to get a grip on wakefulness.
They’re certain that the parking bay had been public and, really, would Fox’ Maps have guided them here if it weren’t? Was that even possible?
Alpha has collected all of their show-ables, about to open the door of their car when they realize that the supposed cop outside is… really tall. And oddly shaped. Alpha stalls.
Through the foggy window of the slept-in-car, it becomes clear only slowly to their sleep-heavy brain that it’s not actually a person standing outside of the car.
“Alpha, is that a deer?”
If it is, it’s large. “Probably an elk,” they correct, shifting to the other side of the car to roll down the window and get a bit of fresh air into the car. It unfogs the windows, yes, but it also helps to wake their brains up and, as the opacity of their own window slowly lessens Alpha slowly comes to the realization that, yes, that is, in fact, an elk.
Standing at the side of their car. Sniffing at the hood of the van as if to determine if it’s edible.
“No loud noises,” Alpha reminds them quietly as they turn around to look at their ade – all of them are in varying states of wakefulness and Rex, they can tell, is the least happy to have their eyes open. “And a good morning, ade.”
Cody is still glued to the window, mouth open as he stares at the creature slowly coming into more detailed shape – the width of their antlers and the dark brown of their coat, the size of their hooves and the gentle darkness of their eyes. “Alpha I wanna ride one,” he awes quietly.
“Don’t do it where I can see and if there’s any report on you hurting yourself you better make certain it never gets into my hands.” It’s a near-immediate response. Alpha can’t be disappointed if they never know what kind of osik their ade get up to. Most of the time Alpha is certain they don’t want to know.
Except if it’s magical osik. Then Alpha reserves the right to know everything.
On a second thought: “And wait ‘til you’re twenty-one and employed somewhere with good insurance.” Just in case.
[Cody goes on a Trail when he’s twenty-five. Alpha will forever deny the noise that came out of their mouth when their ad sent them a polaroid of him on the back of a karking Moose. Next time they see him, they’re going to noogie the mir’sheb until he’s missing as many hair as he’s turned grey on Alpha’s head.]
The hush of reverence lasts as they watch the large beast slowly become disinterested in the van and turning from it, nibbling on a few leaves from the trees around them before stepping over the nearest guard-rail and slowly vanishing into the thicket of the trees beyond. For a while, nobody says anything.
Then: “Are we there yet?”
…
Rex, it becomes clear, has been thoroughly disenchanted with the novelty of a Road Trip. Alpha is well aware that the backseat of the van is one of the more comfortable ones and allowing the ade to pile up has always been a guarantee to get them at least to rest.
But there is something odd, they know, about sleeping in clothes. About wearing the same underwear as the day before until a good solid pitstop allowed a change. About not being able to wash properly while on the road and the inconveniences of toilet-breaks, brushing teeth and eating.
Rex is ten.
When they lie down on the ground in the middle of the parking bay after their breakfast, refusing to step back into the car, Alpha understands all too well.
…
They take care to leave Rex some space to themselves on the last stretch of today’s drive. Cody’s knee is firm against theirs, because they don’t want their vod’ika to feel excluded, but Rex is grateful for the quiet. Sits back in their spot, closes their eyes and their face looks like they go through all the stages of grief before they slip into exhaustion and rest.
Bly doesn’t look much better. Unfamiliar surroundings and odd sleeping positions have put circles under his eyes and lowered the corners of his mouth into a grim mien that barely fits the usual joviality his vod tends to display.
Looking at Fox and Alpha, Cody probably cannot expect himself to look any better. All of them are tired. It’s only day three and the constant sitting feels stifling. He has never before felt the need to move as direly as he does now.
By some unnamed grace, the two hours from the parking bay fly by quicker than Rex can gear up to really start whining.
Cody can admit that he’s started to get antsy under his own skin as well. Short in his answers to any questions. Curt and restricted lest his mouth run away with him and he say something hurtful he can’t take back. Admittedly it devolves into a breathing exercise and a small nap, but it could be worse.
By the time he feels settled, Alpha is pulling off the slower roads in towns and onto a gravel-road pointing towards The Glass Mill. Cody has never been so happy to see the sign to an obviously family-themed artisan shop. He’d make bows and curves around it under normal circumstances but he’ll take anything to get out of the car.
…
Rex knows that it has been their own input that has brought them here – and the deeper the jovial guide leads them into the old farmhouse turned into a small, local museum, the more they can admit that maybe it hadn’t been a bad idea.
They understand near to nothing of the history and the numbers go straight over their head, but their guide smiles brightly at their awe for the brightly colored glass that shines in the sunlight and paints odd shapes on the floor and the walls as she leads them farther into the belly of the old Mill. Until they stand in a big workshop that looks like someone has stamped their garage and placed a few hearths in it instead.
Hearths, they’re told, that run up to 2100° to heat the glass that one of the workers present put into the kiln, taking it out and presenting it briefly in all its red-orange-hot glory. It oozes from the long-handled pole the worker balances it on before he rolls it over a table that doesn’t buckle under the heat. Rex barely hears the explanations.
They’re busy following the hot orange ball of glass to where the large worker blows through the long stem that turns out to be a pipe and, in turn, form the drooping, honey-like glass into a small ball that goes back into the heat, while their guide prattles on.
“Do you want to decide what colors it should have?”
It’s Alpha who tears them out of their focus, large hands settling on their shoulders and their eyes flow up to the gentle brown ones of buir before they realize that the group is looking at them with something like expectancy and the guide is standing close to a few heaps of large, colorful granules.
Rex has barely paid attention. They should have.
“Is it one color only?” they ask instead, carefully giving the guide their best impression of innocence. The squeeze of Alpha’s hand on their shoulder lets them know that buir has caught them in the act, but the guide melts just a little and steps to one particular heap.
“You can choose the confetti heap, if you want to,” she offers and when the worker with the oozing glass comes back, Rex nods.
The hot orange mess is rolled over and through the confetti heap, picking up the small colorful gravel, just like when the honey dips on their plate and oozes over all the kernels the bread-crust has lost, taking them into itself.
The blob goes back into the heat, but before they know it, it is out again and the worker rolls it back over the table, properly sealing the color gravel in the orange heat of the glass. They sit on a bench to roll their long-handled pipe and even out the dents in the roundness of glass on the other side. The guide steps closer to them.
“He’s going to blow a Water Globe, and if you want you can tell him how long he should blow,” she offers. When Rex looks up at Alpha, buir is already looking down, and waiting. Rex nods.
They don’t know what happens to the water globe after it has been put into the kiln to cool down, but Rex won’t forget the streaks of orange, blue, white and red on the pristine globe. It’s as if the Manda had made the globe just for the five of them.
…
Alpha has given Bly a handful of credits, a few instructions in regards to safety and has let the ade run, after the workshop. From what they can tell, the four of them had found the Hot-Dog-Stand, gorged themselves on terrible food choices Alpha would have never condoned and is certain all of them are going to regret before traipsing off into the surrounding woods.
They know that their ade are probably the most dangerous thing in there if they put their heads to it – but it is also quite an exercise in trust and letting go to turn around and heed the call of The Haze as it pulls them deeper into the exhibition-part of the glass-workshop.
“We keep a few gems here,” the guide had smiled at them as she’d handed over the glass-blown watering globe their ad had helped make, “not everyone comes back to pick these things up.”
Alpha doesn’t know what buir wouldn’t, but they are in the privileged position of actually being able to afford living comfortably and they know that this is not always an easy thing to do in their economy. Especially considering its most recent plummet.
“Any particular piece that’s interesting?” they ask, and feel immediately off-kilt.
The guide had been walking close to them throughout the entire tour and Alpha had gotten the feeling that her eyes would rest on them most often as she talked about the history of glass-making and the history of the Glass Mill itself. It could be a fluke, of course. Manda know Jango had told them often enough that it was easier to speak to a group if one picked out a particular individual to speak to instead.
Alpha has been ignoring any kind of advances for years now. It’s well possible they’re so far out of the game that they completely misread the situation.
Nevertheless, the guide hums pensively before she steps in front of them and, with a gentle wave of her hand, leads them to one of the more secluded nooks of the museum.
It’s an exhibition room filled with old glass-vitrines that display some of the most intricate glass-work Alpha has seen in their life. Granted they hadn’t much looked for it before today, but the level of craft is amazing nevertheless. It doesn’t occur to them that there is a peculiar reason she pulls them deeper into the winding rows of the vitrines until the shiver of a ward rolls over them and they only recognize the Shielding Runes burnt into the dark hardwood floor after they’ve stepped over them.
The guide smiles, softly, and with eyes they’re sure haven’t been quite as dark before. “I thought so,” she murmurs gently before stepping aside from the vitrine behind her and baring their view to one of the most intricate, nonsensical glass-exhibits they’ve set their eyes on within the small museum.
It’s barely anything at all. Should’ve maybe been a flower, but Alpha can’t tell exactly from where they’re standing.
What they can say is that the colors and the placement of them had not been coincidental, nor had they been managed without magic. The light hits the exhibit just right at this time of the day, illuminating it in a beautiful sheen that brings it to a vibrant vivacity.
“Not a single parent,” the guide muses quietly as Alpha steps closer, “but they certainly had a gaggle of kids between the two of them. Well-behaved,” she makes certain to intone, “never doubt. Very awake, very curious. Didn’t want to do the glass-blowing until their dad did it first and I’m not certain he didn’t fail on purpose.”
She turns to him then, fully facing him, and in the fracturing light of the glassware around them, the prisms hit her just so – that the illusion drops in certain spots and Alpha can see where she’d altered her eye-color to suit the expectations of non-magical folk, where she’d smoothed her cat-like ears out into wavy brown hair, hiding any abnormities of her ears.
“He left it here, for us,” this time Alpha can see the points of her corner teeth and swallows around the immediate reaction of distrust. Her head turns to look at the piece with a coveting sort of longing. “It’s a real gem.”
And a message.
She must know that, having brought them here.
She must be aware that there are only a select group of people who would know to decipher the carefully placed bubbles enclosed in the heavy rotund of the base as dadita – even as they break the falling light so spectacularly and shimmer tiny spots on the heavy blue cloth it rests on. Must know that there is only a handful who would know about the placement of the colors, the meaning of the bright gold, melding into orange and breaking out into white, streaked with blue where the leaves of the potential flower would have had veins.
Alpha knows that this could not have been done without magic. A beginner could not possibly have that much luck in creating something as unique as this.
Di’kut, they think fondly at A-66 – if their dadita is still good – and the defiant message of Mhi cuy that precedes it.
…
“Well you’re not doing it,” Cody snaps at Rex with more force than necessary and even Fox is crossing his arms over his chest. Bly pulls their vod closer to himself as Cody mumbles an apology.
He knows they’re worried after Rex impromptu scrying at the Diner. It’s not like he had been any different in that regard, but by the time he’d realized that Rex had fallen into a Working, it’d been too late to pull them out without potentially harming them. All Bly had been able to do was ground them in the hopes that nothing bad would come to happen.
They’d probably gotten away lucky, Bly can’t tell.
Rex pouts. Bly sighs and hunches over their shoulders to cuddle them closer.
“You worried us,” he reminds. “It’s not that we don’t trust you, but you worried us and we love you a lot and we don’t want anything to happen to you.”
At some point Rex is going to spread their wings and fly away in any case. Bly knows this. Bly knows that this is what all of them will do – one way or another. Flying away doesn’t imply that they’ll never return, but it does imply that their vod’ika will be outside of their circle of influence and might get hurt and none of them will be able to actually do something against it then.
“Was it bad to come here?” Rex asks with a quiet voice and Bly pulls them closer, pulls them deeper into his embrace, already shaking his head.
Their goal had been abstract in the first place. A Road Trip to heal Alpha’s heart-ache was a slightly ridiculous premise after all and Bly can’t quite get behind the fact that this is ‘all’ that their buir would need to get over the Being that they’ve been missing for the past five years bad enough to keep The Candle Burning.
Bly had noticed that the cuff on Alpha’s wrist is missing. Had noticed that Alpha would keep rubbing the strip of pale skin on their forearm.
It’s not that easy to get over someone who’d been so dear. Bly is not certain he could do it, even if he hasn’t even met his Ka’riduur yet. They shouldn’t belittle Alpha by insinuating that it is.
It could, however, be a step in the right direction. If they do this right.
“No,” he hushes gently, rubbing his nose against the blond buzz of his vod’ika. “I think Alpha had a good time.” Bly truly does think that too.
In their home it’s not unusual to find Alpha, loose-limbed and near-taking-over the entirety of their couch, nose buried in some book until the lights are too low to read and they have to stand only to realize that it’s dinner-time. As ade they are well aware that Alpha’s true weakness is their willingness to learn new things – it is, they think, the reason buir had chosen to work as a horticulturist when they could have easily made the attempt to support them by less conventional means or even some sort of military service.
Bly doesn’t doubt that the guided tour thorough the museum, the fresh knowledge, the new angles and the novelty of glass-blowing itself have pleased some part of Alpha.
“But we don’t actually know,” Rex whines, quietly distressed even in his arms. They squirm. “We don’t actually know if any of this is helping and we don’t actually know if any of this will be helpful to them in the long run.”
They’re close to tears now and Bly wonders how much of it is anxiety and how much of it is exhaustion. Honestly his money is on both. He holds Rex. Breathes deep and carefully until the breath of their vod’ika has evened and their tears exhausted themselves. When they take a deep breath, clutching closer at Bly’s arms, Bly squeezes them closer still.
Cody’s hand is in Rex’ neck, fingers carding gently through the strands of blond and Fox has sat down in front of them, forehead gentle when it comes to rest against Rex’.
“It’s okay not to know, vod’ika,” Fox says softly. “It’s okay not to have the answers to everything and it’s okay to fuck up.”
“Bad Word,” Rex reminds him with a watery voice, but huffs a smile all the same as their hands come to rest in Fox’ neck. Cody’s hand slips lower to rub circles into Rex’ shoulder.
“We don’t know if this is going to make it better,” Fox admit. “We hope it might, but we don’t know. It was as good an idea as any and… well, aside from the fact that my shebs can’t forgive me for the constant sitting, I’m having a good time seeing new places.”
Bly hums. “I liked the gorge,” he pits in.
“I didn’t know I wanted to ride an elk until this morning,” Cody confesses. “Alpha is never going to know about it and I have to make certain I won’t break my neck doing it, but I would never have known that it would be a life goal until today.”
“You’re an idiot,” Fox snarks, but Bly can see the smile on the face of his vod.
“I liked picking fir tips with Alpha,” Rex says quietly before Cody can reply. “I like that they’ve hung up the Creping Jenny to dry and now it smells like forest in the van.”
“See,” Bly soothes, “Those are all good things, vod’ika. So it can’t have been too bad to come here.”
They are better now, Bly senses. Easier when they settle into his arms and slouch just the tiniest bit.
“Where do we go from here then?” they ask curiously and it’s Cody who smiles in answer as he pulls a piece of string from his pocket.
“I might have an idea,” he offers. “But I might need some help in holding the energy.”
It’s not generally a grand idea to tempt fate the way Rex had in the Diner, but to do it twice and to expect that they would get away unscathed – especially after telling their vod’ika what a bad idea it was – would probably be expecting too much. Magic doesn’t always work predictably, and especially not outside of Consecrated Circles.
Asking others to hold the energy is a valid option, even if it is not the same as working in a Consecrated Circle. However, where the stress of holding energy and focus at the same time would be carried by a lonesome person outside of a Consecrated Circle and with no support, having others hold the Circle while they focus could even out the load among the participants.
Rex could not know that, not yet. Alpha hadn’t breached the topic of working outside of Consecrated Circles with them – at least not if they handled their vod’ika roughly the same that they had handled them. Given Rex’ age, Alpha is still a bit slow to introduce them to the finer points of Magic – especially considering that Rex had not yet shown an irrefutable pull into one particular direction. [That is okay. They have time now. Bly can’t remember a single vod who hadn’t been gifted.]
They split up on the soft, old-pine-needle-bronze forest floor, watching Cody as he clears a small space in front of him and pulls out the old map that he had found in the glove box of their van when he’d snooped around out of boredom earlier.
It’s when he winds the string around a piece of glass that Bly realizes what he intends to do.
While Cody doesn’t quite work the way either Bly or Fox work with Magic, he has a bit of an affinity for the Pendulum. It’s not quite his strongest suit, but it’s close. Seeing him bend over the map now, laying it out as flat as possible, Bly knows exactly what their vod is going to do.
“Hopefully this is not going to knock us all on our shebs,” Fox mutters somewhere ahead of him. Bly can’t help but agree but interrupting now might as well be worse than riding out whatever the energy-balancing might take out of them. Instead of answering, Bly closes his eyes. He breathes once and grounds down deep with his exhale.
…
For all that their ade don’t have a single clue about where they’re going, Alpha can’t deny that they’re impressed both by the fluidity of their journey as well as the precision with which their little hooligans can name their next targets just before Alpha could ask. They’re nearing their latter half of the one week they’ve promised the ade and they’re a little surprised to realize that they don’t quite want this journey to end yet.
So when Cody points out a labyrinth about a night’s ride away from them, Alpha concurs with a deep nod and a warm sensation blooming in their chest.
“We’re going to have some proper food first, though,” they urge. “It’s been a bit since you lot had a proper dinner and I’m surprised you haven’t tried to chew my hair for it yet.”
Rex, smallest though they might be, gives Alpha’s mop a calculating glance before they shrug: “I know there’s some salt’n’pepper going on there but I doubt that the seasoning will get me through the ordeal.”
Mir’sheb. Alpha noogies them with a fierce grin and deaf ears to their breathless complaints. Fox beams like he’s the proud buir. [Alpha can’t wait for him to adopt his first ad, they’re going to lay all the unwanted knowledge at his feet and watch him panic.]
“How,” he squeaks into the palms of his hands, “do you lose a genetically engineered buir?”
Fox pinches his nose rather than breathe out too quickly, holds the inhale for a few seconds before the squeeze of his chest forces the air out in an explosive exhale and his body is already making certain that fresh air comes in but Fox catches himself just on the brink of it, forces more air into his chest and slaps his hands over his face again as he hunkers down to the grassy ground.
He exhales at the lowest point. Inhales shakily and holds his breath, swallows the quiver of his lips and the sound that wants to go with it and exhales with a low sound in his throat.
Breathe, he reminds himself. For now, just breathe.
Padme had always been a good friend in these moments. Too calm, really, to be fazed by a lot and Fox wonders just what life has thrown at her already that so little will pull her out of her cool but he hasn’t found the strength, yet, to ask. Like with many things, Padmé is entirely too awesome to be talked to without forethought. Fox is a bit scared of her, but he figures that’s also part of her allure.
His breathing slows. His chest constricts in a last hiccup, and Fox keeps it in. Holds. Until the rush of blood to his head makes him woozy and he expels the air in a controlled rock forward to his hands and knees.
The grass is soft under his fingers. The labyrinth hasn’t been put up long enough, yet, to trample it into inexistence. But the ground under his fingers smells dry, sandy and light. To his left and right he can hear the separating hedges rustle in the soft breeze and if he listens closely he can even hear the delighted calls of children and parents around the maze.
Fox doesn’t focus on that though. Much.
His mouth tastes tacky with tears and the snotty mucus from his nose and nobody can see it if he wipes it into his sleeve.
“Vod.”
Of course it’s Bly who finds him.
Fox doesn’t startle when the hand of his vod lands on his shoulder, large stature coming to bend over him and fold him into an embrace that should be claustrophobic but feels better if only for the fact that it means he’s not entirely alone in the labyrinth anymore.
Smaller hands settle in his neck, pull his forehead into the narrow chest of his vod’ika and Rex shouldn’t have to see him like this. Shouldn’t have to know that he doesn’t like others to see his face when he’s like this and Fox is a terrible ori’vod for putting this on their shoulders when they’re all agreed that Rex should have the least troubled life they could give him.
“We’re alright, vod,” Bly soothes from where he’s draped over Fox. “We found you and we’ll find the other two. This is just a labyrinth. This is not forever.”
Fox knows that. In his head. Even so his fingers clutch at Bly’s, refrain just so from digging into his skin and proving to himself that his vod is here and if some part of him weren’t so violently opposed to the idea, Fox would be trying to squish the ribs of his vod’ika until they squealed if only to know that they are just as real.
He breathes instead. Lets Bly’s weight sink him lower into the ground and narrows his focus down on the smallness of Rex’ fingers in his piebald hair.
For a while, they say nothing. And for a while, all Fox concentrates on is breathing.
Breathing.
The warmth of Bly in his back.
The circular motions of Rex’ scritches.
The weight of Bly that makes it hard to breathe regularly.
The dirt on Rex left shoe.
The dirt on his own fingers.
The dirt that’s likely to be on the knees of his jeans.
And finally… slowly himself.
…
“Ad,” Alpha sounds terrifyingly relieved when he crashes into the larger form of his buir and Cody doesn’t think, for a moment, about the gaggle of people who’d separated them at the entrance of the labyrinth. All too eager to start their search for the center. Too eager to prove themselves to notice a bunch of kids going white in the face as their buir was slowly shoved into another direction than they were.
Alpha cradles them closer, bends just awkwardly enough to press a quick kiss to his hair and Cody knows in that moment that buir must have been as terrified as he had been. If only because separation did not happen to them.
It never had.
Buir had always taken care to be visible on sports events and they’d always make certain to stand at the exits when their clubs would let them go. Cody had never had to look for them. As much as he liked his freedom – liked to visit his friends and leave Alpha to their plants; liked the liberty of the Track; loved to rove out to the surrounding woods alone or with his vode – he always knew where Alpha was.
Except this time.
Cody takes a deeper breath.
Not knowing is for shit.
“Don’t say that where Rex’ika can hear you,” Alpha admonishes quietly, though Cody notices that they don’t try to dock his pocket money for it and their hands haven’t stopped rubbing his back. Cody looks up.
Alpha’buir has always been taller than any of them could ever hope to be. Cody knows that. They’re not as tall as the maze’s hedges though and Cody wishes they were… Maybe if he sat on the shoulders? But no. The angles would be all wrong and he still wouldn’t be able to find…
“Easy there, Kot’ika,” Alpha rumbles, brushing another heavy stroke down his back as he exhales. “We’ll find them just fine. Trust your vode, they’ll be fine.”
Cody wants to trust that. He does.
But Rex is tiny even in comparison to them and Fox went into some direction that Cody couldn’t well follow and Bly is…
“You too, huh?”
He doesn’t have the time to register the hoarse drawl of his vod before the familiar weight of Rex collides with his legs and neither Fox nor Bly hesitate to glue themselves to his side, easily accepting the embrace that Alpha folds them into.
“How’d you find us?”
“Rex,” Fox mutters into the embrace. “Vod’ika has a true north more powerful than any compass I’ve held in my hand yet.”
Rex mutters something into his back that Cody can’t hear, but one of Alpha’s hands lifts from around their shoulders to sift over the head of their vod’ika.
It’s not the first time Rex had simply pointed and gone and had, still, ended up in the right place at the right time with no harm to themselves. Cody doesn’t know how. But if his guess about Divination holds any weight, maybe that’s how. He might have to ask Alpha about it.
Not now though.
“Can you get us out of here?” Alpha asks carefully, still bent over their small huddle and seemingly just as unwilling to let them go as they are.
Rex turns their head. “I can also get us to the Center,” they promise carefully. Cody knows that they could. Path-finding aside, there is a conviction in Rex voice that Cody has come to recognize. He’s heard it from all of his vode by now. It’s the sound of someone who is well aware of what they can do, what they are doing and what else they’re capable of doing.
It’s not so much conviction, maybe, as it is knowing.
Alpha hums, hand travelling lower – probably to Rex’ neck, settling there in the familiar soothing gesture all of them respond well too. Cody wonders when Alpha had felt it the last time.
“If you get us to the center, do you have the strength to get us out of there too?”
Rex is hesitant to answer this time and when they say “Yes” Cody is not so convinced of it. Neither, he thinks, is Rex themselves but none of the vode comment on it. Chances are that there’ll be hints how to get out of the labyrinth once they’ve found the center. Frankly, Cody will take it.
He nods into the embrace. “Lead the way.”
…
Rex is flagging by the time they reach the circular center of the labyrinth and Alpha can’t exactly say that they’re surprised. But even just seeing where they’ve led them, they are content that they’ll manage their way out on their own.
It’s been a while since they’ve had to consider Rex’ Pull and Alpha can’t say that they’re surprised – much – to realize that their kihne’vod has their own version of a Haze to guide them. It should have come to their attention sooner than it has perhaps, but Rex is still growing. They still have a few years ahead of them before a true Pull will establish itself in their life.
At least, that’s how it had been with the rest of the vode. Alpha expects Rex will be mostly the same in that regard.
To the credit of the owners of the labyrinth, the center is quite beautiful indeed. Simple and quiet,, but the Gazebo has been grown with love, wreathed with roses and encircled with lavender that stretches towards the sun and the sturdy benches inside do not seem to have been sat on too much.
Which is not to say that there aren’t traces of wear and tear.
When Alpha sits their ade down for a quick snack – Rex is not going to complain of the same headaches they’d experienced when their own Haze had first established itself if Alpha has anything to say about it – it doesn’t take them long to find the row of numbers etched into the very bench that they themselves are sitting on.
Alpha… can’t help but stare.
It’s ridiculous, they know, to have actually succumbed to the fear of never hearing from or seeing their vode again, considering that they’d all set out to secure the future littles with the express intent to reunite at some point. They have Magic, Alpha knows, and if they’d wanted they could have found each other much sooner. Of this Alpha is convinced.
And maybe it had been their own… They’re hesitant to call it fear, but it most certainly should be called reticence.
Life in Termino had become easy. A tad predictable, maybe, but it had become comfortably rhythmic.
They know all of Cody’s Track Meets by heart. They are well aware that Rex needs no reason to expand on their… creative vernacular, yet could be found studiously bent over any Bukowski they could find. They know that Fox would rather debate Padmé into the ground than admit that, maybe, he likes her – and she’d enthusiastically take the challenge too. And he is well aware that this time in two weeks they’d need to sell a Chokecherry to the Mayor because his neighbor’s dog had chewed up the bark of the sapling from the year before. Again.
There had been a reason for their caution at first. A good reason. A valid reason.
Kamino had been too big an operation to not have been funded by people who might very well be able to fund a… retrieval of lost investment. Logic dictated that if Alpha wasn’t careful with their ade, they might very well find themselves back in an untenable situation. One that might be even worse than before, considering their… insubordination.
At the same time, however, Alpha can’t deny that the necessity for hiding had found a way to ooze into every aspect of their lives in a near-insidious way.
Hiding does not necessitate them to stay stuck in the past, after all.
At least not the way they had allowed themselves to be.
Alpha knows that they’re not the kind to easily find romantic regard for others. They’re just not made that way. Maybe Jango had been to blame for this, maybe it’s something unique to Alpha. But that is not the point. The point is that while Alpha had been taking their sweet time mourning a cuff and putting out a plate for someone whom they hadn’t seen in years, they had never even considered the fact that their vode might have looked for a message on their own vambrace-comms. Waiting for a call that never came.
They haven’t considered that others might have found themselves facing the same decision: continue hiding or live up to the promise that had fed their mutiny in the first place.
They certainly haven’t considered leaving their serial numbers etched into a gazebo bench such as the numbers that they are staring at right now. Alpha swallows uncomfortably around the tightness of their throat and sends a quick prayer to Spar and kaysh five hooligans – whatever their names and personalities are aside from their numbers.
They leave the labyrinth with the help of a small, folded map, giving them the quickest route to the exit. But not before Alpha had taken the liberty to carefully carve their own numbers next to the neat column that Spar had left behind.
With any luck, another vod would find them.
And know. [They’re alive.]
…
Alpha is still tired from the night’s drive when they have to stop abruptly in order for Bly not to fall out of a moving car when their ad tears open the door and stumbles out like his limbs aren’t his own.
“Gifts!”
“What?”
Bly catches himself on shaking legs before his face can make contact with the concrete under his legs and by the time Alpha has pulled to the side of the road and stepped out of the van, the shaking in his limbs has gone down to a barely noticeable degree.
Alpha slips a hand into his neck. “Breathe,” they remind him, “And root down.”
Bly is a good ad. Conscious of his surroundings and the people, aware of himself and eager to please with stable enough boundaries that Alpha is mostly certain he won’t completely let it bowl him over. With his Ka’riduur, however, much of Bly’s non-curricular education has gone into grounding exercises and meditations on the separation between Mind and Being.
It would not be the first time that the connection between two Beings would turn out too strong for one side and leave them hanging in the Aether as their material body slowly disintegrated and left nothing of the Person they once were. Alpha will be thrice damned before they let that happen to their ad.
They feel the tug of Bly’s consciousness, dipping down to his toes and slipping further beyond. Through the concrete and lower still, growing roots that gently thicken and lengthen until the tremors in his body have died down and the clamminess of his skin has dried up.
Bly takes another deep breath for good measure.
“We need gifts,” he says carefully by way of explanation.
“Gifts?”
Bly nods, face still turned towards the pavement as his hands stabilize his forward-bend on his knees. “We can’t go in empty-handed.”
This, Alpha sighs, explains nothing. Though given the vehement abruptness with which Bly had shocked up from his relatively lax morning laze in his seat to nearly barrel-rolling out of the van, maybe Alpha should have expected that. They love their ade, but it’s not always easy dealing with them.
“Go in where?”
It’s Rex’ voice this time that asks and Alpha gladly pockets the key to the car when Cody hands it to him while Fox sidles up with his vod, smushing their shoulders together like the two of them are Tookas. It’s ten in the morning, the sun is already out and Alpha can’t thank the Manda enough that it’s a Workday and most of the street is empty.
Most.
They still garner a bit of a curious crowd. Under their hands, they feel Bly swallow.
“I don’t know,” he answers when Rex pushes in on his other side. “But we do need gifts.”
“A Dream?”
“Something like it,” his ad nods. “Not entirely though more like… a Hint?”
Uncomfortable as Alpha might be with the revelation – their ad isn’t nearly old enough for them to be okay with him reaching that kind of level of communicative ease with their Ka’riduur – it is not necessarily surprising. As they said, Bly is a good ad. It goes to follow that he would apply himself to his connection with his Ka’riduur as he applies himself to anything else he wants to excel in.
They collect the face of their ad in their hands, pulling it upward and inspecting it. Bly is pale, but not in a fashion that would overly worry Alpha. Especially not with the way he’s still rooting down, as he’s been told.
Every breath goes down into his belly and then drops lower from there – little pulses of energy that keep him firmer in the Here And Now rather than letting his Mind run away with the rest of his Soul.
It just so happens as well that Bly had picked the most perfect venue to have his moment. Alpha has been looking for a place to eat around the town and currently it seemed that their best bet was the mall to the left of them – the place Bly had undoubtedly set out towards when he’d stumbled out of their van.
“Food first,” they finally nod. “And then you can terrorize the Mall for Gifts.”
…
Alpha watches their little Hooligans buy one thing each before it occurs to them that they’ve forgotten something fundamental.
Their ade sit them down in the middle of the mall at one of the bench-islands on the lower level, where finding them should be easy enough, before venturing out and returning with Candles. Returning with Incense. And then returning with a Sun-Catcher that is gloriously simple in its design yet catches even the light of the mall with its faceted stones that Alpha knows the true sun will look beautiful when broken into prisms.
It almost makes them think of the botched flower in the glass museum, before another realization parks itself over the memory instead.
Litha.
Alpha can’t believe themselves, really.
How come they can remember exactly what time Cody needs to be back at school in order to be ready for his Track Meet, but can’t seem to remember the date of the next Sabbat coming up in… two days. Manda. Two days. That’s… not a lot.
“If you’re all done, I’d like to get a few things myself,” they offer when Bly comes back with a packed Salad for each of them and a handful of fruits. A good ad, like they said.
Rex looks dejected with their Salad in hand. “Is it okay if we stay here and eat? Only my stomach is a big, empty, black-hole and I feel like it’s gonna suck me up and I’ll vanish if I don’t eat right now.”
Hunger makes them dramatic, Alpha knows this. They sigh. “If I leave you here do you promise to stay behind, all of you, in this one place so that I can find you when I return?”
Their ade nod. “Fine, then you can stay. No talking to strangers and if anything happens-“ they hand over the keys to Cody, “find the van and lay low.”
It’s always good to have a back-up plan after all. Their ade might call them paranoid, but it hasn’t hurt them yet and Alpha is not looking to push one of their ade into another anxiety attack. Better be prepared and not need it and all that.
Even so, turning their back on their ade and marching off into the belly of the mall feels wrong. Alpha doesn’t like being away from their ade, even if they have to admit that, by now, they are responsible enough to organize a Road Trip – more or less. Alpha should probably give them more credit. And check their own mother-henning. Manda know they had never liked it when it would be directed at them.
It is still, however, a relief to find their little Hooligans squished together on the bench, watching something on the screen of Fox’ smartphone with the rapt attention of littles. Alpha knows they wouldn’t have run – or they think they know – and the relief is ridiculous. But it is what it is. And when they return from their impromptu shopping trip and the spectacular find of some Lavender Honey, Alpha can’t help but wonder if this is how all buire feel at some point in the development of their ade.
Chapter Text
+++
Fox has given up on trying to find out where they are.
The Haze has taken over Alpha roughly ten minutes ago and already Maps has lost them and Fox has no karking idea where they are. The van doors are locked, it’s hot as hell outside and the insides of the van aren’t much better and buir has just steered them off the karking gravel road and onto nothing but a strip of dry grass.
There is nothing ahead of them. A small hill. A few trees. Maybe an orchard if he’s being generous, but really, he’s not feeling it.
“Fox?”
Rex, bless them, probably has a radar for his ‘moments’ by now. Recognizes the drop in glucose level like a Therapy Tooka or whatever. Point is, they’ve taken off their seatbelt – like a karking mad person – and are crawling semi-carefully over the laps of their brothers until they reach Fox, who has no compunction about stuffing his vod under the belt with them, arms encircling them.
“I’m fine,” he lies, burying his face in the blond fluff of his vod. “I have no idea where we are.”
And Alpha has stopped answering their questions the moment they’d turned towards the Exit on the Highway.
It’d been fine, really. Their bellies had been full from a solid breakfast, the highway lonely enough for Alpha to pick a particularly weird radio station that played Free Jazz and let the backseat peanut gallery go wild with their added improvisations to the tunes.
Fun and games until the radio had cackled with static before it had fitzed out and Fox had lifted his head just quick enough to watch The Haze glaze over Alpha’s eyes as they calmly set the blinker and turned the wheel towards an exit whose name Fox hadn’t even caught.
So now he’s hiding in the neck of his vod’ika, like a hut’uun, trying to keep his breathing under control and ignore the way that even Bly is pushing into his side. He hates this.
That is… until he looks, and the handful of trees on the grassy lands do, in fact, turn out to be an orchard. Orderly planted fruit trees lined up next to one another with just enough space to unfurl their branches and not come into each other’s way and the van rocks with what feels like a terrible latitude as the tires slip from the grass onto a shaded forest road that leads them downwards and towards the stillness of a house, overseeing a garden and a small creek.
On the first even strip of land that they can find, stretching further in front of them, Alpha’s Haze kills the engine.
Fox waits with baited breath.
…
“Osik,” he hears Alpha breathe and Cody’s death-grip on Bly’s hand eases gently with the first proper exhale he’s allowed himself since Alpha has turned off the highway.
“Vhuck, buir,” he breathes, dipping down to hide his head between his knees. “Don’t vhucking do that again.”
“Karking language,” Alpha snips back, but they’re also pushing their fingertips against their head so Cody knows that whatever this was, it had not been Alpha’s idea. And that… bears some thinking about. “Where are we?”
“Dunno.”
It’s Fox who answers, lifting his face from where he’d attempted to hide it in Rex’ neck. Cody is not a specialist but maybe they should try to see what can be done for their ‘it’s not anxiety Manda damn it, Cody’. Maybe Fox is right. Maybe it isn’t anxiety. But if it isn’t then Cody doesn’t want to see what anxiety looks like – ever. He doesn’t think he’d have the gettse to watch.
Alpha turns, eyes carefully taking in the four of them. “Are you okay?”
“Frightened us, buir,” Bly answers honestly and Alpha’s eyes are… painful to watch, so Cody averts his and swallows. There’s a click, a grunt and a terrible shuffle that makes the van rock and sway as Alpha squeezes through the front seats to squish their bulk into the back-seat, large arms encasing the four of them. Cody feels them breathe.
“I’m sorry, ade,” they soothe gently. “I did not mean to scare you.”
Cody buries his head in Alpha’s shoulder and doesn’t answer. Soaks up the sensation of being held, instead. Accepts the heat of Alpha in spite of the warm day, especially now that they stand in the shadow of the tree-line to their right.
“Are you okay, buir?” Rex tiny voice finally breaks the silence.
Cody can hear Alpha’s rough swallow and huff, but it’s a valid question and when he looks up, Alpha’s smile doesn’t look as encouraging as they might wish for it to look. “Been a while since it took me so completely, Rex’ika. I’ll be fine once we know what’s going on.”
Once they know what to plan for, Cody hears.
“Let’s take a look first, alright?”
…
This, Alpha knows with just a single look, is a Fae Gate.
“We have one just like that,” Cody muses, tilting his head.
And it’s true at that.
The construction of Fae Gates is, technically, unique to every Caster wielding magic. But this one looks almost precisely like the one Alpha has built with the help of their ade in their own garden – down to the placement of the Sigils.
The only difference they can actually see is that the flowers to the left and the right of the gate differ from the ones that Alpha has planted in their garden – maybe because the ground here is sandier than the rich-dark soil that they have at home.
The ground is lighter, sprinkled with light gravel here and there where the grass had given way to the packed earth of trampled paths. They can tell that the lawn is a South facing one by the greenery alone – the lavender blooms terrifically, just as the Oleander bending its heavy branches over the porch.
The house is… different.
Where Alpha’s home is nestled into a long row of houses in a back-street, fence lined with thickly growing junipers to shield the beauty of their garden from curious onlookers, this home has been planted so far off the road and any Maps that stumbling on it by accident is nigh impossible. It’s as if watching two complementary choices of chronic hiders: one has chosen to vanish into the crowd, whereas the other had elected to move as far away from civilization as possible.
The house to the side is a flat build – bungalow-like in its make and Alpha cannot precisely make out how far it sprawls from here, while they are observing the dangling crystals in the Fae Gate dance in the slight breeze, clinking against a small bell.
Not a warning bell, Alpha would think. At least not if the Caster had calibrated the sound similarly to how Alpha has calibrated theirs.
Something tumbles in the depths of the house and before they can compute better, Alpha watches a small Sentient fall through the open front door and only catch themselves on the dry grass in front of them.
She hasn’t even bothered with an illusion.
The blue-white horns of her montrals are still small enough to indicate her youth and the copper-orange skin on her face and arms give her away as a Togruta even before they’ve seen the rest of her.
“You’re here!” she crows with something like victory and dances closer without the fear or caution Alpha would have taught her in the place of her caretaker. “I knew you’d come! Come in! We always have space for vode!”
She doesn’t reach for them. Physically or energetically. Doesn’t try to tug them, but Alpha feels the way that the Fae Gate opens the space, leaves room for them to walk through if they so choose and enter the consecrated ground of another Caster.
“Az’ka!”
Her head whips around, smile widening from her position before her big blue eyes turn to Alpha and her smile widens even more. “Come in,” she urges again before she turns towards the door and is already leaping up the stairs, “I’m comin’!”
For a moment, nothing happens.
And then Rex – reckless, small, tiny mir’sheb that they are – bounds through the Gate with an unknown box in their hands and bends down with a big smile to put the box, tea Alpha notices, by the flat tone behind the Fae Gate.
“Di’kut,” Alpha snarls as they walk after them, picking them up by the scruff like an unwieldy akk pup and sorely tempted to shake them just the same in admonishment but—
The Ground sighs. Eases and gentles and welcomes them even as Cody, Fox and Bly follow them through the gate, putting down the Gifts they’d fetched at Bly’s Hint, and Rex’ smile is terribly smug as they squirm out of the hold and dash behind Fox’ leg. Alpha has a mind to give chase – give a lecture – but it’s at that moment that the tall stature of somebody else darkens the doorstep from the inside and—
“Vhuck.”
--drops a Honey Cake.
The griddle makes a hollow sound on the front porch as gravity turns the cake around and eats what looks like a labor of love and Alpha watches the face of their vod – the face of the man they’d thought they’d lost – go through a myriad of emotions as he steps closer and Alpha’s breath leaves them in a surprised grunt when Bacara kisses them for the first time in years.
…
Cody remembers wondering, just a few days ago, when the last time had been that a vod had pulled Alpha in a Keldabe.
Judged by the way buir is near-digging their fingers into the thick neck of their vod, probably five years. Given the way the large vod doesn’t look like they’re about to let go of Alpha, it might just have been as long for them too.
Their noses smush and their breath mingles and even without the touching of mouths and tongues the way he’d watched his peers do it, the Kiss looks terribly intimate.
Rex, slinking forward from between Fox’ legs, carefully tugs on his fingers and ducks into the ruffle that Cody scritches over their head.
“We did good?”
Fox snorts, giving in to Bly’s weight and leaning it towards Cody’s until they prop each other up, still watching the reunion of the two ori’vode in front of them. “I’d say.”
There’s a murmur between the two now, something intimate and stupid that makes Alpha huff an amused sound before the two of them separate, hands sliding down until they interlink at the fingers, and Alpha turns, just far enough to give the house their back and smile down on them with something like mischief in their eyes.
“Cyare, these are my ade. Cody, Fox, Bly and Rex,” they say gently. “Ade, this is Bacara. The Marine.”
Notes:
So. Here you go. geniecat2 I hope you enjoyed it, all these four chapters are for you :)
Acronymjigsaw on Chapter 1 Mon 27 May 2024 08:46PM UTC
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basically_thearlaich on Chapter 1 Wed 29 May 2024 05:56PM UTC
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PadawanMine on Chapter 4 Mon 21 Jun 2021 09:45PM UTC
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basically_thearlaich on Chapter 4 Wed 23 Jun 2021 09:39AM UTC
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PawnsVictory on Chapter 4 Tue 22 Jun 2021 02:16AM UTC
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basically_thearlaich on Chapter 4 Wed 23 Jun 2021 09:38AM UTC
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FiresFromOurHearts on Chapter 4 Sun 05 Dec 2021 08:42AM UTC
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basically_thearlaich on Chapter 4 Wed 08 Dec 2021 05:14PM UTC
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fandomgymnast on Chapter 4 Tue 04 Apr 2023 07:31PM UTC
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violentcheese on Chapter 4 Mon 01 Apr 2024 10:16PM UTC
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FiresFromOurHearts on Chapter 4 Sun 23 Feb 2025 12:15PM UTC
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Ziaira on Chapter 4 Sat 27 Sep 2025 04:07AM UTC
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Megzilla01 on Chapter 4 Wed 03 Dec 2025 10:02AM UTC
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