Chapter Text
At the beginning of his senior year, Riz decides to start looking into what happened to his mother’s pension.
It snowballs from there.
He knew the Elmville PD was incompetent at best, and actually pretty brutal at worst. He still remembers spending months in jail his freshman year. Fabian’s face after his father came in is seared in Riz’s mind, baffled at how the cops would allow this to happen to them, to children. He remembers suddenly thinking, oh, this is how Kristen must feel, like he was waking up from a fugue state, like he could finally see that, actually, trying to appease the system didn’t make the system less broken.
He and his mother… they’d just gotten too used to it. It was so easy to slip between the cracks and pretend it was assimilating instead of hiding. Either way, they were left behind.
In this case, literally.
Junior year had been its own layer of hell, so he hardly had processed it, but after successfully passing the year and destroying the plans of people like Kipperlily Copperkettle and Bobby Dawn, his brain finally had the space to catch up. He finally got to spend more than a few minutes with his mom everyday, finally felt able to go talk to his dad’s grave, and finally, finally, realized that he’d watched his mom get tossed aside by her former employers the moment she stopped being valuable.
He’s starting to understand why his mom was so worried about him being taken advantage of. It’s so easy to pretend that isn’t what’s happening, even when it is. It’s so easy to think, well, it’s my job and they respect my work ethic, and they’d do the same for me.
And then they don’t.
Then, you dare to want for something more, something better, and they punish you for it.
So, yeah. Riz decides, actually, senior year he has better things to do than worry about silly things like attending classes. He’s already done the most impressive thing a rogue can do at this school, and saved the world three times besides. It won’t be hard to find Eugenia Shadow again, not if he has the right tools. Besides, it’s the last year of being a Bad Kid, though even thinking it makes his chest ache and his breath hitch. He wants to have as much time as possible to spend with his friends.
It’s a week before school starts when he asks Gorgug if he would enchant his glasses for him, make them able to see into the ethereal plane, but the softy agrees to do it without complaining. He goes to Zayn with blurry vision and the sense that maybe asking a ghost how to find another ghost might be insensitive, but Zayn helps him out too.
“If you have any of her stuff from when she was living, she might be kinda drawn to that,” Zayn offers, “It’s like, I can kinda feel it if one of my possessions is around. We call ‘em ‘artifacts.’”
Riz has a feeling that Zayn alone calls them artifacts, but he nods anyway.
“So, if I had something of hers she might come to investigate? Is that, like, insensitive?”
“Maybe,” Zayn shrugs, “We aren’t a monolith. It doesn’t really bother me much, but if you’re worried you could always just try and use good ol’ fashioned bribery. It can be hard to get ghost foods here, and the options are kinda mid. We don’t actually have to eat, so, like, it’s not really a problem, but I still sometimes miss being able to drink iced lattes n’ stuff.”
“Oh,” Riz says, “That, uh, that makes sense. I’ll look into it. Thanks, Zayn.”
“No problem, man. Thanks for hanging out.”
It takes a few days to find a ghost-food delivery service. Turns out it’s not easy for corporeal beings to pick up and handle non-corporeal food, which makes delivering to non-ghosts more complicated for dead and undead workers in the food industry. Eventually, Riz ropes Gulsom into the whole thing, since being a construct gives him a little bit more flexibility between “living” and “not living.”
(Ethereal drinks are actually even harder to find, Riz realizes. Apparently it’s less common for ghosts to crave drinks than food, though he eventually stumbles upon a site called ‘Boorista Buddy’, which specifically caters to people who died still addicted to caffeine. He orders several pounds of ethereal espresso beans, and Zayn actually cries when Riz and Adaine bring him the first Americano he’s had in over three years.
Adaine captures the tears in a small vial she produces from her jacket.
“They’re component materials,” she says, and Riz nods because it’s not the weirdest nor the worst thing either of them have ever done.)
He rocks up to the first day of senior year with a ghost steak, which Fig had insisted must be Eugenia’s favorite if she brought it on the first day of their freshman year, and his fancy new glasses and decides, fuck it. He’s not gonna rush, doesn’t even bother dashing, just wanders around the school carrying a seemingly empty plate with glasses that make him feel like he’s in a 3D movie until he stumbles upon a lock of curly hair dangling through the ceiling of the empty artificer lab.
“Hi, Mrs. Shadow,” he calls, “Would you be interested in a ghost steak?”
To her credit, Eugenia Shadow doesn’t hesitate for a second before popping her head, upside down, more fully through the ceiling.
“Good morning, Mr. Gukgak,” she says pleasantly, “Are you bribing me?”
Riz shrugs.
“Not really. Or, I mean… I just figured I’d have something to offer you, in case me finding you last year meant you were going to start running from me. I can’t exactly check for you in certain places, after all.”
Like inside the ceiling, for example. Or the girls’ bathroom.
“It would hardly be fair for the student’s if I punished them for doing such great work,” Eugenia smiles, “Although, you seniors do tend to be quite high level. I did bring lunch for today, but I will take the steak. It’ll make a delicious dinner, thank you.”
“Yeah, sure,” Riz says, head still craning to look at her. He lifts the steak higher in the air, but doesn’t bother trying to get it higher than that. Maybe this is senioritis, he thinks mildly. Tough that he’s caught it day one.
Mrs. Shadow lowers herself more fully into the space of the classroom, making a lazy rotation as she goes until she hovers, upright, a few feet above him. Riz doesn’t take any offense to this; he’s used to most people being taller than him anyhow. His teacher looks at his plate, steak glimmering in a pale blue, and raises an eyebrow at him.
“I don’t suppose you have a tupperware for me, Mr. Gukgak?” she asks and Riz blinks.
“Oh!” he exclaims, “Uh, no actually.”
Looking down at the plate between them, Riz frowns.
“How is it that none of us thought about that,” he asks mostly to himself. He’d talked to all of the Bad Kids about this, not to mention Zayn. Foolish, he thinks. “I can bring it back tomorrow?”
But Eugenia just laughs at him, “Not to worry, I have an extra. Would you mind walking with me to the teachers’ lounge? I don’t really wish to have steak covered hands for the day.”
“Yeah, makes sense,” Riz waits for her to begin gliding before following behind. They get out of the classroom in relative silence, but it’s more comfortable than Riz would expect. Something about Eugenia is kind of… nice. It feels like she respects her students, which feels pretty rare after the hell that Porter and Henry put Gorgug through last year, not to mention all the shit with Jace Stardiamond, Interim Backup Principal Grix, and, really, Augefort himself.
“So,” Riz says after a bit, “That was the music room above us, right?”
“Indeed it was. Having the layout of the school memorized is a boon, Mr. Gukgak. It will do you well to get comfortable with the intricacies of buildings in our line of work,” she replies before dropping the didactic look on her face for something more casual, “I enjoy attending the first class of freshman bards. They’re so… nervous, yet eager, and it reflects in their music.”
“That’s cool,” Riz nods, storing that information away for if he ever needs one of the underclassmen to do something for him. Eugenia smiles knowingly at him. Gathering and storing intel for their benefit is also something taught in rogue classes, and Riz feels duly flattered that she would give him such a bargaining chip.
They make it to their destination after a leisurely stroll, and Eugenia promptly deposits Riz’s not-bribe into her take-home tupperware. Turning to him, she runs an appraising look over him.
“Well, congratulations on acing your courses this year, young man,” she offers. “I must say, you always were one of my most dedicated students. I am proud to call myself your teacher.”
Riz flushes at the praise, “Thank you, ma’am. I think yours are the coolest classes at Augefort.”
Eugenia laughs a bit at that and Riz flushes a little harder. He recognizes that he should probably get going at some point, but it feels nice to be here, in his elusive teacher’s presence, being acknowledged for his hard work.
“What will you do with all your free time, now that you’ve found me again?”
Riz considers this. It could be nice, really, to take a break, maybe start pestering his friends in their classes. He could get a job or knock out his college apps (and probably some for his friends, as well). He thinks about the Nightmare Forest and his fear of resting on the job, but nothing is set to kill them yet this year, which puts them at one-up from last year already.
But then he thinks of his time in Kei Lumennura, struggling to relax. He thinks of junior year, and feeling like he couldn’t stop and still managing to drop the ball in so many ways, so to speak.
He thinks of his mother’s face, tired and ashamed, as she told him that her pension fell through.
Riz looks at Eugenia and offers her a wry smile. She returns it, as though she knows what he’s about to say before saying it.
“I have a case I’ll be working on.”