cliche_bingo

*

Kullat Nunu IV is completely covered with water and shows signs of an oceanic ecosystem remarkably similar to that of Earth. Its population is likewise aquatic, and while no mammals make their home there, sharks do. Not shark-men, or amphibious shark-like creatures, but actual sharks. Alien sharks, as close to their earth-counterparts as humans from any number of the alternate earths they’ve visited.

It’s almost expected on such a planet: the top predator so often rises to civilization, given time and a little luck. Social and despite apparent intelligence, within an hour of beaming down they’ve tasted (not eaten, but he’d dead nonetheless) Ensign Reid. They’re also holding the rest of landing party hostage in a school-like circle of swimming bodies. Kwan down in xenozoology says they look like white-tips, save slightly larger, and that they’re clearly obeying orders from the shark in charge – a large tiger shark analogue. There are no carcharodon types to be found, likely – Kwan tells her – due to the lack of mammalian life.

Of course the Universal Translator operates on a strictly oral-aural basis; the inhabitants of Kullat Nunu IV communicate almost strictly via body language. Body language is not Uhura’s specialty, and it takes almost three hours to puzzle out why they’re reacting as they are with Kwan’s help, though the other woman is a reptiloid specialist.

She makes contact as soon as she can, adjusting the communicator protocols for the interference caused by high ocean winds and sixty feet of water. “Bridge to Captain Kirk,” she says, “I have something.”

The Captain’s reply is that he hopes it’s a miracle, because they’re down to their last twenty minutes of air. Everyone receives dive training at the Academy, but even the best among the crew can only hold their breath for six minutes. Not enough time to reach the surface even without the sharks. The constant motion and distortion from the water makes transporting them back onboard from anywhere but the surface too great a risk for anything but a last-ditch effort.

“You need to stop treading water,” Uhura says, “shift into a prone position and swim slowly. Keep your arms down; they’re being read as erect pectoral fins, which function as a challenge for leadership or resources in this society. If you’re approached by a shark larger than yourself, turn slightly away.”

“Right,” Kirk says, then, “Spock, Bones, keep your fins down.”

“You want to swim close enough to stroke the leader-shark on the chin; he should trance. Lieutenant Kwan thinks that his species is enough like the earth tiger shark that it will work. If he were smaller, you could have turned him upside down, but … ”

“Trance the shark?” The Captain’s voice sounds anything but certain. The squeak at the end is definitely not due to interference.

“We’ve only got a forty percent chance of ya beamin’ up in one piece with the depth you’re at an’ system movin’ in overhead, Captain,” Scotty says from the command chair, “I’d as soon not try it anywhere but from the surface if we don’t absolutely have to.”

There’s a pause, and Uhura catches McCoy’s, “I’m a doctor, not an appetizer!” as well as Spock’s reply, “Most species of shark will not knowingly consume a human being, Doctor.”

“Trance the shark,” Kirk says. “Okay, we trance the shark, then what?”

“You’re you’re not likely to be able to communicate with him through his own body language, not adequately, and the chance that he’ll understand speech or sign is slim enough that it isn’t worth the time to attempt it.”

Spock anticipates her. He says, “Then I will join with the leader of our captors. As they are intelligent, it is the simplest manner in which to achieve mutual understanding with this species.”

“Don’t you worry about the bends,” Scotty says, “Ya can decompress when you’re back an’ safe on the ship.”

“You’re sure about trancing the shark? Wait, no, don’t answer that. Here we go – Kirk out.”

They beam up twenty-four minutes later, Kirk and McCoy unconscious and all three of them soaking wet; there’s a medical team waiting in the transporter room to resuscitate them.

Uhura doesn’t get to reply until until they’re out of decompression. In sickbay, McCoy is grousing that he should be the one up and attending while Chapel threatens to sedate him. Spock is working on his mission report from his biobed; she checks up on him first and he promises to give a full account of the day later in the evening.

Kirk is laying in a bed across the aisle, looking pleased with himself but no moreso than usual.

“Captain,” Uhura says with a grin, “I was sure about trancing the shark.”

*

Non-gorey redshirt death. (Return to header.)

amaresu

apocalyptothon

wizefics

*

Michael Westen is sitting in an office in Washington DC when the Greenland Ice Shelf falls into the Atlantic Ocean.

*

He is a polygraph, an interview, and a psych evaluation away from being reinstated. He’s still on TSA’s no-fly list and he’s probably still on DHS’s terrorist-watch list, but he’s so close to getting his life back that he’s filed both away under “can deal with this later” and he smiles, more genuine and unforced that he thought he had in him, at the polygraph tech.

They’ve moved on from state your full name and date of birth to are you now or have you ever been married? to what is your favorite color? (don’t have one) food? (blueberry yogurt) football team? (the ‘fins) to, have you ever sold state secrets? (no) and have you ever aided and abetted a known terrorist? (no) and were you involved in the death of Philip Cowen? (peripherally) when the door opens and a woman who walks so stiffly Michael immediately recognizes her as Army Intelligence says, “Sir, the capitol is being evacuated. We expect a massive tsunami in less than six hours.”

*

Michael was not in southeast Asia in 2004. He did not spend the days between Christmas and New Year scrambling to make contact with his handler.

He knows people who were, and he knows better than to trust the city’s administration – to trust his country’s administration – to get him safely to high ground.

Even four hours between now and the coming wave mean eight to ten more before it hits Miami. Michael doesn’t pick up his cell from where he checked it in; all the networks will be jammed anyway. Instead he grabs his spares from the charger, heads downtown, borrows a motorcycle and drives east until he runs out of gas.

From there he finds an empty house, leaves the three containers of chocolate mousse yogurt in the fridge and uses the landline to make a call.

*

Five rings gets him the answering machine at Fi’s apartment. “Pick up the phone if you’re home, Fi,” he says, “This is not the time to be petty.”

Three more rings and she picks up. She says, “I was in the middle of something important, Michael.”

“You need to find a boat, preferably a sailboat, and go as far out to sea as you can.”

“I need to what?”

He hears the front door opening and wishes he had taken the yogurt. He says, “Turn on the news, and track down Sam if you can. I can’t get ahold of him. You have about six hours.”

Click.

*

The cell network is down completely. Verizon would like to thank him for his patience. So would AT&T, Virgin Mobile and TracFone.

*

He borrows another motorcycle and heads south; when he stops for gas he hears a radio broadcast reporting a hundred-foot high wave.

*

Michael gets to the Georgia-South Carolina border like that, before the gas runs out, and from there he starts walking.

He doesn’t think about the number of deaths.

He doesn’t think about Fiona and he doesn’t think about Sam.

His mom is in Nevada for Christmas this year and tried to get him to come along. And because Nate doesn’t have a landline and the cell network is still down he doesn’t think about his family, either.

*

Four weeks after the Greenland Event, the Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks off into the Southern Ocean and starts drifting toward Madagascar.

Michael is pretty sure that Miami doesn’t exist anymore. He keeps walking.

*

Pro: The rest of the world, Management included, appears to be too busy to Michael’s life miserable.

Con: They’re providing relief for a disaster he couldn’t have stopped even if he had never been burned. This was so far out of his hands and so long in coming that he couldn’t have stopped it even if he had been President of the United States.

Pro: The human race is more likely to survive this than a full-scale nuclear war. You can’t have a nuclear winter without a nuclear detonation.

Con: Almost all of the news Michael has heard is predicting the Second Ice Age.

Pro: He’s still alive. He’s walked halfway down the length of the state of Florida.

Con: He does not get to go back to Washington (because Washington probably does not exist anymore, because it has probably been swallowed whole by the Potomac) and tell his old bosses, “I told you so.”

*

The second-worst part, Michael thinks, is that when he is between vestiges of civilization he genuinely has no way of knowing or learning anything.

The worst part is that when he passes through those last vestiges of civilization the only thing he can be absolutely certain of is that everything he hears is a rumor. That every piece of information he passes on is unverifiable and unreliable.

The longer he walks, the more he thinks about his mom and Nate and Fi and Sam. He goes over the declension and conjugation patterns for every language he knows even a conversational amount of, then goes back to fine-tune his Iraqi accent.

No one who isn’t a native Iraqi ever perfects it. Doesn’t mean he won’t try.

When his mouth is dry and his throat is sore and his voice is gone, Michael wishes he had stayed in Miami. It’s fleeting and bitter and won’t do him any good now, but if he had stayed he knows that he would either be dead or he would know something first-hand.

Either one would be better than this.

*

He reaches the refugee camp outside of where Cape Coral used to be eleven weeks after Greenland and seven after Antarctica.

The camp serves the greater portion of south-west Florida; they have a satellite internet uplink and a four-day wait to access it. Michael uses the time to skulk around the edges of the camp, listen and blend in and exchange rumor for rumor. It takes him two hours to track down Harold Grening and make him for the best source of information in the camp.

Grening is the former sheriff of Hendry County, a tall guy who used to be rounder than he is now. Within twenty minutes Michael learns that he used to dress up as a Confederate colonel and drive around the South doing battle reenactments during the summer and that he’s de facto head of security at the Cape Coral refugee camp. That Before, he never left home without his cut-throat razor and that he’s camp barber as well.

The barber part is where Harold collects the bulk of his intelligence, such as the fact that Felicia and Bruce Thomson have set up a still on the south edge of camp, not that that’s much of a secret. That he lets it go because it’s better to know where the liquor is coming from than not; it’ll come either way.

Michael welcomes the shave and, for the time-being, the older man’s offer of friendship. After Michael stands but before he has the chance to wander off toward the medical tent, Grening asks, “Hey, I know you from somewhere?”

It’s certainly possible that Grening is among the police Michael has evaded over the course of the last year, but the man looks about the right age so he says, “Probably not. Unless – were you in the Gulf in ‘91?”

Grening was, and one of the easiest ways to begin building someone’s trust is to have fought in the same war.

*

He’s treated for heat exhaustion, dehydration, second-degree sunburn and assigned to a cot. Michael sleeps lightly; he wishes he were armed and knows that a moderate increase in his own potential safety isn’t worth the corresponding suspicion he would draw.

*

Someone’s put up bulletin boards, really just pieces of plywood nailed dying trees or stakes in the ground. As Michael drifts in and out of consciousness he can’t shake the memory of a capitol dome sailboats tucked behind faces he doesn’t know labeled missing, and last seen Sarasota/Port Charlotte/Port Meyers/Naples/Everglades City/Miami.

*

Instead, when he wakes up, he finds that he’s been invited to drinks with Grening and the Thomsons and the camp security detail.

Two days until he can check the FEMA and Red Cross lists. He knows Sam would give Charles S. Finley and Fi any number of aliases (Michael is composing a list in his head) but possibly also her given name.

When he logs himself as alive, seeking friends or family, he’s decided that he’ll give Westen for his mom and Sam’s sake and McBride for Fi’s.

It’s a risk, but he thinks it’s one worth taking.

*

It takes full hydration and rest for Michael to realize that he’s been running at quarter-power since Columbia. It’s too easy to push himself too hard with no checks and no outside force of duty to require he take adequate care of himself.

“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” the Red Cross nurse told him just before he passed out, and, “You need to stay right where you are. Give yourself time to recover.”

He arranges for the camp’s supply of pain medication to disappear temporarily and slips away in the subsequent chaotic search for it.

*

Security is made up of the Hendry County Sheriff’s Office, the remains of several local police departments and ten Florida National Guardsmen.

And Diego Garza, who gives him a look that’s equal parts, Of all the people I thought I never had to deal with again, and Don’t even think about acting like we know each other.

“Diego!” Michael says, “this really is a surprise.”

“I thought you were dead,” Diego replies, and Michael grins at that and the implicit, but that would just be too easy, tacked on at the end.

“It really hurts that you would think so little of me,” Michael says, raising his glass, “Getting rid of me is not that simple.”

Grening raises his glass as well, before anyone can read too much into the building tension. It’s a skill that someone picks up when you’re stuck in an uncomfortable place with people you may or may not know or like. “To old friends!”

They drink to getting the hell out of here, to the lost and the missing, to the hope that family and friends are safe somewhere. One of the guardsmen raises his glass to not having to drink California fucking orange juice in his tequila sunrises for longer than is absolutely necessary.

“My granddad has a couple of groves up north. Had. Had a couple of groves,” the young man explains when the laugh dies down. There’s a silence that follows and Michael knows they’re all thinking about how long they’ll be correcting to the past tense.

He’s been nursing the same glass of moonshine for almost two hours, letting his body keep up with where he wants his head to be. He says, “To tequila sunrises, period. I may have drunk paint thinner smoother than this.”

When you sit down to drinks with friends or contacts in Russia, you don’t leave until you have finished the bottle of vodka. And while Russian vodka certainly tastes better than paint thinner, the net effect is much the same.

It strikes him that he might never set foot in Russia again, and Michael finishes his drink and asks for another.

*

Grening catches him as they disperse and asks if he’s interested in helping out with security and peacekeeping, when he’s up to it. They have too many people, he says, and not enough staff to keep them in line, though the flow of new refugees has evened off over the last month.

Michael gives a noncommittal response, watching the back of Diego’s head disappear from sight. He doesn’t plan on staying any longer than he has to, which isn’t a good reason to deliberately destroy an asset.

*

Fi isn’t in the database under any name Michael remembers. She wouldn’t be, though, because he did not leave on speaking terms with her (again), and because Ireland was among the nations hit first and hardest, with least warning. She wouldn’t make herself visible unless she knew someone she wanted to find her was looking.

Sam shows up in Albany and again in Macon, unless there is another Charles Samuel Finley floating around the South.

His name turns up on the missing persons list out of Las Vegas. Michael stares at the laptop screen, and maybe if he had a way of knowing whether he really is safe enough for the time being he would type in his given name – but he doesn’t.

He doesn’t know anything; just that the collective population of the East Coast has been killed or picked up and moved elsewhere, or hunkered down in makeshift camps like this one. Michael could return to his old life under a new name, as a freelancer, and no one would be the wiser.

He never did work directly for the CIA. The don’t have a copy of his fingerprints on file, save a couple imprints of his right thumb for visitors’ badges.

Nate is smart enough to check for Westen comma Frank. He thinks.

It’s still a risk.

He promised he wouldn’t disappear again, not if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

*

The oceans are expected to rise thirty-seven feet above their pre–Greenland levels.

*

He’s been at Cape Coral for two and a half weeks, and it didn’t take half that long to know that this was almost exactly the same as every other refugee camp he’d ever acted his way into for the job. There isn’t enough space and there aren’t enough supplies and security is rougher than they have to be, only this time it’s FEMA writing the check and it’s his backyard that’s the disaster area.

Not that Michael has never been stuck without power for a couple of weeks, post-hurricane. That kind of worst-case scenario involves replacing your roof and dealing the state beaurocracy to get their insurance program to pay for it.

You clean up, you move on, you park your car in the garage afterward because you walk outside when the eye passes over to find that there’s a tree sitting on top of it. You lie upstairs with a pillow pulled tight over your ears and try to block out the sound of your parents fighting about it, and then you move on and bide your time until the next one.

Now refugee is a word that carries the weight of an indefinite timespan.

*

Cornering Diego is harder than Michael would have thought – the other man is using every instinct and every skill he has to avoid the meeting.

“I know why you’re here,” Diego says, preempting him, “And they weren’t going to let you back in. You’re flashy. You leave messes behind you that people like me get to clean up. It doesn’t matter what side you’re on, Westen, you’re more of a goddamn liability than you are an asset.”

Michael has made himself enough of a thorn in Diego’s side that while the speech itself is a surprise – a fellow-spy should know better – the content is disappointingly predictable. “That wasn’t what I tracked you down for.”

“Fuck.”

“I need to know what Miami looks like,” Michael says evenly. Then, because he knows Diego will balk if he doesn’t, “You’re the most reliable source I have right now.”

Most people will exaggerate or downplay the events of a story, because they haven’t had to learn how to relate an accurate account.

“It’s under water,” Diego says, then turns and walks off.

*

Grening tells him there’s going to be a power-vacuum once the world gets back on its feet, if the world gets back on its feet. It’s nothing Michael didn’t know in the back of his mind, but he’s tucked “decline and fall of the Western world” away among the things he does not think about.

“The Mediterranean nations might be worth keeping an eye on,” he says, because he’s making small-talk and he doesn’t think they will. Russia, certainly, and China. India if they avoid revolution and collapse in the wake the Antarctic Event. The US will probably relocate its capitol to the Midwest, if Potomac acted anything like the Miami River.

“You’re looking restless,” Grening says, then, “Someone comes along with some job security for you, you should take it, if you’re gettin’ ready to leave. Friend of mine told me that, used to have a pair of glasses like yours. Don’t know what happened to him, come to think of it.”

*

It rains. The bulletin boards have looked pathetic for a long time, but now even moreso as paper ripples and ink bleeds into the muddy ground.

He pauses by the one near the medical tent and pulls a damp flyer from the plywood, capitol dome and white sales and captioned, Visit Madison!

There’s a compass rose on the back, pointing north-east.

Michael doesn’t know who put it there, but he knows that he can’t go home and that he won’t find anything in Washington.

*

Lots of implied character death (ie: the entire eastern seaboard); some major series characters are explicitly not known to be alive or dead. (Return to header.)

caitiedidit

*

Parker cheats at cards. Ticks the edges with her fingernails just so, a different side for each face-card and corners for aces (high) or sometimes deuces (wild). She learned staying up late nights at one of the group homes – she’s lost track of which, it was so long ago.

Hardison doesn’t cheat at cards. Not technically, but he counts them – sets of four – and he knows in the back of his mind who’s played what card and which ones are left over. The rest is simple probability, the kind of computation he could do in his sleep.

Eliot bluffs.

*

None of the Big Four. (Return to header.)

trialia

*

“Do you hear that?” Rosie asks, wrapping her arm around Lark’s waist.

They’re cool in the shade of the house, the day warm and her garden happy. Lark idly coaxes a straggling thread on their blanket back into place as she asks, “Mmm, did I miss something?”

“That, my dear, is the sound of a blessedly empty cottage.”

“Oh?” Lark prompts, then presses a slow, easy kiss to Rosie’s lips.

Breaking away – reluctantly, but she does need to breathe – she continues, “It sounds like peace.”

They both miss having charges, though Rosie won’t admit it. This, though; she loves this.

*

None of the Big Four. (Return to header.)

*

Established a warnings policy: see its page for details.

yuletide

halcyon_shift

eternal_sadist

*

Part of every spy’s job is reading the local papers: you can learn a lot about the climate from something as small as what stories get picked up during a slow news week or the light in which local politicos are cast. While the media can be a valuable asset, they can just as quickly turn into a nuisance or a nightmare. A couple of reporters with the inclination and the time to do so can sour an op faster than you can say “stop the presses”.

“Well,” Sam says, sounding more amused than distraught; he’s wearing his Chuck Finley face – the one that wouldn’t look out of place laughing at a nuclear holocaust. “Looks like we finally did it.”

He takes a drink and sets his bottle down with the heavy thunk of a mostly-full vessel, folds the paper into a more manageable shape with a rustle. A moment later he’s reading aloud, a hundred cover ID’s worth of theatrics injected into his delivery. ” What do drug dealers, thugs, white-collar criminals – ” a pause, ” – human traffickers and bank robbers have in common? They’re all disappearing from Miami like the Everglades from the edges of a housing development.”

“That’s a nice comparison,” Michael says, takes a sip of his own beer.

He’d expected a level of public interest eventually. It’s a given with how often cars, ships and buildings explode in their presence, to say nothing of – how many times have they drawn gunfire?

It should shock him that he’s lost track, but that part isn’t what leaves him edgy. He should remember and doesn’t, should question how far off his game he’s fallen and won’t. That internal refusal sets off his mental alarms much more strongly than the bullets do, because the equation’s the easy part.

Number of jobs multiplied by number of jobs they’ve been shot at – subtract the ones where they shoot at each other for the sake of the job, and somewhere along the line two plus two stops being four. It’s not even five; between Carla and Victor, Bly and the bank number that wants him dead, Michael’s pretty sure two and two could be swordfish and he wouldn’t even blink.

“We do deal with the swampland of the human race,” Sam says, thoughtfully. Chuck is gone, replaced by Sam-making-light (different from Sam-trying-to-not-die, from Sam-after-lady-of-the-week; they could be actors in another lifetime, complete with their own cult following), though Michael’s pretty sure the voice will return for the rest of the article.

He grins at the observation – only half a smile but as open as Michael ever gets. “You know, when most people think of the Glades, they think about sawgrass prairies rather than swamps.”

Sam gives a snort of laughter; then, “You’re mincing words there, Mikey.”

“That’s because it’s a faulty metaphor,” Michael replies, just as the paper obscures Sam’s face again. “I’m just saying – you say Everglades, I think sawgrass.”

“South Florida has a new breed of hero stalking its back alleys,” Sam reads at his hammiest. “See there, they called us heroes! You ought to be flattered.”

“What you ought to do,” Fiona says, leaning over Sam’s left shoulder with a bloody Mary dangling between her fingertips, “is pay up.”

Sam flinches right, starts going for a sidearm that isn’t there; Michael stifles a laugh at his friend’s expense – he can hardly blame Sam for his reaction. “Jeez!” Sam says, settling back into his seat. “Make some noise, will ya?” He picks his beer back up and makes a show of the drink he takes while Fi settles into the chair between them.

“There are three people sitting at this table,” she says smugly, her voice in the staccato rhythm of a person utterly confident in victory, “And two of them owe me money”.

She’s twirling her celery between her index and middle fingers, and Michael hasn’t seen a vegetable look so deadly since he was six. “Over a year to get going, between tourist and hurricane seasons, front page,” Fi drawls, “so I’m right three for three.”

“I wasn’t part of the bet,” Michael replies, pointing at her with the corner of his sandwich. He’s thought it was a bad idea from the start, an invitation for their old friend Murphy to walk in and make their lives more complicated than they had to be. Enough already went badly without tempting everything that could to do so.

“I distinctly remember the words, ‘I’d just as soon we never show up in the news’ having been uttered,” Fi says. “That counts.”

She bites into the celery stick, and that right there is the reason why celery substitutes for breaking bone in sound effects studios. Or, really, any time you need someone to think it’s their comrade making the sickening crunch rather than this week’s market-fresh produce.

Sam cuts in before that line of conversation can go any further. “Hey now, the thing with the heroin dealers got a full page spread in the Florida section. Going by that, I’m the real winner here – ”

“I should have known you would try to weasel out of – ”

“Let’s hear the rest of the article, Sam,” Michael says, too brightly. He kicks at Fi’s ankles under the table; she kicks him back hard enough to hurt, which is probably hard enough to bruise. She’s wearing a smirk as she does it, though, at least as amused as Sam is.

At the prompt, Sam reads through the article at length, pausing for commentary where it’s appropriate (It didn’t happen like that!; Where did they go, anyway?; I thought she was in witness protection.; Didn’t you swear him to secrecy?). There must be ten jobs covered in the article – most of them people they’ve helped, one unavailable for comment out of Monroe Correctional, two people they’d met through Nate and another two through his mother.

Not entirely unsurprising. “The doc had a weird knowledge-base,” the article quotes one man from the bank robbery – Michael thinks it’s the one Bly took the fall for, but he can’t be certain. The rest is a string of cover-IDs that no one should have been able to put together.

“We were able to reach a local high school football player,” Sam reads, and Michael knows that set in Sam’s shoulders – pride. “‘I owe them Super Bowl tickets. Someday’, he said, but wouldn’t comment further.”

“Thank you, Corey,” Michael says, because he’s done the best of all the interviewees. Barely seventeen and he already understands that when someone tells you staying quiet is important, they actually mean it’s actually important. Michael can only guess at what the writer could have gotten from Sophie or Bill.

Sam lays the paper down in the center of the table. Upside-down, Michael reads the title as Robin Hood of South Beach Foils Bank Robbery. There’s a photo toward the bottom of the page: the three of them in black and white (that’s some indication in favor of a higher power that likes them – they’re also caught at a distance and an odd angle, faces small and blurry and eyes obscured by three pairs of matching sunglasses). It bears the caption “Miami’s Merry Men?”

“Merry Men,” Fi says, rolling her eyes as she does. “And here I thought we were reading an equal-opportunity expose.”

Michael allows himself a small smile at that, spreading the paper flat to see the by-line and the reporter’s own picture. He blinks when he sees Javier Rios’s inch-by-inch portrait. Michael knows him, assumed he was one of Carla’s people out running her errands, a glorified pet-sitter, and not particularly good at his job. Assumed the appearance of incompetence was part of the other man’s cover.

“That’s the guy who was asking about my downstairs neighbor,” Michael says; he’s been renting that apartment too, just to keep it vacant, after the first couple of blessedly Sugar-free months. Rios had looked like he didn’t quite believe Michael’s assurance about not having neighbors – but he’d left, and not returned, just another blip on Michael’s radar.

By Fi’s small gasp and Sam’s huh, they’ve seen Rios around, too.

“He called Veronica a couple of weeks back,” Sam says, the wince in his voice if not on his face, “and she called me. Said some guy with a Cuban accent was poking around, asking about the Caddy. She was pretty upset.”

“I would imagine so,” Fi says, then takes an indulgent sip of her bloody Mary. Something passes between them, a look that says that was uncalled for/no it wasn’t, over something Michael isn’t privy to. A moment later, Fi turns her eyes on the street outside, then back in on their table, the motion so deliberately casual that she may well have won that wordless battle.

She sighs; then, “Rios was snooping outside my apartment, taking pictures – what? – two, three months ago?”

“He what?”

A lump moves through Michael’s chest and into his stomach and sits there for an uncomfortably long while before fading. He knows Fi knows better than to ignore unknown people surveilling her. He also knows she’s perfectly capable of taking care of her own surveillants herself. It still stings a little that she hasn’t said anything about it.

Fi flashes a lightning grin, showing teeth. “Honestly, Michael,” she says, “He tromped around like a sedated rhinoceros, unarmed, and took his pictures with an off the shelf Canon. Dear Javier might as well have sent me a card saying, ‘Hello there, don’t mind me, I’m an amateur!’”

He’s about to reply when his phone rings. Michael checks the caller-ID and answers anyway. “Hi, Mom,” he says, “Mm-hm. Yes, Mom, I’m looking at it right now. No, you don’t have to do that – Mom, please don’t frame it … ”

Sometimes people of interest find you through a complex web of espionage, counter-espionage and betrayal. And sometimes they don’t have to, because you’re right there on the front page of the Miami Herald.

*

None of the Big Four (Return to header.)

*

My dear brother, (Menolly wrote) I wanted for you to know that I am well and alive, for you are the only living person at Half-Circle who cares for me. To let you go on believing that I had died in Threadfall would be cruel, I think; someday perhaps I will have the chance to relate the tale to you in person, and in music, as it ought to be. I also wish to tell you that I am, as of this writing, two sevendays a journeyman (scratched out, replaced after with “journeywoman“) in the Harper Hall.

The music sent along with this letter is in part my own; the Fire Lizard Song that set into motion the events which brought me here and Brekke’s Lament. Doubtless some account of that event has reached you in bits and snatches of rumor. The song is as I experienced it through my own fire lizards (I have nine, and I didn’t Impress them on purpose.) Masterharper Robinton is having copies sent out to every hold on Pern.

I asked Harper Elgion not to tell (here, the beginning loop of a letter, unidentifiable; a drop and smudge of ink, as though in hesitation) our parents of my safety. I trust you will tell them, or not, as your conscience leads you, though just now I would as soon they not know.

I belong here. I have friends and I’m useful. (It’s still so hard to believe that the Harper actually thinks my songs are important. Some days I feel like I’ll wake up in my cubical having dreamed everything.). I don’t mean to be a braggart, just – I am happy here, Alemi. Happier than I’ve ever been before, and wished for you to know it.

*

Menolly carried little with her – only clothes and her instruments: harp, guitar and pipes, all new-made and carrying Master Jerint’s approval. She and Sebell arrived by boat, the same skiff in which Menolly had taught him to sail. Tomorrow morning Sebell would continue east, stopping several leagues from the Dragonstones to pick up his passengers, two holdless men, and then on to the Southern Continent.

This trip she was really only present to supervise, having declared her friend competent on their second return foray a few months back. So long as the weather held off doing anything too terrible to Sebell, Menolly thought, in which case she couldn’t do much to help anyway, he would be fine. The two passengers came from seaholds themselves, and would hold their own on the way down.

Sebell gave a little more sail while Menolly steered; the boat moved around the last hook of land before Half Circle came into view.

She clenched her left hand involuntarily, running her fingertips over the old scar. It felt nearly flat how, a line of soft, ridgeless skin. All the remaining traces of angry red disappeared some six months back, and she could stretch the hand and play any cording as written, as well as most combinations on the great harp. Still, it nettled. For all dragonlengths of difference between the girl she had been a turn ago and the person she was now, Menolly still bore proof of who she was.

“You aren’t specifically needed at Half Circle, you know,” Sebell said quietly, enough that she almost didn’t hear him over the sea wind, “Gerand could do it.”

“You would wish my family on a journeyman that green? Sebell,” she said, only half-teasing, “Whatever did he do to you to get so far out of your good graces?”

For a while he didn’t speak, instead running up their flag and then taking them into Dock Cavern with surprising grace; Sebell would have made a good seaman, though Menolly couldn’t help her thankfulness that he wasn’t. Having a human friend at her side gave her strength she hadn’t known she would need until the boat clunked into place at the dock.

Being only a few hours after dawn and a day past Threadfall, Dock Cavern was mostly deserted, the men out fishing. Menolly spotted her mother in the crowd. She wasn’t scowling yet, and probably hadn’t realized who Harper Elgion’s replacement was. Beauty trilled softly from her spot on Menolly’s shoulder, and she rubbed the little queen’s eye ridge with a finger. The other lizards she’d sent back to the Harper Hall for their breakfast, though Rocky and Diver balked and Beauty refused outright to leave her.

Unbidden, the thought touched the back of her consciousness, that perhaps they would be so discomfited by the fire lizards that they wouldn’t notice their harper wasn’t only a girl, but their daughter. She pushed it out of her mind instantly, instead reminding herself of who she was now, all she had seen and done in the turn since she ran away and the journeyman’s badge at her shoulder.

It didn’t help as much as she thought it would.

“I wouldn’t wish your family on anyone,” Sebell said lowly in her ear as they stepped off the boat. Kimi wheeled above their heads and cheeped her assent. “Least of all you.”

*

Menolly set Master Robinton’s breakfast tray down on the sand table divider, and Alemi’s latest letter on the glass next to the tray. She neglected to bring the new lyrics she was to set to a catchy land-tune out of Telgar, thoughts of fish and waves and salt air leaving her fidgety of late.

Robinton already knew Menolly felt herself to be in, as he described it, a musical rut. It seemed entirely unfair that now, with all the music on Pern at her fingertips, she could not for her life force a line or a note from her ears onto paper sheets, sand or wax tablet. Though she did try, as best she could, not to dwell on it.

The music would come back, Robinton had told her, it always did. And in the meantime Menolly kept busy on harper business other than music-making. At least she had Master Shonagar’s grudging permission to sing in public now!

“You beast!” the Harper said, stuffing Zair’s face; the little bronze had reached almost full growth and still ate like a hatchling. “That was my finger! I ought to turn you out to fend for yourself!”

In response, the fire lizard snapped up another piece of meat, this one almost as large as his head. Menolly took up the task of feeding Zair, as she usually did, to give Robinton the chance to eat his own breakfast and down his morning klah.

Last night’s late arrival – from Keroon, this time – showed in the dark circles beneath his expressive eyes and the visibly stifled yawns. He looked little better after he finished eating, Zair flitting off to sleep away his own meal in the sunny window.

“He’s obscene,” the Harper said affectionately.

“But would you rather a well-behaved, dignified fire lizard?” she asked in turn, grinning.

“There’s a well-behaved, dignified variety?” he asked back, then turned his attention on Alemi’s letter.

The news of interest was at the end of the message-slate, and Menolly told him so. Menolly finished that she hated to bear bad news. Robinton said that he was actually rather surprised this hadn’t happened sooner.

“I didn’t know how long it would take Harper Elgion to get to a drum-heights; T’gellan would have taken him up to one, or even to Benden Weyr, but Threadfall isn’t due over Half-circle for a sevenday yet, and the letter is dated just after the last Fall.”

The Masterharper nodded silently, his mind obviously sorting out the good that could come of this development. The official message, Alemi had written, would say that Elgion wished to return to the Harper Hall to pursue his mastery. What would go unsaid in that message, as yet un-received, was that Alemi was considering leaving the hold himself and that Elgion did not believe he could continue to serve at Half Circle without going mad.

That Sea Holder Yanus was thoroughly immune to change of any sort, as resistant as an Oldtimer in his own way. And that Alemi agreed.

The Harper looked as though he was going to speak when Menolly volunteered; Zair lifted a sleepy, well-fed head and cheeped questioning counterpoint to Robinton’s, “I do not believe I could have possibly heard you correctly, my girl, did you just suggest that you go back to Half Circle?”

“Until someone else can be found, sir,” she said.

Robinton considered this. “Yes, yes,” he replied, “It could be advantageous to have your eyes and ears on the eastern half of the continent. You truly wish to return? For a few sevendays only, until someone more suitable can be found. It would be quite upsetting to have you disappear as if between again.”

“Only a few sevendays,” Menolly repeated dutifully, then, “perhaps the change of scenery would do me good as well.”

*

“I heard tell you work closely with the Masterharper,” Sella told Sebell, leading him off to show him his quarters for the night. Menolly followed her mother, and refrained from rolling her eyes at her sister.

“Journeywoman Menolly, your sister, does as well. The Harper Hall would be so much the poorer without her there,” Sebell replied evenly (too evenly to Menolly’s ears, and she reminded herself to thank him for his handling of her sister and apologize for the need of it before he set sail in the morning).

They rounded a corner and were out of earshot before Menolly could hear her sister’s reply. She did catch the whispers of newly made gossip circulating around the cavern, echoing far more loudly than she remembered the echoes sounding. All amounted to questions of how Menolly could be alive and how could she be a harper? How could she be their harper?

If her ears didn’t deceive her, Menolly heard flinches in the words, whispered and apprehensive, carrying the implication of another question – By the first Egg, what will Yanus do? What will he say? How much more irritable will this make him?

“Truly,” Mavi said, once they came into the privacy of a glow-lit corridor.

So I rate fresh glows now, Menolly thought. Or is it not me? Is it just that they thought a new harper was coming, and if they’d known which one they’d have turned me away and spared a man from the fishing to teach the hold’s children?

“You thought I had died?” Menolly finished. “In the first Threadfall after I left?” Beauty cheeped angrily, eyes whirling; Menolly thought calming pictures at her, of their hatching cave and fresh spiderclaws long evenings singing in the Harper Hall.

Mavi flinched away, whether at Menolly’s words or at the fire lizard, she couldn’t be sure. “Your father still maintains that those — that the fire lizards are no more than boys’s daydreams. We truly thought you dead, daughter. If only we had known … ”

You could have mounted a search, she thought, but kept the words to herself. You could have bothered looking, you could have spared the children an afternoon to check down the coast, but holey nets are so much more important than your own daughter’s safety.

She was about to give voice to a smaller reply, one more forgiving than her thoughts, when they arrived at her father’s Records room. Mavi knocked lightly on the door and stood back. Before the woman simply would have entered. What all had happened to change that in the turn Menolly had been away?

Her answer came at Sea Holder Yanus’s gruff call to enter. Menolly’s mother deferred for her to proceed, and she nearly stood gaping. Training, months of telling herself every day that her new life was real and that same stretch of time convincing herself, every day, that she was and would forever be a harper with music never again forbidden to her took hold. She breathed deep and full, as if she were about to sing before the most demanding audience she had ever known.

She sent Beauty out to their old cave to hunt; better all around to spare her father the double shock of daughter and fire lizard in the same meeting.

Menolly’s mother deferred to her because she was the new Harper of Half Circle Sea Hold, and to do otherwise would be impolite.

“Sea Holder Yanus,” Menolly said, because she was a harper now, the Masterharper’s own journeywoman, not Menolly of Half Circle who was barred even from the simple joy of the evening sing. “I am afraid I will only be stationed here briefly, though I look forward to my stay and,” here she removed a message slate from the inside of her vest, “I bring a request from Lord Groghe of Fort Hold for your consideration.”

The Sea Holder grimaced and replied, taking the slate, “We thought you were dead!” His tone was the same one might use on an escaped criminal, which, Menolly supposed privately, she may as well have been in his eyes.

Stop it, she told herself, you’re better than that kind of pettiness. Menolly turned over a second slate with Masterharper Robinton’s personal letter of assignment. Piemur had wanted to add in his own words of warning – something to do with sending her back in one piece or there would be an “or else” to contend against.

Yanus pulled slate and stylus from his desk and wrote out a reply, then handed it to Menolly. “I accept Lord Groghe’s proposition,” he said, his voice distant and disdainful. If he wanted to play this as if she weren’t his daughter, as if he never tried to silence her or keep her from music and the Harper Hall, then Menolly could do that, too. Perhaps it would even be easier. He continued, “Take this to the hold runner to be delivered to the nearest drumheights, Harper. Kindly also tell Lady Sella that she is to prepare for her own time fostering at Fort Hold. Young Lord Benis will be most welcome here. You both can go.”

Menolly went to do as she was asked, for it technically was part of her duty as the hold’s new harper. She could not shake the feeling that her father’s request had been more than a small part order.

*

My dear sister (Alemi wrote), time is short, as is all our sleep here. Seas have been rough of late, and while that means heavy net after heavy net and what feels the whole sea of fishes inside the hold, we also run across far more accidents and injuries than we usually do this time of year. Our father was among them this last trip; thrown against the mast of our largest ship and wrapped near double around it. Mavi keeps him asleep with as strong a draught of fellis juice he can take and the rest of us worry but keep our hands as busy as we’re able. She sent to Benden for a healer, and he says that though Yanus may well walk again someday, he may never be able to sail.

I do not know why I write you this. Surely you prefer not to think of the man, but it is good to be able to confide in family. Mother is wracked and Sella withdrawn, our brothers here so consumed with work that they’ve scarcely a voice to talk with. Elgion tries, and he is indeed a friend to me if ever I’ve had one, but he does (the word scratched out, rewritten and scratched again in the soft wax) cannot understand as you do.

Do not be burdened by this missive. All will be well again. It must be.

I must go now, my ship is sailing on the half-hour.

– Alemi.

*

The men were not yet back, and Menolly’s welcoming supper was small. With Elgion still present – he would return with Sebell – the three of them took the evening to perform as many new songs as they could both newly written and written to tell news.

She found her hands trembling over her gitar strings, and counted her sour notes in her head; she’d reached fifty-eight by the evening’s end, which she attributed to her nerves, though Sebell assured her he had heard nothing off key and that Master Shonagar would not by any means have allowed her to go journeying if she were not in a proper state to sing.

The Fire Lizard Song was requested four times, by now a favorite of the hold children; each of the three Harpers sang it through once solo, and they performed it together once at the end of the evening.

Before leaving the dais, Elgion murmured to her, “If I had known … ”

“You didn’t,” Menolly said, glad for the dark and the quick dissipation of the little crowd, “Besides, I asked to come here.”

The three harpers went to the kitchen cavern, by now quiet and deserted, and stayed up talking the night long.

Sebell and Elgion left the next day at dawn. Sebell told her that they could as easily trade places still, and when Menolly refused he squeezed her shoulder and said she may well be out of her mind.

“I wouldn’t have me any other way,” Menolly said as the men boarded the skiff.

*

Her work started that very morning; some of the same children she had taught after Petiron’s death were again under her tutelage while others were new and still more had finished learning their Ballads and Sagas and gone on to adult work within the hold.

“We thought you -” a little girl began, only to be silenced by her brother.

“Any rumors of my untimely, gruesome demise,” Menolly said brightly, “are patently false.” After a pause and a roomful of saucer-eyed looks Menolly added, “Or at least greatly exaggerated.”

“Do we still have to keep you teachin’ us a secret?” a little boy – Aver, she remembered the boy she had tried to start on drums and abortive nature of those lessons.

“No, you do not,” Menolly told him, and then went on to tell them the whole truth of her story, from running away to coming back. She left out the parts about her fire lizards until the end, hoping someone would think to ask.

Harpers were all performers at heart after all, and she was sure her lizards would wear any remaining apprehension in her students clean off. There was a long pause at the end of her story, and finally another boy – ten turns, perhaps, or a little older or younger, asked the question she’d been waiting for. Was it really, really true she’d Impressed a whole clutch of fire lizards?

Menolly called Beauty and the rest of her fair from the cave, and a bare moment later the teaching room reeled with dipping, diving fire lizards in all colors. Only Beauty settled serenely on Menolly’s shoulder, showing her pictures of their cave and the sense of happiness and home and very fresh, tasty fish. Lazy was the first to descend after Beauty, landing on Aver’s folded legs and demanding attention with his slow chitters.

“He likes his eye-ridges scratched, just like dragons,” Menolly said, asking her fire lizards to find perches on shoulders and laps of the excited children while she answered the thousand new questions thrown her way.

When their time was up, and she dismissed her charges, all reluctant to go, Menolly added that if they were all very good and learned quickly and thoroughly, the fire lizards would sing with them as well. This set off a new wave of excited chatter among the children, some of them humming or singing a bridge or a chorus as they set off down the corridor.

*

It all went to chaos that night when the men returned with the fleet, for they had the biggest catch in anyone’s memory, bigger even than the ones from four months ago, to prepare – gutting, salting and drying for the fingerlings and large-mouthed bottomsuckers, gutting and cooking or smoking for the packtail. Menolly politely refused to help in that work, and canceled the day’s lessons preemptively when she saw that the activity did not look likely to slacken.

“I’ll lead The Founding of the Weyrs in the cavern for you, I promise,” she said, though the children begged for something more exciting. Instead, she offered them worksongs from the land – though the cactus-gatherer song from the Igen deserts was probably more suited for adult sensibilities, it was catchy enough that she could set new words to the tune … and as suddenly as the idea was in her mind, the words were gone.

She did lead several rounds of a song for calling in the heardbeasts – one Piemur had taught her (and told her he was implacably sick of and wished he never had to hear again), the rhythm of it right for disentangling fish from nets and getting them gutted.

After a while, Menolly made her way back to the kitchen cavern, visiting with the old aunts and uncles who had missed her arrival the night before; she spent the time until supper reassuring that she was not dead, telling them news and stories, singing or playing on request. Supper she ate quietly, as far from her parents on the high table as she could manage, and repeated the afternoon’s singing for the men just back from sea. It wasn’t often that Half Circle received new music as often as it had this past turn! Most of the holders and seamen looked interested and grateful despite Yanus’s scowl and Mavi’s worry-creased brow.

Menolly found, in fact, that she enjoyed being a teaching harper as much as she enjoyed playing Master Domick’s intricate, difficult compositions. The enjoyment came from a different place, however, and was of a different kind entirely. When she could sing no longer, her throat hoarse, Menolly played and let the chorus relax into songs they knew, and finally retired after the the men’s voices thinned to a handful. Tomorrow would be just as long as today.

Ordinarily she would have had Petiron’s old rooms, but somehow Mavi had found enough compassion in her to put Menolly in a guest room instead. She did not think on the possibility that the action might be a veiled insult, but took it as a kindness to her instead. To take up her old master and only friend’s old rooms as her own would have been too much, Menolly thought. She felt blessed to not have to find a way to gracefully reject her parents’ accomodations.

Alemi met her outside the room, and Menolly could only manage to set her gitar gently down against the wall before she ran to embrace him as if she were still a child. She held her brother long and tightly, pulling away only when she was sure one or the other of them would suffocate if she did not.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, her eyes bright with equal parts joy and sleeplessness; Alemi, too, looked like he had spent too many hours awake and at work. Then she held out her left palm, not bloody or red or pulled from the day’s work, and giggled, “It’s healed, Alemi! I can play again!”

“I’ve missed you as well,” Alemi said, “How are Yanus and Mavi … ” he trailed off.

“Like I’m just another harper – a woman they’ve never met, which suits me fine. Did you ever tell them about our letters?”

“I didn’t see a need to say anything, and they never did figure it out for themselves. I’m a little surprised they didn’t set on you like Thread to – ”

“An overgrown pasture,” Menolly replied, nodding. “I had built this place up into such a such a nightmare of a thing. Our parents aren’t – ” she began, but before she could finish Sella called to her from down the corridor, looking harried and a little petulant.

She said, “Father wants you in the Records room. Now.”

*

The door was left ajar, but not hanging entirely open. Menolly felt a wave of tiredness crash over her, the strongest she had felt all day, and pressed back the choking fear of punishment at her father’s hand. He wouldn’t dare beat her again, not now with the entire Harper Hall behind her. Would he?

The Sea Holder’s face was lined moreso in the last turn than she had ever seen it before, from the hard life pulled from the sea as well as from pain, his brows knit in a scowl. Likewise Yanus’s hair was almost all silver and he held his back at an odd angle. He clenched his hands over the arms of his chair and did not ask Menolly to be seated.

She took a chair anyway. It seemed that Yanus could not have beaten her if wanted to, though all sense of justice Menolly might once have drawn from the man’s fall was gone. She had grown up under the tight control this man exerted on his hold; seeing him so weak evoked more pity than anything else. She saw a man denied his love now, for to deny Yanus the sea was as denying Menolly her music. She wished she could give Yanus’s craft back to him.

“I will not have those bewinged nuisances of yours in my hold,” he growled, “Distracting the young from their work and turning men’s thoughts to folly. Do you enjoy making a disgrace of this hold?”

As soon as she had felt it, nearly all Menolly’s compassion left her. “I can no sooner send my fire lizards away than a dragonrider can divorce himself from his dragon, Sea Holder,” she said, voice low and even. She wished she had the chance to confront the man at his full strength, to have an even ground for her satisfaction, but this was what she had. Her heart felt in her throat; Menolly wondered how he could continue to instill that nervous reaction in her.

“I see now that I should have spared a man from the fishing, as I was mistaken in letting you play at being a harper a turn ago.”

“You may be my father,” Menolly replied, standing. “I accept that and respect you for it. But you will not address a journeyman of the Harper Hall as you would an outspoken drudge, nor will you so much as think about laying a hand against me.

If you know nothing else, know this, I am not a disgrace to this hold, though there are days I still wish I had been born a boy so you could see it. But even if you can’t see or won’t accept that, neither do you frighten me. Not now. Not any longer.”

“And you,” Yanus replied, his own voice low and cold, “Menolly of the Harper Hall, are no longer welcome in my hold after these twelve sevendays are up.”

She stood then, and before she left for her room said, “I have no trouble accepting that.”

*

The next day she pulled Aver aside and told him she would like to teach him the drum.

The sevenday after that her fire lizards accompanied the entire hold in its evening sing.

*

Watch your blades lads, watch your blades,

Knifes turn fish to livings made;

Careful children, don’t let slip,

In the back and out the tip …

(Menolly’s Song for Gutting Packtail, composed on her first, brief and only return to Half Circle Sea Hold, known colloquially at the Harper Hall as The Song Menolly Never Meant to Write.)

*

Verbal abuse of an adult child, recovery from physical and emotional abuse & victory over personal demons resultant from said abuse. (This is seaholder Yanus we’re talking about, after all.) (Return to header.)

*

They say immortals were born from the dreams of men. That they came into existence with the right roll from the Hag’s dice-cup, three painted knucklebones turning up with the power of man’s belief, gods’ folly and world’s need to create creatures like himself.

*

That transmundane they also say the dead shall stay aground, because that always works out so beautifully.

He’s seen a few Kudarung in the peaceful realms of late, seemings of bodies riddled with arrow-holes before they flicker back to wholeness at the dark god’s hand. Rikash never did put much stock in the words or belief of a crowd. Humans being too bound by their short lives and gods too constrained by their eternal existence and distance from the realities they govern. There’s a thin border between death and dream, though, and Rikash thinks there might be something to the old stories - thinks there might be, and takes the Black God’s given opportunity, his cowled back turned, to sneak a little fun. He didn’t wait four hundred years locked away to be relegated to the mandatory rest of elysian vacation half a breath after getting out.

Nobody, after all, misses a Stormwing.

*

Rikash has never been to the Realm of Chaos, and he would just as soon never visit. Having his physical being broken apart is one thing, the pain of death passing; having his spirit being dismantled and reassembled into something resembling a flickering puddle of oil (one moment) or a pile of self-molding, color-shifting clay (the next one), makes his human-skinned parts crawl in the manner of the mortals who feared Stormwings into existence. Gainel’s realm is as close to Chaos as anyone from this side of the divide can get without succumbing to Uuosoae’s hypnotism, and it’s about as simple to navigate.

His last visit, Rikash remembers with a shudder, he was discovered and returned to his proper residence in the peaceful realm.

The thing they never talk about is how thoroughly boredom is wedded to peace.

*

Soldiers’ dreams are easy, but banal. They go to battle and fall, while he circles above, or they don’t and their friends do. Here Rikash sparkles clean as a cat and he shakes his hair back, bones clacking hollowly against one another. Finger bones and knucklebones, the flesh long ago rotted and dropped off of them. Soldiers’ dreams bore him as much as his rest does. Despite or because of this he has a roll in aftermath of the not-battles, sups on the smell and the taste of soldiers’ nightmares and moves on, a little grimier and a little more comfortable in his own dream-skin. Who ever heard of a clean Stormwing? He could have run his fingers through his hair, root to tip, and had his hands come out smelling of soap and spices.

If he’d had fingers instead of wings. His magic is still red-and-gold, the fire born of battle terror, wrought in a haze and tempered in grief. Rikash cracks a smile and wheels up, through a layer of clouds, through a flash of volcanic heat that washes off the last dream’s work and leaves him hungry again.

*

He flies through the dreams of the King’s Own. Others’ dreams mean others’ dream-logic; Rikash plays by his own rules or not at all.

*

Takes him half the night to find the place, but Rikash does. Maybe his presence helped build it, but he isn’t one of Gainel’s minions and wouldn’t take that job for all the life in the world. The perch outside Weiryn’s cottage is as he left it, save deserted, the world around it painted gray and soft where it fades to black instead of forest. He can smell the badger god on the air, no wind around to carry it away, but fading nonetheless.

Rikash alights and waits, calls out, “I know you’re around somewhere! Or have you regained your rightful fear of Stormwings like a proper human?”

It’s not even his dream and Veralidaine still manages to look like smoke, wafting into his frame of vision as if she lacks feet. Rikash shifts from foot to foot, ruffles steel feathers to shing against one another like knives in a honing steel. He’d have been born a butcher, if Rikash had to choose a mortal life over the one he has been given – the one he used to have.

“You,” he says as the girl circles him and takes her seat atop a rough oak table that wasn’t there before. She’s barefoot, dressed in a cream gown shot through with copper threads, eyes bright blue and hair wild. Filled out since the last time Rikash saw her. “Have hardened rather a lot around the edges,” he finishes.

Veralidaine smiles, small and soft, a child’s grin or a mother’s. She replies, “And you’ve taken up bathing, I see. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

The Stormwing ruffles again, and he can see the shiver it draws out in his human companion. He draws his lips back in a steel-toothed mockery of a friendly greeting. He has some dignity left, after all.

There’s a pause, soundless, as Veralidaine’s eyes travel the length and breadth of his body, as if she’s trying to decide whether or not Rikash is real. A moment later she grins in earnest and not long after he follows into a laugh – the first real laugh Rikash has had since his unfortunate demise.

“Immortals may be next best to gods,” he says humbly, “but this kind of cleanliness is nothing shy of a curse.” He flexes each of his feet; this world is so much more real than his restful prison.

“Feeling naked without your protective shell of filth? It’s good to see you again; Mithros, Mynoss and Shakith all help me, but I’ve actually missed you.”

“Truly, I’m being punished,” he replies. The girl huffs, her shoulders tensing before she relaxes. Not so much a girl anymore, and he’s reminded how differently time passes in the mortal realms than in any of the others. In the blink of an Immortal’s eye entire human empires rise and fall.

With the quirk of an eyebrow she assumes one of the mage’s expressions, and it doesn’t look at all out of place aligned as it is on her features. “Being punished with my company, or with soap?”

Rikash gives his best enigmatic look. Tt’s not for mortals to know the intent behind his double-spoken words; he would not have come to visit if he didn’t think he’d find entertainment. Of a kind.

True to form, Veralidaine ruins his perfectly constructed moment. “Don’t you look like a Ozorne’s puffiest cockatoo. There’s enough smug about you for a dynasty of emperors.”

“Among the individuals present at this time and place, only one has found a workaround for death itself.”

“Smug,” she replies almost dismissively. Then, with a lead-heavy tone, “If you had found a way back, I would have felt something.”

“Something wrong?” Rikash suggests.

“Something strange. Noticible. Folk don’t just walk out of the peaceful realms, and,” with levity and a handwaved gesture at the cottage, now washed in a thin gold light and going soft ’round the edges with wakefulness, “my parents’ home is scarcely a few minutes walk outside Corus, if you take my meaning, Lord Moonsword.”

“Mortals,” he scoffs, and feels a pull at the back of his neck, chances a glance back over his left shoulder. “So very narrow-minded.”

Gainel stands in the doorway, looking entirely too petulant for a greater god. Veralidaine calls a greeting to him, and the dream god returns it with a pale-handed wave.

He takes off with a flip of his tail, hovers midair for a few extra seconds. Before he wings into the black of the door he calls back, “I didn’t walk from the peaceful realms! I flew!”

*

None of the Big Four. (Return to header.)

jlh

kindoflikeyou

*

Zuko wouldn’t call the feeling entrapment; not after living through the months after the fall of Ba Sing Se under Azula’s psychopathic thumb. That was almost as bad imprisonment, and this entrapment came out of obligation – to his people and to the people his people had spent the last hundred years rolling up, over and setting on fire. Obligation to his body, to sleep at least four hours a night – and even then, twenty-hour days wore him thin.

The last thing Mai had said the last time she had seen him was that she felt like she’d seen more of him when she’d been in jail than she did now. She wore a half-smile on her face when she spoke, her new default expression. Zuko couldn’t be sure whether it meant she was plotting to get him back for ignoring her (possible), or whether she understood completely and accepted this unfortunate aspect of being engaged to the Fire Lord (unlikely), or whether it meant she was just as frustrated about it as he was (probable).

At least someone else was planning the wedding. According to Mai’s last letter – (Definitely just as frustrated as he was, that they had to resort to sending messages through the palace runner system. He had Teo’s father on contract to come up with something better, but the mechanist said he needed more time to tease the problem out.) – Aang, Katara and Toph would be flying in any day to set up the wedding pavilion, at Toph’s insistence. She didn’t trust his underlings, Mai reported, and Mai agreed with her.

Have I mentioned that your subjects can be pretty bloodthirsty if they think they’re getting pushed aside? Mother says some of returning colonials are ready to get rid of the monarchy entirely and start voting for their leaders. By the way, sixty-three days until the wedding. I think we should just skip the next sixty-two of them. Or elope in the Earth Kingdom six months ago.

Zuko pinned the note up above his work table despite (because of) that last remark and reminded himself to let the incoming colonials vote about something. He decided that it was worth upsetting some of his father’s loyalists about, since the colonials outnumbered them. Besides, she’d been right about the official state wedding being a horrible idea.

He wished he could at least see Mai, talk to her in person, and while he’d enjoy nothing more than being able to make out with her or more, at this point he would settle for the chance to sit in the same room with her. Zuko cursed the herd of advisors who followed him everywhere, and the flock of foreign dignitaries and the – the murder of ambitious young noblewomen making a new career out of sucking up to his fiancee. He’d only wished he could order everyone to leave them both alone, forever a couple of times. And he hadn’t actually given that order, or begged Uncle to abandoned his semiretirement and come back because Zuko was was going completely insane. Yet.

Between private diplomatic meetings – General How and Chief Hakoda (Sokka’s dad would forgive him for skipping out, Zuko hoped. A lot.) – he wrote out a few quick characters and sent them to Mai’s pai sho circle (“Mai’s pai sho circle”: number 398 on the list of things he never expected to attribute to her; Zuko could do groveling at his former enemies if it meant peace, but he thanked any available, applicable higher power every day for Mai’s unexpected capability at politick.). Zuko gave the runner two gold pieces, a kid no older than seven, his green eyes betraying mixed parentage, and told him to go faster than he’d ever gone before. With any luck Zuko would be first, this time. He took off at a run himself, robes streaming behind him and making him look really undignified.

He had run these corridors as a kid, not as a runner but for the sake of learning the lay of the palace and all the places it boasted to hide and escape. Even at the height of power Zuko’s ancestors were a bunch of paranoiacs, insisting that their young know how to flee if they had to. This time he ran through he kitchens, grinning at the collective Look the cooks gave him and laughing at their rolled eyes. He never wanted his people to be afraid to say their Fire Lord couldn’t make a fool of himself. Past the food storages rooms, underground into a series of root and wine cellars and up again, through the palace laundry and out into an extinct lava tube that’d been converted for storage years ago.

For now it looked empty enough; no one in sight as far as he could see either up or down the chamber. Ninth door on the left, the black-rock walls melted into a smooth, rippled puddle on the floor and covered over in steel. The natural hall glowed orange with the gas lamps. Zuko didn’t knock, but eased himself in through the bare crack he made when he slid the door open with a creak from long-unused steel hinges.

“You’re getting slow in your old age,” Mai said over the click of spark stones between her fingers. Her lantern caught and the space around them flared to light and dust and buckets and brooms; Mai set the lantern down and smirked at him. Her voice held an uncharacteristically light lilt, even for these days.

“How do you do – mmph – ”

Zuko leaned into the kiss, forgetting Mai’s mockery to focus instead on breathing and the the heat of her lips against his. One hand fell to her hip while the other rose to the back of Mai’s skull to tangle in her hair. He could feel her breath against his cheek as Mai pulled back just enough to rest her forehead against his. Zuko opened his eyes at the same time Mai opened hers, bright and wicked sharp and this woman could turn him into a platter of sashimi if she wanted to, and he’s really, really missed this.

“– that?” Mai finished. Her breath came in quick, shallow puffs. Zuko felt her raised eyebrow more than he saw it.

“Get here so fast,” he corrected, pulling her close to kiss her neck. Mai smelled ridiculously good.

“That’s my secret,” Mai said. She shifted her weight to send Zuko over her hip – not in a throw but a rearrangement of him to exactly where Mai wanted him. “And you don’t get to sneak up on me,” she said. And oh – she smirked with her voice. At least he expected the look on her face that went with it. Zuko moved in for another kiss, this one long and slow and fierce, as much teeth hands and flame in the pit of his stomach as it was lips.

This time Zuko pulled away, because if he didn’t he was sure he would suffocate. He didn’t let go of her, though, but let the palms of his hands rest on the small of her back. Mai held her arms around his shoulders; Zuko felt weeks of tension slip away from him, down and out the soles of his feet. He wanted to soak up all her warmth he could, right now, before he had to turn around and head back out the door and start being Fire Lord again.

They could wait two more months, he told himself. They would probably even have a better chance at getting ten minutes alone together then. “Do you think it would scandalize the courtiers if I made out with my wife in public?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Mai replied, and kissed him again. Zuko kissed back for all he was worth.

*

None of the Big Four. Contains underage making out (17-year-old Zuko and 16-year-old Mai.) (Return to header.)

*

Tendrils of smoke and dust rose above the ruined Fire Nation Palace. Somehow the edges of the extinct volcano managed to keep their integrity despite Toph’s onslaught below; maybe she’d thought of that and not bent any earth that couldn’t survive being moved. In the complex, Aang could just make out people moving – the palace guards who worked for Zuko now and their friends, no longer imprisoned, straightening up the worst of the mess and and digging out the few people they’d accidently buried under falling rubble.

Katara’s hand felt cool beneath his fingers. The soft, heavy warmth in the air around them, even this close to the ground, promised a quick beginning to the monsoon season. “I … have to go,” Aang said, voice low. He felt about a hundred and twelve years old right then.

“Mm,” she replied, leaning into his shoulder. “They’ll worry if we’re gone too long, yeah.”

“Not that.” They shouldn’t stay gone too long, either, not with so much work that still needed to get done, but in the days since the Battle of Sozin’s Comet, since Fire Lord Ozai and Azula’s deaths, Aang finally felt like he had time to sit down and take a breath again. Time to think about a future longer than a few months. Time to think about Roku and Kyoshi and Kuruk and Yangchen, about himself. About another hundred years worth of responsibility he didn’t know if he was strong enough to handle. At least his friends would never let him even try to take care of the world alone. They’d all proved that a long time ago.

“Whatever it is, we don’t have to rush it.”

Aang angled his head to meet Katara’s glance. The bruise ringing her right eye, courtesy of some anonymous Fire Nation soldier, had faded almost completely back into her skin. He didn’t mention it; the echos of a thousand other lives – lives he had to find again, reconnect with, restore to the net of spirits that made up the Avatar – didn’t do a thing to tell him the encounter left Katara shaken. She used bloodbending to disarm the man who’d tried to kill her.

It was way past time that she – that all his friends – knew a world outside this war.

“I think Zuko would track me down himself and try to feed me to the sun dragons if I disappeared right now,” Aang replied.

Katara’s giggle carried out across the caldera as it strengthened and snowballed into a full belly laugh. She curled around her knees, gripping her ankles, shaking with each round of laughter. After a while she slowed, then sat up and knuckled tears out of her eyes. “You disappear again, I’ll track you down myself and feed you to the tiger-seals. Mister Big Important Firelord Pants can have what’s left of you for the dragons.”

“Then I promise I won’t disappear,” Aang said quickly, grinning himself. Katara took his hand again. When she squeezed his fingers he felt a tornado, a lightening storm and an earthquake go through his insides all at once. He wanted to kiss her again. No, Aang decided, he reallywanted to kiss her again. The thousand other voices – just four, now – thought Katara was right, though. They were both still kids, as much as anyone who’d spent the last year saving the world could still be kids, and they needed both finish growing up. He said, “I’m gonna go find the Airbenders.”

She pulled away, her mouth open and her eybrows quirked together. Katara shook her head a little afterwards, then closed her mouth and looked away from him. She sighed before she glanced back. Katara looked like she was fighting to keep from looking completely confused – still, one corner of her mouth turned down, like she was thinking her words through carefully before she said them.

“I know it sounds crazy,” he said.

“Not just crazy; it sounds impossible, unless you can – ” Katara stopped, then started again, “You’re the last Airbender. The last Air Nomad, period. We’ve been all over the world and we didn’t see – Aang, you’re the only Airbender anyone’s seen in the last hundred years.”

“But the world’s a big place.” And besides, they hadn’t looked for any other Airbenders. “But … even if all the original Air Nomads are dead – ”

“You don’t think they are.”

“I hope they’re not.” He watched the motion down in the city, komodorhino-pulled carts and rhino handlers picking their way through broken streets. They’d needed every single last cracked road tile. Hopefully, Zuko had told them all earlier, he could get their amnesty paperwork drawn up and signed before someone got the stupid idea to get the City Works bureaucrats and their guards involved. Aang met the head of City Works earlier this morning. The man reminded him of Momo on the scent of some lychee nuts – nervous, twitchy and single-mindedly easy to irritate all at once. Chief Arnook hadn’t been even half that irritated after the siege of the north ended. “But even if they are gone, I – ” Aang stopped. He knew how silly it was for him to think saying it out loud would jinx the idea, but still. He wanted to be careful. “I think I can teach people Airbending.”

Katara looked at Aang like he’d just turned into a bear.

“I am not following you,” she said at last.

“Your people learned waterbending from the Moon and Ocean spirits,” he said.

Katara nodded. “Go on.”

“Earthbending:”

“From the badger-moles.”

“And Firebending comes from the sun dragons. The Air Nomads – skybison taught us how to airbend. Appa’s still here, and – ” Aang was thinking out loud now. “It’ll be harder to do, if I can’t find the other Air Nomads’ great-grandkids, but bending is about what your spirit is and who you are, not who you’re related to.”

Katara said what Aang really didn’t want to say out loud, her voice low and thoughtful. “If it works – ”

“– I know it’ll work – ”

“– then the Avatar Cycle won’t be broken when you – ”

“– when I die. Teo and Ty Lee both already want to try. This has to work. If it doesn’t the world might be in the same place it was when you found me in the iceberg.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

Katara looked upwards, toward the sky and the thick, fluffy clouds floating above them. Aang could have sworn he’d seen those exact same clouds a hundred years ago. “Sounds like – ” his friend took a breath, then started over. “Next you’re going to say you have to do this by yourself.”

Aang nodded, slowly. He rested his head on Katara’s shoulder and she leaned into him. “Yeah,” he replied, “I think it is.”

After another pause, Katara murmured, “The hard part is that I think you might be right.”

*

None of the Big Four. (Return to header.)