The Rift in Family
Meta Knight / Dragato / Tali
Meta Knight / Dragato / Tali
Little things could spiral into the worst situations with enough time. Sometimes people didn't fit in. Sometimes friends and family fought, and it never went well for anyone. Relationships took building, but moreso, they took maintaining. And fixing, if things were broken.
Meta and Kirby didn't often get to visit their family in West Nova. Kes, the wife of their family, hardly got to visit at all, as warm as the weather was. Too much sun for her, who would rather stake out in South Nova with her own clansmen. Everyone largely understood it and wished her well.
But still, they didn't get to visit that often. Meta missed them, and wished he weren't so far away, and Kirby just wanted to play with his friends and family and eat a lot of food and listen to his grandfather tell stories. Not seeing family so often meant they missed things, although Meta tried to keep up with the times how he could.
One couldn't really keep up with growing children though.
Tali was Dragato's little girl, and she was a spitfire to outshine all spitfires. Meta thought Kirby was bad, then Tali was worse. Tali just didn't think about things before doing them - she wanted food! She wanted to play! And given that she was a Zoos that was part dragon, well, nobody was going to stop her if she wanted something.
Nobody in the family blamed her. She was only six, and she was a special little girl. But when one lived in West Nova, where most of the inhabits were harmless, and you had a dragon-zoos hybrid for a child, things got sticky. Dragato loved her, though - she was a sweetheart with a heart of fire and wind, he thought. She just needed to grow.
Growing, though, meant she got stronger - bigger, tougher, larger teeth, longer claws, more muscle. Tali never thought anything of this. The adults in their family just geared up to be able to handle her. Meta, on his arrival to Bate's house, practically went bug-eyed at the sight of her out in the open yard.
"They grow so fast!"
"That they do, huh? I'm pretty impressed with her wings myself!"
Dragato thought it was funny, the look on Meta's face.
Meta, in particular, loved his family, as much as anyone did theirs. Visiting Bate and the rest was a time to be happy. Although he only got to see everyone a few times a year, he tried to savor each occasion.
He knew Tali, a little bit! A real rough-houser, Arthur told him often. Always up to something. And didn’t Meta know it, from the few occasions he had to walk and visit and see that Tali had dug up some rosebushes, or broken a panel of wood in his teacher’s wall from a too-rough headbutt.
She was a sweet girl! But he did worry sometimes.
"Hi, Tali!"
And Kirby, two years her junior, with only a sprouting of wings on his back freshly feathered, well, he was in awe. Kirby loved Tali, himself - he loved his whole family, yes, but Tali was so cool. She could do things nobody else could, and one of the first things he had wanted to do was see how big of a branch she could chomp this time. A really big one, as it turned out!
"Why don't you go play with her, huh? Your uncle Arthur says Atticus is doing pretty good today!" Dragato says cheerfully.
"In moderation," Arthur says with a flat expression. Atticus stands beside him, silent.
Him, he'd never really trusted Tali and her bulk and wild manners - not around Atticus, who was always so poorly especially so young. He didn't blame the girl, but he had his own to look after, and Dragato understood that. It was just a good day, with lots of people around, and he had just wanted Atticus to have fun with his cousins. "Nothing wild, kids. Alright?"
“Yeah!” Kirby shouts, but whether he’s agreeing or just yelling in excitement, nobody knows, not even Kirby himself. “Come on, Atti! I missed you guys! Come on!” And Meta had, of course, let them go.
Atticus had brought his ball for the occasion today, and Kirby was very keen to make use of it while the adults were off talking and hoarding the food to themselves. Atticus had been hesitant, knowing Tali, but he had wanted to play and he had asked his father lots of times to play.
They kick it around. Atticus can’t kick very hard, but Kirby never minded. It was fun anyway! The sun is overhead, the sky doesn’t have any clouds at all, and everything really is nice.
Tali doesn’t pay attention to any of that though. Tali doesn’t think very much – she just does things, and then only seems to realize she’s done something wrong when someone is upset. Tali loves her cousins, and she wants to play with them, and that is exactly what she’s doing.
She’s just.
“Tali, you gotta stop catching the ball! Let Atti have a turn!”
Very excited.
Kirby tries to kick the ball with not a lot of force, but Tali is a lot like a Gao Gao or one of those scarfies his dad told him to stay away from. She sees the ball and she jumps for it, wings flares and filed claws at the ready.
Tali loves playing catch! Kirby loves watching her but he wants to kick the ball to Atticus! No matter how he tries to angle it – the side, throwing a stick – Tali always catches it, digging her feet into the dirt and scraping up grass. Atticus looks and feels kind of lost about the whole thing.
“Sorry!” Tali says, and she’s said it each time now, setting the ball down and kicking it back for Kirby to take. “Not do again!”
She will. She’s already honed in on it and Kirby hasn’t even moved his foot yet.
Atticus, fifteen feet away, sees all of this and has a bad feeling in his stomach that he can’t understand. Kirby, though, just wants to make sure Tali doesn’t catch it this time.
“Ready? I’m gonna kick it now!” Kirby calls.
Atticus braces. Tali also braces.
Kirby lifts his little foot and kicks.
The ball goes soaring and-
“Tali, no!”
Tali leaps into the air, wings flapping to give her a boost. Nothing is on her mind but the ball, arcing its way through the air because Kirby had hit it a little too hard. For Atticus, it’s an action scene in slow motion, watching the way Tali doesn’t even reach out to grab it, or kick it, but opens her mouth with all of her shiny, sharp teeth and-
The ball gets caught square in her maw. She chomps down with the force of a dragon capable of breaking a boulder three times her size.
Kirby doesn’t need to have heard the popping sound to know that that ball was dust. Man.
The game doesn’t last long after that. Actually, it stops – because the ball is popped and just rubber in Tali’s mouth, and Atticus had had that ball since he was just a little guy, and to see it – a gift from his grandfather – ruined, well that upset him quite a bit.
Kirby opens his mouth to say something and doesn’t get a word in. Atticus, distraught, tears in his eyes and little lungs starting to heave, runs faster than Kirby has ever seen him go, bumping past him on the way and leaving Tali and Kirby alone.
Tali looks at Kirby with the ball still in her mouth. What’s left of it anyway. She, who just hadn’t thought of it, now thinks about it quite a bit, and she feels that familiar little cold in her stomach when she’s messed up again.
The adults are still milling around amongst each other and the picnic table they have set up. Just Arthur, Meta, Dragato, Ramset – others are off for the moment, but they’re sure to visit eventually while Meta and Kirby are here.
Atticus runs to his father’s arms. Kirby can’t hear much of what they’re saying, but his cousin’s crying is hard to miss, and the adults crowd about him enough to cut him from view. He’d lost his ball, and Tali did it, and he was sad.
Dragato, for his part, isn’t so surprised, although he is a bit worn. He looks at Arthur, holding his son in his arms, and the familiar needle of guilt pokes into his stomach. Arthur also isn’t surprised, but he sure isn’t happy either.
“Let me take him in,” Arthur mutters. “Teacher can handle it probably better than I can.”
“Let me know how it goes.”
Dragato steps out of the throng after, watching as Arthur carries Atticus into Bate’s home before he himself makes his own way to the two children. Tali never meant to do these things. She just did them.
Tali looks terrible. Kirby, by now patting her arm and trying to offer words of comfort, doesn’t look much better. Both of them perk up at the sight of him and shuffle over quickly.
“A little incident, children?” He says, and he’s careful to keep his tone light enough so as not to perturb them more than they are.
“Tali popped his ball,” Kirby says bluntly. He points.
“I see that,” Is Dragato’s somewhat bemused reply. That’ll do it, he figures.
Tali doesn’t waste a moment. Atticus is also her friend, even if his father won’t often let them play together – they make flower crowns together and have funny talks and she loves him just like she loves her papa and everyone else.
She runs over to Dragato, who scoops her up on instinct, and shoves the remains of the ball in his face, a grey, star-speckled thing that had no small amount of tooth punctures riddled through. “Fix!”
If Atticus is sad because of his ball, then a better ball will make everything alright and he won’t be sad anymore. That’s her thought.
Dragato wishes it were that simple. He barely has to even hold the scrap to know that no amount of work is ever going to bring it back. He holds it in his free hand, giving it a perusing look – mostly for Tali’s sake.
“I’m sorry,” He sighs. “I don’t think we can fix this, sweetheart. But! I’m sure we can buy a new one for Atti just like this! Something that can handle your teeth, huh?”
“Wouldn’t that have to be made of metal then, Uncle?”
Dragato snorts to himself and gives Tali a cuddle. Tali, along with him, gives a giggle, maybe because it made Dragato laugh more than anything. Kirby has a point.
“We’ll see,” He says agreeably, and now that he sees that both children are a little more settled, and Tali’s spirits a bit brighter, he moves to sit her on down, giving her a few pats to the head. “For now, let’s just focus on apologizing, okay? You didn’t mean to, and I’m sure Atticus will get that when you say you’re sorry.”
“Yeah, you didn’t mean to! You were having fun!” Kirby grins and kicks his foot. “Atti will get it! We can get a new ball and he’ll love it sooo much more than this old one!”
Kirby doesn’t actually know that, but Tali grins anyway, a wide toothy smile full of sharp teeth and lots of gum. Her tail thunks mightily against the ground, squishing the grass beneath, and Kirby can feel the tremor in his feet.
“Yah!” She says. She needs to say sorry, and get a ball, and things will be fine, and they can go back to playing. “Sorry! Okay! Go, go!”
Because if she needs to say sorry, she needs to go see Atti to do it, and that is what she’s going to do, and she turns toward the direction of the door a ways away to go and do exactly that right now.
“Give Atticus a rest first, okay?” Is Dragato’s interjection. A hand comes down to grab her just before she can actually move. “He’s gone to see your grandfather right now and we don’t want to interrupt them just yet. Okay?”
It’s probably a bad idea, so soon after Atticus had been taken in side.
“Oh… Um.”
“It’ll be alright, Tali.”
Tali feels the hand ruffle the top of her head. Dragato’s voice soothed in its calm playfulness, a tone that Tali always looked to for comfort. He was the only one who never got upset when she did things, no matter how much she might’ve upset others. Things would be okay if he said so.
“Okay.”
Dragato takes one more look at them both – Tali, doe-eyed and sweet and so misunderstood but trying her best, and Kirby who, while a bit lost, seems chipper enough with the pep talk. Good kids, both of them.
“You two have fun, alright?”
“Yeah!” Kirby thinks they will!
And Dragato steps back, calm in his reassurance, to go and revisit the rest of their family.
Arthur has re-emerged from the house by the time he comes over, sans one Atticus. “How are things?” Dragato inquires, and is graced by one rather unsophisticated shrug of the shoulder.
“You know Atticus and teacher. Two peas in a pod. Both asleep right now.”
“Will he be alright?”
“Yes, I think so. He wasn’t hurt – just upset. A nap with his grandfather will do him some good.”
All told, Arthur can’t really harbor any ill will. It could have gone a lot worse, knowing Tali’s penchant for impulsive behavior, and her track record for breaking food stalls and smashing rocks. The ball was a lost cause, but it was salvageable. Tali’s just a very strong girl.
Dragato admired it about him. Arthur had hang-ups, but it was out of safety, not fear or anger. It felt like finding a needle in a haystack, the reputation Tali had in town these days. He understood. Things would be fine eventually.
Tali, though. She was never good at waiting.
She and Kirby do play. Kirby, now lacking a ball to kick, decides instead to hand her a bunch of sticks to play the game of how-hard-can-Tali-bite. It’s fun! She bites pretty hard and smashes everything he gives her.
But Atticus doesn’t come back out so Tali can apologize, and Tali really wants to apologize so they can play again. It’s forefront in her head, no matter how many sticks she bites and how many rocks she breaks.
Why do they have to wait? How long do they have to wait? Tali doesn’t want to. She can fix it so she will.
Kirby is in the middle of handing her a particularly burly branch when he sees Tali stand up from her place sitting in the grass. There’s a twist of determination on her face, her snout wrinkled and eyes set and bright.
“What are you do- Hey, where are you going? Taliii!”
“Say sorry!”
“Wait! Uncle said--”
Tali is already setting off for the door.
Kirby has to act fast. Tali likes to do things and uncle had said to let Atti sleep. Atti’s gonna be pretty mad if they do something uncle had said not to do – Atticus and a lot of other people.
“Hey!”
Kirby butts himself in front of her just as they reach the front door. Tali is mid-way through reaching for the doorknob, and even if she can’t reach it – she could probably break the door down anyway if she wanted. “Flowers! Atti likes flowers! We could pick flowers for him and let him sleep, okay? That would make him super happy!”
Because he really doesn’t wanna get in trouble.
Tali freezes in place first, now that Kirby is in front of her. But Tali was never one to turn down a good idea, and Atti loves flowers, and if they give him flowers that will make him happy, and maybe that would work.
“Yeah!” She shouts, and Kirby doesn’t have time to prepare before she grabs his arm in an iron grip – ow, ow, okay – and drags him off around the back of the house.
Grandfather Bate prided himself on a large, healthy garden of a variety of plants, from fruits to vegetables to bushes and flowerbeds. It was a pastime of his, useful for homegrown food and lovely to look at. It was a point of pride, and one of the things that stood out most among everything about his home. The grandchildren enjoyed playing in it and he loved watching the culmination of his efforts flourish.
Into this garden does Tali go, Kirby dragged along for the ride, with no other thought than picking out a bunch of nice flowers that she knows Atti will like. There are so many to choose from, though, and for a moment she finds herself at a pause because how can one pick from everything?
Kirby, now no longer being dragged, has the freedom to look too. Unlike Tali, though, he’s pretty quick to point something out. “Oh, that one! What about that!”
Tali looks.
There’s a flowering bush growing just up underneath the windowsill of the house. Not big, not small, just right and neatly trimmed – and lots of flowers of a bright pale blue color, open and in bloom, reaching for sunlight.
“Pretty!” She says loudly, because they really are pretty, prettier than anything else here. Atti will love them! “Okay!”
So off they go to pick a few, because grandfather won’t mind. Err. Won’t mind much, because Tali isn’t graceful about her picking methods – it’s more like she yanks them right out of a bush, hardly mindful of the thorns and the branches.
Kirby has to go slower; his skin’s too soft to be able to stand the hazards the way Tali’s can, with her thick dragon’s hide and all. Still, he tries, and he has a fun time! It’s enough such that he fails to notice the buzzing in his ear. At first.
Not so much Tali, though.
First it’s a buzz to her paw, which she swats without much thought. Then something tickles at her ear and she brushes at it distractedly to scratch the stray itch. Little things, here and there, and she doesn’t notice a thing out of place at all until something hits her in the eye and that makes her huff.
“What!” She barks to nothing in particular, turning her head up from the bush. Bugs, buzzing around. Bees, papa said they were, all over her and her flowers. “Go away!”
“Tali?”
She lets out a snort and swats with a paw, again and again. The buzzing just gets louder, and worse, and a little more prickly on her skin, and it just makes her more frustrated because why are they bothering her?
“Go away!” She barks, loud enough that she doesn’t notice Kirby’s yelp as the swarm eventually hits him too.
Bees don’t sting without a reason. It’s a last resort. But they will, and can, if pushed, and some bugs are meaner than others. Kirby may not have bothered them himself, but Tali was angry enough that each swipe and bite and snap stirred up a real frenzy that knew no real target.
Tali only notices an annoyance. Kirby, on the other hand, feels a sharp pinch on his hand. Makes him yelp and back up, the flowers dropping in a pile on the floor. “Tali-” He starts, and then another sting on his arm. Another one, another--
He yelps again. Swings his arms to swat them off, but it only makes things worse.
“Tali!”
It grabs her attention, the way his tone turns and wavers. Tali knows it’s not a good sound, had heard Atticus and Cellic and others cry enough that she knew the sound and smell of tears like she knew desert heat.
She turns her head quickly and squawks.
“Kirby!”
Bees on her friend, she sees. And what do people do when bees are around?
There aren’t any bugs inside.
“Give hand! We go!”
Tali tries to grab his hand and Kirby runs with her to the back door. If they go inside, they won’t have anymore buzzing and Kirby won’t be upset. Grandfather Bate will help.
She reaches, prepares to open the door, yank it off of its hinges if she has to -
Freezes.
Tali is impulsive, but she remembers some things. Fear and upset most of all. People were like that a lot around her, and sometimes her uncles and grandpa could be too.
She broke the door once trying to get in. Remembered how the handle had cracked like nothing in her grip and the door had burst into a million little pieces. Grandfather was so upset, even if he hadn’t acted like it. Uncle Arthur had gotten mad at her too, and she remembered that too.
Had broken a wall with her strong head when uncle Meta came to visit. She wanted to show him how fast she could run with her feet and hands and had made him so mad that he had sent her outside.
They’d probably get upset again. Atti already was.
Kirby lets out a noise that veers toward a sob that he can’t hold back, and Tali snorts and whirls on around. He’s in pain, and it hurts, and he doesn’t know what Tali is doing now or why, but there’s fire in her eyes – and in her mouth.
“Go away!”
She hears Kirby and his voice isn’t happy, and the buzz is very, very loud, and these things itch and get everywhere.
Kirby doesn’t like it either, and she isn’t letting anything bother her cousin.
Tali doesn’t think so much beyond these simple thoughts, and when swinging her paws don’t get rid of them, she resorts to just closing her eyes, opening her mouth, and spewing a vat of flame in the first direction she can hear them.
Kirby sees all of this, and his little heart starts to race because now Tali is shooting fire, which would ordinarily be super cool, but not when his skin itches and burns and there’s buzzing in his ears and tears down his face, and now there’s fire starting to slowly spread across the bushes with a big heat that stings his face from how close it is.
This home isn’t fireproofed. This is a green planet, a very lush one, and fire-breathing was, while not unheard of, definitely not accounted for when it came to the infrastructure.
Tali’s fire isn’t the strongest – little flames, not even much of a stream – but in a garden, even just a spark is all someone needs.
Things catch. Pretty quickly. Grandfather Bate’s garden was as lush as it came, and an open fire never did plants any good. Fire caught, fire spread, and things get progressively worse and worse.
And Tali keeps going. She feels the heat like a pleasant buzz, warm against her armor-like hide, familiar and toasty. This way, that, wherever her ears can detect even a faint buzz. She hears crackling and the calling of someone, smells smoke, but it’s a distant thing to her right at that second. This was her environment and she felt no inclination that it could ever be dangerous to her mind.
She doesn’t see the way flame spreads across flowering bushes, across flowerbeds both in bloom and yet to unravel their occupants. Crawling their way down the rows of grasses and cereal plants line inching, flaming slugs, catching onto the nearby trees and carving scorched paths up bark and branch.
Doesn’t see how the fire crawls from the bushes, from the gardens, onto the outside furniture, to light up a parasol into an ashen wreathe that stinks of fabric and chemical and exudes coal black smoke.
Doesn’t see the way, eventually, that flame stats to crawl right up the wall, to arc high, high above and snare itself onto the first shingle of the roof, hanging just over the window sill. And spread further out on its merry way.
To her in those very, very few minutes, it simply feels like warmth – and an old, ancient home.
“Tali!”
---------------------------
It doesn’t take long for the adults to notice something is wrong.
It could have been Ramset, who sensed more than saw anything amiss but knew by the shift in the air. Or maybe Arthur, who caught the scent of ash and burning leaves and felt himself bristle in offense. Meta, who noticed the rising tension as everyone’s voices started to fall hush.
Dragato, who felt the stillness in the air and knew something, just before someone looks up and sees--
“Bate’s roof--”
“—Is that fire?”
--And the alarm inside pierces, loud, long, and shrill.
Fire.
All of those present are warriors, in some way, shape, or form. They’ve had blood on their hands for years, ever since they were teenagers, and even Dragato, who had left that life early, was not an exception.
It is, however, rather difficult to keep a cool head when the children are unaccounted for in their quick headcount. Particularly in Arthur’s case, who knows immediately that both Atticus and his teacher are still inside.
“Go find the others,” He bites, a quick order on a sharp tongue, turning around on a hairpin movement and sprinting to the door. His mind is reduced to a needlepoint awareness, tunnel vision with no regard to himself, his size, the flames snaking above or the smoke or the sound of crackling wood as something very quickly groans and gives inside with a terrifying snap.
He’ll throw himself into the kindling if he has to, if it means his son survives.
But he doesn’t have to.
The door slams open, his glove the only thing keeping it from searing his skin, and a blur of green and wings and muffled coughing rams into his arms, and it’s all he can do to catch the thing before it knocks him on his rear end.
“What—”
“Dad—”
“Atticus-”
Arthur’s arms tighten their hold and his teeth grit at the sound of his son’s labored breathing, the hacking through his already weak lungs. There’s a bit of soot on his face, in his wings, the smoke is acrid even from here.
Everything goes in a blur, too fast and too slow. He looks up, automatically turns to shield the boy against the worst of it. “Teacher!” He calls, “Teacher!”
“Go!”
There.
Further within, amidst the broken and burning wood and the crumbling furniture, carpet, and décor of what had once been his teacher’s living room, he sees him. A grand sight Bate was under most circumstances, with a pair of taloned wings to impress anyone, now he looks nothing short of miserable.
Bate’s arm falls weakly from where he had thrown the boy from his arms clear across the length of the house. Crumpled on hands and knees fallen from his chair, wings askew, limp at his sides, and Arthur sees immediately that he cannot move.
“Teacher!”
“Go!” Bate roars, and now Arthur sees it. Focuses enough to finally notice that something, here, is keeping his teacher pinned. Wood, an entire pillar of it, likely fallen from the ceiling, and Arthur’s heart races and roars as loud as his teacher, as loud as the rising fires and the decaying home of his childhood.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thinks distantly. How did fire spread this quickly? What had happened?
This was supposed to be a nice day. Everything was supposed to be okay. And now…
“Kirby!”
Meta shoves him to the side, son and all, so beset by his own animal panic for his own son that he can think nothing else, and Arthur doesn’t blame him. He stares frantically, expression twisted into a horrific thing of pinprick eyes and a snarl in his teeth. Nothing else matters. “Teacher! Is Kirby here!”
Bate can only shake his head and gaze blearily at them as the last of his adrenaline leaves his body and the smoke inhalation dulls his senses to a tired fog. He doesn’t expect to make it out of here.
But at least Atticus is safe.
Meta curses, curses again because it’s both parts relieving and terrifying in equal measure, because if Kirby isn’t here then maybe he’s safe, but if he isn’t here then where is he? And his teacher, they can’t leave him--
“I found them!”
They all had had something to lose. Dragato wasn’t the exception, but while those two had clogged the doorway, he had thought to branch out.
“Dragato! The air! I’ll get the fire extinguisher!” Teacher Ramset shouts. Already, he’s sprinting off towards Bate’s shed, and Dragato will thank him later on.
“Right!”
The others couldn’t have gotten far, Dragato thought, and had spread his wings and set off to the sky.
He’d looked, frantic, quickly, for any sign of brown-grey and pink, of little wings both of mottled leather and feathery white, and had seen immediately that neither of them were afield. Had turned his head, eyes scanning each bit of color he could see, and--
“Children!”
He swoops down to land just outside the garden fence. Everything here is burnt to cinders, flames burning high, and Dragato feels the sweat on his brow as heat comes too close. Trees, vegetation, all of it taken to the fires. He has to be very, very careful getting close to the house to avoid getting caught on fire himself.
The children are tucked against the wall. A little corner of stone, and it’s maybe the only place safe enough for them if they hadn’t been taken by the flame, so close to it as they were.
“Papa!”
“Uncle!”
Their voices are a collective squeal, and Dragato curses to himself. He’s too far, surrounded by too many hazards, and he isn’t protected.
“Stay still!” He shouts. The smoke is stifling. “I’m going to get you both, hold on!”
He’s going to need to wing it.
Ramset, sprinting back from Bate’s back shed with the fire extinguisher in his hands, steps back on scene just in time to see Dragato sprint through it all, vaulting over the fence and using every old warrior’s instinct he possesses to block his face, duck, and vault through the mess to where the children sit huddled against themselves.
Like Arthur, Dragato’s mind melts into a finely sharpened point, with only one goal in mind. The flame snaps at him, grazes, there’s going to be a few burns tomorrow he’s sure, but he gets there, and the children clamor into his arms the moment he reaches to scoop them up.
“Hold on!”
And he arcs his wings and leaps back into the air, before anyone else can get hurt.
“Dragato!” His teacher calls from below.
“I’ve got them!”
Dragato angles his flight to where his teacher stands, landing with a thunk and shuffling them a safer distance away. Ramset gestures, hands him the extinguisher, and Dragato feels his stomach fall and tucks them close just on instinct.
Tali sniffles. Dragato checks her quickly.
“Oh, thank Nova you’re alright.”
Nothing on her, from wing to ear to tail. Soot, yes. Tear tracks on her face and the worst expression he’s ever seen on her. But no cuts, no bruises, no burn marks but that was a given. She’s okay. She’s okay. Ohhh, thank NOVA.
And Kirby--
He stalls.
That...is a lot of bee stings.
“I’ll take them to the hospital,” Ramset says quickly, snapping him out of it, “But you can fly, and you have a Warp Star, and a level head on your shoulders. You need to put out the fires. Do you understand.”
Ramset knows it’s hard, when one’s children had been endangered. He knew the feeling, with his grandchildren, his nephews, his family, all of them. His boy only wanted the best for them all.
Dragato does hesitate. There’s no denying that he doesn’t. But he gives them up, both of them with mutters of comfort, for his frightened daughter, his nephew covered in welts but thankfully no burns but that was never a guarantee. He gives their shivering forms up to his father and teacher, takes the extinguisher, and nods with a hard, warrior’s look in his eye.
“Bate is out of the wreckage,” Ramset says as farewell. “Arthur’s taking him to the hospital as well, most likely. We’ll see each other again there.”
“Got it.”
Ramset leaves. Dragato doesn’t have it in him to think much more on it beyond the arduous task of putting out the fires.
Much as Arthur had thought, just a few minutes ago, Dragato thinks that today was supposed to be a good day.
-----------------------------------
Meta had not said one word to him in the past two hours.
Dragato felt the looming of something weighing him down like a pit in his stomach.
Bate’s house hadn’t survived the fire. Dragato would’ve been surprised if it had, considering the extent of the damage. After a torrent like that, there was very little left of it but a shell and the frame of what was once quite a quaint roof. They’d spent ages stamping out every bit of flame that they could, working together like a well-oiled, albeit quiet, machine.
It was fortunate, he had thought, that at least Bate was alive. Arthur had noted that while not severe, the damage would leave him in the hospital for some time; smoke inhalation on already poor lungs and a wooden beam over the back and the wings did a number on someone, as it turned out. He would recover with rest, some casts on his wings, and lots and lots of time. Thank NOVA for that.
The children would be alright. Atticus, with his own poor health, had gotten very, very lucky with just a few minor burns and a bit of rough coughing. A night of monitoring and he could go home like little else had happened, Mends had said.
Kirby had bandages, from a bit of minor bruising and the usual scrapes and bruising from something so chaotic, but mostly from the dozens of what were apparently bee stings making him look like a swollen little pimple.
“I’m okay!” He’d said cheerily amidst his hospital pudding. It’s not really that good, but he’ll eat anything sweet. “This is great! I need to do this more!”
“Uh, no you don’t.” Was Meta’s rebuttal. He was too tired to argue more about Kirby’s bedside table manners. Nor the fact that he was gorging himself on chocolate in the first place.
And Tali… Well. Tali was Tali. It’d probably have taken NOVA themselves to ever put a scratch on her, Dragato was convinced of that. Not one bruise or burn or anything – just tears and lots and lots of smoke.
She’d told him everything from her place there in his lap curled up in his arms, after she’d been cleaned and assessed and given the green light and Ramset had handed her off to her father. The flowers, the fire, the bees, all of it. It was an accident. She was sorry. She didn’t want anyone to hurt. She was so sorry. Sorry sorry.
Dragato had rubbed her back, soothed as best he could. She hadn’t meant to, and she had only been trying to help. She’d never hurt her family, Dragato murmured. Everyone would be okay, and everyone loved her.
There in that hospital lobby, Meta, sitting across the room, had said not one word. But Dragato felt the look against them both, burning with an emotion that Dragato knew but had not wanted to name.
Meta was unhappy. Beyond it. Meta was, for lack of a better word, livid.
And Meta didn’t bother to linger any longer with people who didn’t understand nor care just what their family had gone through.
He leaves.
Dragato exchanges a look with his teacher, settled beside him with an expression set into one of a certain kind of neutrality.
Ramset holds his arms out silently.
“I’ll be back,” Dragato sighs, and he deposits a half-asleep Tali gently into his teacher’s arms, and goes to maybe set things right.
-------------------------------------------
They can see the house from here.
Meta thinks bitterly to himself that it isn’t exactly much of a house anymore, is it. A house is for people to sleep in. To celebrate at, a place to eat food and bond with others. For Meta, in this case, it was and had been all three.
Teacher Bate’s home had been his and Kirby’s second residence. Home away from home. Just as much had it been the central point by which everyone gathered. If family wanted to meet, they did it at Bate’s house. He had a way of bringing everyone together.
And now it was gone. All of it. Food, mementos, precious things that Meta would never know of hidden in the depths of his teacher’s heart and mind. Gone. Not to mention his – Kirby’s – own belongings.
Not that they had brought much from home, but the sentiment mattered.
Meta has a sort of void, he thinks, in his head and his chest where feelings and thoughts ought to be. Kes said that warriors sometimes shut down certain facets of themselves in the face of hazardous conditions to complete their missions out in the wastes of South Nova. Survival couldn’t allow for the distraction of things like feelings and stray thoughts. Best keep it home.
That was all well and good, Meta thought, and it was a nice sentiment that Meta believed, but what exactly did it mean when he didn’t have a home to return to? When teacher didn’t have a home to return to? NOVA, what is he even going to tell him?
This was supposed to be a nice day.
“Meta?”
Dragato takes a careful step closer and stop several feet away. Meta doesn’t look at him, keeps his sights on the house, and Dragato knows that how he feels can’t be described in word alone.
“Meta…” He hesitates. “I really am sorry about what happened. I don’t think anyone could have predicted this, and I can’t understate how sorry I am that you, and Kirby, and Teacher Bate have to go through this.”
Dragato gets no response. Meta doesn’t consider it worthy of replying to.
“Teacher Ramset says it can be rebuilt, given enough time. You know that I’ll help you as much as I’m able to. Anything in my power, to fix this--”
“You can keep that girl away from us.”
….......
What?
Meta turns towards him, fully, away from the remains of Bate’s house, and the look in his eyes… Dragato’s never seen it before.
His wings raise automatically, in a gesture of defense.
“You know,” Meta says, and his tone oozes with something years in the making. “I tolerated your daughter because I knew Teacher wouldn’t want me kicking a fuss. His broken doors, his shattered windows. I dealt with it. Kids are kids, he’d say. They didn’t know any better. Even when he needed to sleep after babysitting because he was so sore he couldn’t do anything else. I dealt. Kids are kids.
“But this?”
Meta points. To the house, and his voice is acid. To the hospital, where the children are recovering.
“This? This? No. I don’t care if kids are kids. I don’t care if your daughter is too young to know better. Kirby is four and do you see him doing half the damage that your kid does on a daily basis?”
“Meta—”
“Don’t Meta me, Dragato. I’m not the only one who feels this way. You think Arthur doesn’t? When he doesn’t let his son around your kid? When the only time Atticus was, he got hurt? Guarantee you Arthur feels the same way I do – he just doesn’t have the gumption to speak up about it.”
Something feels weighted in his chest, and Dragato very carefully keeps his distance from it. Something of this feels too, too familiar.
“Kirby is in the hospital because of her. Teacher is in the hospital because of her. When is enough enough, Dragato? What is it going to take to get that through your skull? Does someone need to die for you to actually do something with her?”
“Meta,” Dragato steps in. “She is a child. You are getting angry over a child.”
“A child with no manners and no restraint who could have killed three people today!”
Dragato grits his teeth.
“You want to help?” Meta bites, and it feels good to let it out, every stray thought, every passing irritation, a ball of resentment settled like stone in his stomach bursting from his mouth like metaphysical tar. Dragato is angry? Let him be. Maybe he’ll hurt as much as everyone else does. “You two stay out of this family, out of our lives, out of this town. Go to North Nova – that’s where she ought to be.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Dragato says. “You know Bate loves her just as much as he loves all of his grandchildren. Please. Stop and take a deep breath. Just-- think. For a moment.”
“Think? Oh, I’m thinking plenty, and what do you think Bate is going to think when all of his belongings, his memories, all of it – is gone because of her? You think he’s gonna be happy? You think he’s gonna welcome her with open arms? Are you stupid?”
It feels far too familiar to Dragato. All of it feels like a tape on repeat, of so many different encounters, all ending the same way. North Nova, West Nova, it hardly mattered sometimes. Everyone was the same.
“Meta—”
“No, I’m done, Dragato. I’m done. You wanna help? Fine. Take that mutt and go to North Nova and actually teach her some manners and then maybe--”
Apparently family was no exception.
…
Meta has a curious moment in which things seem to blink in and out of existence, between one second and another.
One second, he speaks to Dragato. It’s about a lot of things, but mostly, it’s a lot of rage, not a lot of which makes much sense.
The next second, there’s a ringing in his ears, blood in his mouth, far too much sun on his face, and the feeling of dirt digging hard into his wings as something slams into his cheek with the full force of a lit bomb. At least, it feels that way.
And something blocks his view of the sky. Wings and blazing eyes that look like a demon beast ready to tear him apart.
Something holds him and drags him halfway up, and only distantly does he realize then that his mask is off, tossed somewhere into the distance.
Something presses against him, and dazed does he look down to see a foot, digging him into the dirt in a pin that he finds it hard to breathe through. He wiggles, just barely, and the foot presses harder, punishing.
He coughs.
“Shut up!”
It’s a scream, he thinks through the ringing in his ears. So why does it sound so muffled?
And Dragato, whose control was so resolute, who prided himself on a level head through thick and thin, who could no longer bear to hold on to it when Meta had deigned to slur his own niece.
Betrayal, it stung like. Betrayal and disgust that makes him want to puke. Because if Meta, his cousin, practically his brother, was willing to foul-mouth a child when it suited him--
What exactly did that say about how the thought of Tali? What did that say of the rest of their family?
(Maybe they were better off without them.)
“Dragato!”
He almost swings again, just for the sheer sting of it. Lost in his own head and he would be cursed if he let Tali’s own family demean her.
He would have, had his teacher not grabbed him and yanked his body back with far more force than the Sasuke would ever have been thought to have.
“Teacher,” He huffs, and he fights it on impulse, but Ramset knows him and pulls harder, gripping his shoulder in a vice. “He-- Let me go! He--”
“I know,” Ramset says firmly. “I know. But you cannot commit manslaughter over this. I’m not going to have my own student a criminal. Think of Tali – she needs you right now. Think.”
He gives Dragato a good shake. Just to get the nonsense out of his brain.
It does work. Somewhat.
“Go to her now, Dragato. I’ve taken her to Falspar and Pyrell’s for the moment, they have her handled. You can stay there. Don’t lose yourself.”
Dragato gives Meta one more look, and Meta, returning slowly to his senses, stares back with no words on his tongue to give.
“Okay.”
Even if it felt like some pyrrhic victory, being with Tali was better than being here, of all places.
In the end, Meta is left sans one Dragato, and a teacher who gives him a steady look that Meta cannot read.
Meta doesn’t know Ramset all too well. It isn’t that he doesn’t know Ramset at all, but the larger part of his child years had been spent in Bate’s care, and Ramset was more the fun uncle he knew by association.
As he cards through his memory of just a few minutes ago, and parses things together, and slowly comes back into a sense of rationality, there’s a kind of cold chill that crawls from his throat to his chest as the gravity of everything he had said settles in like a weight. Ramset continues to stare at him and says nothing.
Ramset is the fun one. The fun uncle, who annoys and teases Bate mercilessly even now. There’s something about the way that he pins Meta under his gaze like a bug under a magnifying glass that makes him feel very, very small.
He’d said a lot of things, and Ramset had probably heard him.
...He’d said a slur, he realizes distantly. Against Tali, Ramset’s granddaughter. And against Ramset’s own husband by association of the same species.
It’s a wonder Ramset hasn’t killed him himself. Honestly.
And then Ramset glances away. “So that just happened.” He says, and it sounds far too calm for Meta’s liking.
“That. Did happen.”
“You should get up. There’s a lot of work to do tomorrow.”
Meta realizes he’s still sitting on the grass. He does so immediately, awkwardly dusting grass off of his back. The pain in his cheek is going to smart, and Meta wouldn’t be surprised to find a very sizeable bruise by the time the day is over.
He...doesn’t know what to do.
There’s nothing Meta can say that can fix what he’d done. No easy way to just wipe off the mess and forgive and forget. Things didn’t work like that, and it’s his first time being in a situation like this.
He can’t. Quite looks Ramset in the eye. Feels afraid of something, and what it is, he doesn’t know. How do you recover from that?
“I would offer you my home, while all of this mess gets sorted out. But I imagine you won’t take it.”
Meta clears his throat. “Yeah. Sorry. Teacher and Kirby, they both need me at the hospital. Mends said I could stay, Kirby’s guardian and all, and teacher is…”
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time his house burned down.”
And that practically clocks him in the face for the second time that day. “I-- Huh?”
“Don’t worry about it. Point is – give your teacher – and your son! Great kid! - some credit. Nothing ever kept him down for long, else he wouldn’t be so spry!”
Ramset grins.
“Gotta look after your family, but don’t be too up in arms. Everything works out eventually.”
Meta stares, boggled.
Yes, look after his family. Of course, look after his family. It was one thing Kes loved about him, that he was so protective of them, and he prided himself on it. Family stuck together, and if it weren’t for Kirby’s training, he’d have probably moved back to West Nova some time ago.
That’s all he was doing, in the end. He had a right to be angry.
And, as Ramset looks at him keenly, that’s probably what Dragato had been doing too. He was as much a student and a father as Meta himself was.
Family. Different branches, not siblings, but still related, both doing the same things. And he’d opened his mouth and let it get him in trouble.
“Teacher Ramset,” He says. “About… About what I said, it--”
“I’m aware!” Ramset starts to leave, and that doesn’t feel right, to leave so quickly after- after everything, but, “I hear it well enough in your voice, but I’m not the one to be talking to about it. You probably know that!”
Yes, he knows. But how does he even go about fixing it? That, he doesn’t know at all.
“Regardless of what happens, I do hope the family stays together.” Ramset sighs. “Bate would miss Tali quite terribly, you know! She always gives him a good laugh when I’m not around. I think she got it from me, personally!”
Ramset winks.
Meta’s mouth twitches upward, just barely.
As Ramset leaves, Meta turns to take one more look at the house in the distance, still pluming with the smoke of long-faded flames. It’s gotten dark, he thinks, and now he can barely see it at all. Maybe it’s a little symbolic.
The house wasn’t the only thing that got burnt down today. Far from it. But a house...Dragato was right on that front. A house could be rebuilt in time.
Family ties, though?
That...was something Meta didn’t know the answer to.
He was afraid to find out.
Meta and Kirby didn't often get to visit their family in West Nova. Kes, the wife of their family, hardly got to visit at all, as warm as the weather was. Too much sun for her, who would rather stake out in South Nova with her own clansmen. Everyone largely understood it and wished her well.
But still, they didn't get to visit that often. Meta missed them, and wished he weren't so far away, and Kirby just wanted to play with his friends and family and eat a lot of food and listen to his grandfather tell stories. Not seeing family so often meant they missed things, although Meta tried to keep up with the times how he could.
One couldn't really keep up with growing children though.
Tali was Dragato's little girl, and she was a spitfire to outshine all spitfires. Meta thought Kirby was bad, then Tali was worse. Tali just didn't think about things before doing them - she wanted food! She wanted to play! And given that she was a Zoos that was part dragon, well, nobody was going to stop her if she wanted something.
Nobody in the family blamed her. She was only six, and she was a special little girl. But when one lived in West Nova, where most of the inhabits were harmless, and you had a dragon-zoos hybrid for a child, things got sticky. Dragato loved her, though - she was a sweetheart with a heart of fire and wind, he thought. She just needed to grow.
Growing, though, meant she got stronger - bigger, tougher, larger teeth, longer claws, more muscle. Tali never thought anything of this. The adults in their family just geared up to be able to handle her. Meta, on his arrival to Bate's house, practically went bug-eyed at the sight of her out in the open yard.
"They grow so fast!"
"That they do, huh? I'm pretty impressed with her wings myself!"
Dragato thought it was funny, the look on Meta's face.
Meta, in particular, loved his family, as much as anyone did theirs. Visiting Bate and the rest was a time to be happy. Although he only got to see everyone a few times a year, he tried to savor each occasion.
He knew Tali, a little bit! A real rough-houser, Arthur told him often. Always up to something. And didn’t Meta know it, from the few occasions he had to walk and visit and see that Tali had dug up some rosebushes, or broken a panel of wood in his teacher’s wall from a too-rough headbutt.
She was a sweet girl! But he did worry sometimes.
"Hi, Tali!"
And Kirby, two years her junior, with only a sprouting of wings on his back freshly feathered, well, he was in awe. Kirby loved Tali, himself - he loved his whole family, yes, but Tali was so cool. She could do things nobody else could, and one of the first things he had wanted to do was see how big of a branch she could chomp this time. A really big one, as it turned out!
"Why don't you go play with her, huh? Your uncle Arthur says Atticus is doing pretty good today!" Dragato says cheerfully.
"In moderation," Arthur says with a flat expression. Atticus stands beside him, silent.
Him, he'd never really trusted Tali and her bulk and wild manners - not around Atticus, who was always so poorly especially so young. He didn't blame the girl, but he had his own to look after, and Dragato understood that. It was just a good day, with lots of people around, and he had just wanted Atticus to have fun with his cousins. "Nothing wild, kids. Alright?"
“Yeah!” Kirby shouts, but whether he’s agreeing or just yelling in excitement, nobody knows, not even Kirby himself. “Come on, Atti! I missed you guys! Come on!” And Meta had, of course, let them go.
Atticus had brought his ball for the occasion today, and Kirby was very keen to make use of it while the adults were off talking and hoarding the food to themselves. Atticus had been hesitant, knowing Tali, but he had wanted to play and he had asked his father lots of times to play.
They kick it around. Atticus can’t kick very hard, but Kirby never minded. It was fun anyway! The sun is overhead, the sky doesn’t have any clouds at all, and everything really is nice.
Tali doesn’t pay attention to any of that though. Tali doesn’t think very much – she just does things, and then only seems to realize she’s done something wrong when someone is upset. Tali loves her cousins, and she wants to play with them, and that is exactly what she’s doing.
She’s just.
“Tali, you gotta stop catching the ball! Let Atti have a turn!”
Very excited.
Kirby tries to kick the ball with not a lot of force, but Tali is a lot like a Gao Gao or one of those scarfies his dad told him to stay away from. She sees the ball and she jumps for it, wings flares and filed claws at the ready.
Tali loves playing catch! Kirby loves watching her but he wants to kick the ball to Atticus! No matter how he tries to angle it – the side, throwing a stick – Tali always catches it, digging her feet into the dirt and scraping up grass. Atticus looks and feels kind of lost about the whole thing.
“Sorry!” Tali says, and she’s said it each time now, setting the ball down and kicking it back for Kirby to take. “Not do again!”
She will. She’s already honed in on it and Kirby hasn’t even moved his foot yet.
Atticus, fifteen feet away, sees all of this and has a bad feeling in his stomach that he can’t understand. Kirby, though, just wants to make sure Tali doesn’t catch it this time.
“Ready? I’m gonna kick it now!” Kirby calls.
Atticus braces. Tali also braces.
Kirby lifts his little foot and kicks.
The ball goes soaring and-
“Tali, no!”
Tali leaps into the air, wings flapping to give her a boost. Nothing is on her mind but the ball, arcing its way through the air because Kirby had hit it a little too hard. For Atticus, it’s an action scene in slow motion, watching the way Tali doesn’t even reach out to grab it, or kick it, but opens her mouth with all of her shiny, sharp teeth and-
The ball gets caught square in her maw. She chomps down with the force of a dragon capable of breaking a boulder three times her size.
Kirby doesn’t need to have heard the popping sound to know that that ball was dust. Man.
The game doesn’t last long after that. Actually, it stops – because the ball is popped and just rubber in Tali’s mouth, and Atticus had had that ball since he was just a little guy, and to see it – a gift from his grandfather – ruined, well that upset him quite a bit.
Kirby opens his mouth to say something and doesn’t get a word in. Atticus, distraught, tears in his eyes and little lungs starting to heave, runs faster than Kirby has ever seen him go, bumping past him on the way and leaving Tali and Kirby alone.
Tali looks at Kirby with the ball still in her mouth. What’s left of it anyway. She, who just hadn’t thought of it, now thinks about it quite a bit, and she feels that familiar little cold in her stomach when she’s messed up again.
The adults are still milling around amongst each other and the picnic table they have set up. Just Arthur, Meta, Dragato, Ramset – others are off for the moment, but they’re sure to visit eventually while Meta and Kirby are here.
Atticus runs to his father’s arms. Kirby can’t hear much of what they’re saying, but his cousin’s crying is hard to miss, and the adults crowd about him enough to cut him from view. He’d lost his ball, and Tali did it, and he was sad.
Dragato, for his part, isn’t so surprised, although he is a bit worn. He looks at Arthur, holding his son in his arms, and the familiar needle of guilt pokes into his stomach. Arthur also isn’t surprised, but he sure isn’t happy either.
“Let me take him in,” Arthur mutters. “Teacher can handle it probably better than I can.”
“Let me know how it goes.”
Dragato steps out of the throng after, watching as Arthur carries Atticus into Bate’s home before he himself makes his own way to the two children. Tali never meant to do these things. She just did them.
Tali looks terrible. Kirby, by now patting her arm and trying to offer words of comfort, doesn’t look much better. Both of them perk up at the sight of him and shuffle over quickly.
“A little incident, children?” He says, and he’s careful to keep his tone light enough so as not to perturb them more than they are.
“Tali popped his ball,” Kirby says bluntly. He points.
“I see that,” Is Dragato’s somewhat bemused reply. That’ll do it, he figures.
Tali doesn’t waste a moment. Atticus is also her friend, even if his father won’t often let them play together – they make flower crowns together and have funny talks and she loves him just like she loves her papa and everyone else.
She runs over to Dragato, who scoops her up on instinct, and shoves the remains of the ball in his face, a grey, star-speckled thing that had no small amount of tooth punctures riddled through. “Fix!”
If Atticus is sad because of his ball, then a better ball will make everything alright and he won’t be sad anymore. That’s her thought.
Dragato wishes it were that simple. He barely has to even hold the scrap to know that no amount of work is ever going to bring it back. He holds it in his free hand, giving it a perusing look – mostly for Tali’s sake.
“I’m sorry,” He sighs. “I don’t think we can fix this, sweetheart. But! I’m sure we can buy a new one for Atti just like this! Something that can handle your teeth, huh?”
“Wouldn’t that have to be made of metal then, Uncle?”
Dragato snorts to himself and gives Tali a cuddle. Tali, along with him, gives a giggle, maybe because it made Dragato laugh more than anything. Kirby has a point.
“We’ll see,” He says agreeably, and now that he sees that both children are a little more settled, and Tali’s spirits a bit brighter, he moves to sit her on down, giving her a few pats to the head. “For now, let’s just focus on apologizing, okay? You didn’t mean to, and I’m sure Atticus will get that when you say you’re sorry.”
“Yeah, you didn’t mean to! You were having fun!” Kirby grins and kicks his foot. “Atti will get it! We can get a new ball and he’ll love it sooo much more than this old one!”
Kirby doesn’t actually know that, but Tali grins anyway, a wide toothy smile full of sharp teeth and lots of gum. Her tail thunks mightily against the ground, squishing the grass beneath, and Kirby can feel the tremor in his feet.
“Yah!” She says. She needs to say sorry, and get a ball, and things will be fine, and they can go back to playing. “Sorry! Okay! Go, go!”
Because if she needs to say sorry, she needs to go see Atti to do it, and that is what she’s going to do, and she turns toward the direction of the door a ways away to go and do exactly that right now.
“Give Atticus a rest first, okay?” Is Dragato’s interjection. A hand comes down to grab her just before she can actually move. “He’s gone to see your grandfather right now and we don’t want to interrupt them just yet. Okay?”
It’s probably a bad idea, so soon after Atticus had been taken in side.
“Oh… Um.”
“It’ll be alright, Tali.”
Tali feels the hand ruffle the top of her head. Dragato’s voice soothed in its calm playfulness, a tone that Tali always looked to for comfort. He was the only one who never got upset when she did things, no matter how much she might’ve upset others. Things would be okay if he said so.
“Okay.”
Dragato takes one more look at them both – Tali, doe-eyed and sweet and so misunderstood but trying her best, and Kirby who, while a bit lost, seems chipper enough with the pep talk. Good kids, both of them.
“You two have fun, alright?”
“Yeah!” Kirby thinks they will!
And Dragato steps back, calm in his reassurance, to go and revisit the rest of their family.
Arthur has re-emerged from the house by the time he comes over, sans one Atticus. “How are things?” Dragato inquires, and is graced by one rather unsophisticated shrug of the shoulder.
“You know Atticus and teacher. Two peas in a pod. Both asleep right now.”
“Will he be alright?”
“Yes, I think so. He wasn’t hurt – just upset. A nap with his grandfather will do him some good.”
All told, Arthur can’t really harbor any ill will. It could have gone a lot worse, knowing Tali’s penchant for impulsive behavior, and her track record for breaking food stalls and smashing rocks. The ball was a lost cause, but it was salvageable. Tali’s just a very strong girl.
Dragato admired it about him. Arthur had hang-ups, but it was out of safety, not fear or anger. It felt like finding a needle in a haystack, the reputation Tali had in town these days. He understood. Things would be fine eventually.
Tali, though. She was never good at waiting.
She and Kirby do play. Kirby, now lacking a ball to kick, decides instead to hand her a bunch of sticks to play the game of how-hard-can-Tali-bite. It’s fun! She bites pretty hard and smashes everything he gives her.
But Atticus doesn’t come back out so Tali can apologize, and Tali really wants to apologize so they can play again. It’s forefront in her head, no matter how many sticks she bites and how many rocks she breaks.
Why do they have to wait? How long do they have to wait? Tali doesn’t want to. She can fix it so she will.
Kirby is in the middle of handing her a particularly burly branch when he sees Tali stand up from her place sitting in the grass. There’s a twist of determination on her face, her snout wrinkled and eyes set and bright.
“What are you do- Hey, where are you going? Taliii!”
“Say sorry!”
“Wait! Uncle said--”
Tali is already setting off for the door.
Kirby has to act fast. Tali likes to do things and uncle had said to let Atti sleep. Atti’s gonna be pretty mad if they do something uncle had said not to do – Atticus and a lot of other people.
“Hey!”
Kirby butts himself in front of her just as they reach the front door. Tali is mid-way through reaching for the doorknob, and even if she can’t reach it – she could probably break the door down anyway if she wanted. “Flowers! Atti likes flowers! We could pick flowers for him and let him sleep, okay? That would make him super happy!”
Because he really doesn’t wanna get in trouble.
Tali freezes in place first, now that Kirby is in front of her. But Tali was never one to turn down a good idea, and Atti loves flowers, and if they give him flowers that will make him happy, and maybe that would work.
“Yeah!” She shouts, and Kirby doesn’t have time to prepare before she grabs his arm in an iron grip – ow, ow, okay – and drags him off around the back of the house.
Grandfather Bate prided himself on a large, healthy garden of a variety of plants, from fruits to vegetables to bushes and flowerbeds. It was a pastime of his, useful for homegrown food and lovely to look at. It was a point of pride, and one of the things that stood out most among everything about his home. The grandchildren enjoyed playing in it and he loved watching the culmination of his efforts flourish.
Into this garden does Tali go, Kirby dragged along for the ride, with no other thought than picking out a bunch of nice flowers that she knows Atti will like. There are so many to choose from, though, and for a moment she finds herself at a pause because how can one pick from everything?
Kirby, now no longer being dragged, has the freedom to look too. Unlike Tali, though, he’s pretty quick to point something out. “Oh, that one! What about that!”
Tali looks.
There’s a flowering bush growing just up underneath the windowsill of the house. Not big, not small, just right and neatly trimmed – and lots of flowers of a bright pale blue color, open and in bloom, reaching for sunlight.
“Pretty!” She says loudly, because they really are pretty, prettier than anything else here. Atti will love them! “Okay!”
So off they go to pick a few, because grandfather won’t mind. Err. Won’t mind much, because Tali isn’t graceful about her picking methods – it’s more like she yanks them right out of a bush, hardly mindful of the thorns and the branches.
Kirby has to go slower; his skin’s too soft to be able to stand the hazards the way Tali’s can, with her thick dragon’s hide and all. Still, he tries, and he has a fun time! It’s enough such that he fails to notice the buzzing in his ear. At first.
Not so much Tali, though.
First it’s a buzz to her paw, which she swats without much thought. Then something tickles at her ear and she brushes at it distractedly to scratch the stray itch. Little things, here and there, and she doesn’t notice a thing out of place at all until something hits her in the eye and that makes her huff.
“What!” She barks to nothing in particular, turning her head up from the bush. Bugs, buzzing around. Bees, papa said they were, all over her and her flowers. “Go away!”
“Tali?”
She lets out a snort and swats with a paw, again and again. The buzzing just gets louder, and worse, and a little more prickly on her skin, and it just makes her more frustrated because why are they bothering her?
“Go away!” She barks, loud enough that she doesn’t notice Kirby’s yelp as the swarm eventually hits him too.
Bees don’t sting without a reason. It’s a last resort. But they will, and can, if pushed, and some bugs are meaner than others. Kirby may not have bothered them himself, but Tali was angry enough that each swipe and bite and snap stirred up a real frenzy that knew no real target.
Tali only notices an annoyance. Kirby, on the other hand, feels a sharp pinch on his hand. Makes him yelp and back up, the flowers dropping in a pile on the floor. “Tali-” He starts, and then another sting on his arm. Another one, another--
He yelps again. Swings his arms to swat them off, but it only makes things worse.
“Tali!”
It grabs her attention, the way his tone turns and wavers. Tali knows it’s not a good sound, had heard Atticus and Cellic and others cry enough that she knew the sound and smell of tears like she knew desert heat.
She turns her head quickly and squawks.
“Kirby!”
Bees on her friend, she sees. And what do people do when bees are around?
There aren’t any bugs inside.
“Give hand! We go!”
Tali tries to grab his hand and Kirby runs with her to the back door. If they go inside, they won’t have anymore buzzing and Kirby won’t be upset. Grandfather Bate will help.
She reaches, prepares to open the door, yank it off of its hinges if she has to -
Freezes.
Tali is impulsive, but she remembers some things. Fear and upset most of all. People were like that a lot around her, and sometimes her uncles and grandpa could be too.
She broke the door once trying to get in. Remembered how the handle had cracked like nothing in her grip and the door had burst into a million little pieces. Grandfather was so upset, even if he hadn’t acted like it. Uncle Arthur had gotten mad at her too, and she remembered that too.
Had broken a wall with her strong head when uncle Meta came to visit. She wanted to show him how fast she could run with her feet and hands and had made him so mad that he had sent her outside.
They’d probably get upset again. Atti already was.
Kirby lets out a noise that veers toward a sob that he can’t hold back, and Tali snorts and whirls on around. He’s in pain, and it hurts, and he doesn’t know what Tali is doing now or why, but there’s fire in her eyes – and in her mouth.
“Go away!”
She hears Kirby and his voice isn’t happy, and the buzz is very, very loud, and these things itch and get everywhere.
Kirby doesn’t like it either, and she isn’t letting anything bother her cousin.
Tali doesn’t think so much beyond these simple thoughts, and when swinging her paws don’t get rid of them, she resorts to just closing her eyes, opening her mouth, and spewing a vat of flame in the first direction she can hear them.
Kirby sees all of this, and his little heart starts to race because now Tali is shooting fire, which would ordinarily be super cool, but not when his skin itches and burns and there’s buzzing in his ears and tears down his face, and now there’s fire starting to slowly spread across the bushes with a big heat that stings his face from how close it is.
This home isn’t fireproofed. This is a green planet, a very lush one, and fire-breathing was, while not unheard of, definitely not accounted for when it came to the infrastructure.
Tali’s fire isn’t the strongest – little flames, not even much of a stream – but in a garden, even just a spark is all someone needs.
Things catch. Pretty quickly. Grandfather Bate’s garden was as lush as it came, and an open fire never did plants any good. Fire caught, fire spread, and things get progressively worse and worse.
And Tali keeps going. She feels the heat like a pleasant buzz, warm against her armor-like hide, familiar and toasty. This way, that, wherever her ears can detect even a faint buzz. She hears crackling and the calling of someone, smells smoke, but it’s a distant thing to her right at that second. This was her environment and she felt no inclination that it could ever be dangerous to her mind.
She doesn’t see the way flame spreads across flowering bushes, across flowerbeds both in bloom and yet to unravel their occupants. Crawling their way down the rows of grasses and cereal plants line inching, flaming slugs, catching onto the nearby trees and carving scorched paths up bark and branch.
Doesn’t see how the fire crawls from the bushes, from the gardens, onto the outside furniture, to light up a parasol into an ashen wreathe that stinks of fabric and chemical and exudes coal black smoke.
Doesn’t see the way, eventually, that flame stats to crawl right up the wall, to arc high, high above and snare itself onto the first shingle of the roof, hanging just over the window sill. And spread further out on its merry way.
To her in those very, very few minutes, it simply feels like warmth – and an old, ancient home.
“Tali!”
---------------------------
It doesn’t take long for the adults to notice something is wrong.
It could have been Ramset, who sensed more than saw anything amiss but knew by the shift in the air. Or maybe Arthur, who caught the scent of ash and burning leaves and felt himself bristle in offense. Meta, who noticed the rising tension as everyone’s voices started to fall hush.
Dragato, who felt the stillness in the air and knew something, just before someone looks up and sees--
“Bate’s roof--”
“—Is that fire?”
--And the alarm inside pierces, loud, long, and shrill.
Fire.
All of those present are warriors, in some way, shape, or form. They’ve had blood on their hands for years, ever since they were teenagers, and even Dragato, who had left that life early, was not an exception.
It is, however, rather difficult to keep a cool head when the children are unaccounted for in their quick headcount. Particularly in Arthur’s case, who knows immediately that both Atticus and his teacher are still inside.
“Go find the others,” He bites, a quick order on a sharp tongue, turning around on a hairpin movement and sprinting to the door. His mind is reduced to a needlepoint awareness, tunnel vision with no regard to himself, his size, the flames snaking above or the smoke or the sound of crackling wood as something very quickly groans and gives inside with a terrifying snap.
He’ll throw himself into the kindling if he has to, if it means his son survives.
But he doesn’t have to.
The door slams open, his glove the only thing keeping it from searing his skin, and a blur of green and wings and muffled coughing rams into his arms, and it’s all he can do to catch the thing before it knocks him on his rear end.
“What—”
“Dad—”
“Atticus-”
Arthur’s arms tighten their hold and his teeth grit at the sound of his son’s labored breathing, the hacking through his already weak lungs. There’s a bit of soot on his face, in his wings, the smoke is acrid even from here.
Everything goes in a blur, too fast and too slow. He looks up, automatically turns to shield the boy against the worst of it. “Teacher!” He calls, “Teacher!”
“Go!”
There.
Further within, amidst the broken and burning wood and the crumbling furniture, carpet, and décor of what had once been his teacher’s living room, he sees him. A grand sight Bate was under most circumstances, with a pair of taloned wings to impress anyone, now he looks nothing short of miserable.
Bate’s arm falls weakly from where he had thrown the boy from his arms clear across the length of the house. Crumpled on hands and knees fallen from his chair, wings askew, limp at his sides, and Arthur sees immediately that he cannot move.
“Teacher!”
“Go!” Bate roars, and now Arthur sees it. Focuses enough to finally notice that something, here, is keeping his teacher pinned. Wood, an entire pillar of it, likely fallen from the ceiling, and Arthur’s heart races and roars as loud as his teacher, as loud as the rising fires and the decaying home of his childhood.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thinks distantly. How did fire spread this quickly? What had happened?
This was supposed to be a nice day. Everything was supposed to be okay. And now…
“Kirby!”
Meta shoves him to the side, son and all, so beset by his own animal panic for his own son that he can think nothing else, and Arthur doesn’t blame him. He stares frantically, expression twisted into a horrific thing of pinprick eyes and a snarl in his teeth. Nothing else matters. “Teacher! Is Kirby here!”
Bate can only shake his head and gaze blearily at them as the last of his adrenaline leaves his body and the smoke inhalation dulls his senses to a tired fog. He doesn’t expect to make it out of here.
But at least Atticus is safe.
Meta curses, curses again because it’s both parts relieving and terrifying in equal measure, because if Kirby isn’t here then maybe he’s safe, but if he isn’t here then where is he? And his teacher, they can’t leave him--
“I found them!”
They all had had something to lose. Dragato wasn’t the exception, but while those two had clogged the doorway, he had thought to branch out.
“Dragato! The air! I’ll get the fire extinguisher!” Teacher Ramset shouts. Already, he’s sprinting off towards Bate’s shed, and Dragato will thank him later on.
“Right!”
The others couldn’t have gotten far, Dragato thought, and had spread his wings and set off to the sky.
He’d looked, frantic, quickly, for any sign of brown-grey and pink, of little wings both of mottled leather and feathery white, and had seen immediately that neither of them were afield. Had turned his head, eyes scanning each bit of color he could see, and--
“Children!”
He swoops down to land just outside the garden fence. Everything here is burnt to cinders, flames burning high, and Dragato feels the sweat on his brow as heat comes too close. Trees, vegetation, all of it taken to the fires. He has to be very, very careful getting close to the house to avoid getting caught on fire himself.
The children are tucked against the wall. A little corner of stone, and it’s maybe the only place safe enough for them if they hadn’t been taken by the flame, so close to it as they were.
“Papa!”
“Uncle!”
Their voices are a collective squeal, and Dragato curses to himself. He’s too far, surrounded by too many hazards, and he isn’t protected.
“Stay still!” He shouts. The smoke is stifling. “I’m going to get you both, hold on!”
He’s going to need to wing it.
Ramset, sprinting back from Bate’s back shed with the fire extinguisher in his hands, steps back on scene just in time to see Dragato sprint through it all, vaulting over the fence and using every old warrior’s instinct he possesses to block his face, duck, and vault through the mess to where the children sit huddled against themselves.
Like Arthur, Dragato’s mind melts into a finely sharpened point, with only one goal in mind. The flame snaps at him, grazes, there’s going to be a few burns tomorrow he’s sure, but he gets there, and the children clamor into his arms the moment he reaches to scoop them up.
“Hold on!”
And he arcs his wings and leaps back into the air, before anyone else can get hurt.
“Dragato!” His teacher calls from below.
“I’ve got them!”
Dragato angles his flight to where his teacher stands, landing with a thunk and shuffling them a safer distance away. Ramset gestures, hands him the extinguisher, and Dragato feels his stomach fall and tucks them close just on instinct.
Tali sniffles. Dragato checks her quickly.
“Oh, thank Nova you’re alright.”
Nothing on her, from wing to ear to tail. Soot, yes. Tear tracks on her face and the worst expression he’s ever seen on her. But no cuts, no bruises, no burn marks but that was a given. She’s okay. She’s okay. Ohhh, thank NOVA.
And Kirby--
He stalls.
That...is a lot of bee stings.
“I’ll take them to the hospital,” Ramset says quickly, snapping him out of it, “But you can fly, and you have a Warp Star, and a level head on your shoulders. You need to put out the fires. Do you understand.”
Ramset knows it’s hard, when one’s children had been endangered. He knew the feeling, with his grandchildren, his nephews, his family, all of them. His boy only wanted the best for them all.
Dragato does hesitate. There’s no denying that he doesn’t. But he gives them up, both of them with mutters of comfort, for his frightened daughter, his nephew covered in welts but thankfully no burns but that was never a guarantee. He gives their shivering forms up to his father and teacher, takes the extinguisher, and nods with a hard, warrior’s look in his eye.
“Bate is out of the wreckage,” Ramset says as farewell. “Arthur’s taking him to the hospital as well, most likely. We’ll see each other again there.”
“Got it.”
Ramset leaves. Dragato doesn’t have it in him to think much more on it beyond the arduous task of putting out the fires.
Much as Arthur had thought, just a few minutes ago, Dragato thinks that today was supposed to be a good day.
-----------------------------------
Meta had not said one word to him in the past two hours.
Dragato felt the looming of something weighing him down like a pit in his stomach.
Bate’s house hadn’t survived the fire. Dragato would’ve been surprised if it had, considering the extent of the damage. After a torrent like that, there was very little left of it but a shell and the frame of what was once quite a quaint roof. They’d spent ages stamping out every bit of flame that they could, working together like a well-oiled, albeit quiet, machine.
It was fortunate, he had thought, that at least Bate was alive. Arthur had noted that while not severe, the damage would leave him in the hospital for some time; smoke inhalation on already poor lungs and a wooden beam over the back and the wings did a number on someone, as it turned out. He would recover with rest, some casts on his wings, and lots and lots of time. Thank NOVA for that.
The children would be alright. Atticus, with his own poor health, had gotten very, very lucky with just a few minor burns and a bit of rough coughing. A night of monitoring and he could go home like little else had happened, Mends had said.
Kirby had bandages, from a bit of minor bruising and the usual scrapes and bruising from something so chaotic, but mostly from the dozens of what were apparently bee stings making him look like a swollen little pimple.
“I’m okay!” He’d said cheerily amidst his hospital pudding. It’s not really that good, but he’ll eat anything sweet. “This is great! I need to do this more!”
“Uh, no you don’t.” Was Meta’s rebuttal. He was too tired to argue more about Kirby’s bedside table manners. Nor the fact that he was gorging himself on chocolate in the first place.
And Tali… Well. Tali was Tali. It’d probably have taken NOVA themselves to ever put a scratch on her, Dragato was convinced of that. Not one bruise or burn or anything – just tears and lots and lots of smoke.
She’d told him everything from her place there in his lap curled up in his arms, after she’d been cleaned and assessed and given the green light and Ramset had handed her off to her father. The flowers, the fire, the bees, all of it. It was an accident. She was sorry. She didn’t want anyone to hurt. She was so sorry. Sorry sorry.
Dragato had rubbed her back, soothed as best he could. She hadn’t meant to, and she had only been trying to help. She’d never hurt her family, Dragato murmured. Everyone would be okay, and everyone loved her.
There in that hospital lobby, Meta, sitting across the room, had said not one word. But Dragato felt the look against them both, burning with an emotion that Dragato knew but had not wanted to name.
Meta was unhappy. Beyond it. Meta was, for lack of a better word, livid.
And Meta didn’t bother to linger any longer with people who didn’t understand nor care just what their family had gone through.
He leaves.
Dragato exchanges a look with his teacher, settled beside him with an expression set into one of a certain kind of neutrality.
Ramset holds his arms out silently.
“I’ll be back,” Dragato sighs, and he deposits a half-asleep Tali gently into his teacher’s arms, and goes to maybe set things right.
-------------------------------------------
They can see the house from here.
Meta thinks bitterly to himself that it isn’t exactly much of a house anymore, is it. A house is for people to sleep in. To celebrate at, a place to eat food and bond with others. For Meta, in this case, it was and had been all three.
Teacher Bate’s home had been his and Kirby’s second residence. Home away from home. Just as much had it been the central point by which everyone gathered. If family wanted to meet, they did it at Bate’s house. He had a way of bringing everyone together.
And now it was gone. All of it. Food, mementos, precious things that Meta would never know of hidden in the depths of his teacher’s heart and mind. Gone. Not to mention his – Kirby’s – own belongings.
Not that they had brought much from home, but the sentiment mattered.
Meta has a sort of void, he thinks, in his head and his chest where feelings and thoughts ought to be. Kes said that warriors sometimes shut down certain facets of themselves in the face of hazardous conditions to complete their missions out in the wastes of South Nova. Survival couldn’t allow for the distraction of things like feelings and stray thoughts. Best keep it home.
That was all well and good, Meta thought, and it was a nice sentiment that Meta believed, but what exactly did it mean when he didn’t have a home to return to? When teacher didn’t have a home to return to? NOVA, what is he even going to tell him?
This was supposed to be a nice day.
“Meta?”
Dragato takes a careful step closer and stop several feet away. Meta doesn’t look at him, keeps his sights on the house, and Dragato knows that how he feels can’t be described in word alone.
“Meta…” He hesitates. “I really am sorry about what happened. I don’t think anyone could have predicted this, and I can’t understate how sorry I am that you, and Kirby, and Teacher Bate have to go through this.”
Dragato gets no response. Meta doesn’t consider it worthy of replying to.
“Teacher Ramset says it can be rebuilt, given enough time. You know that I’ll help you as much as I’m able to. Anything in my power, to fix this--”
“You can keep that girl away from us.”
….......
What?
Meta turns towards him, fully, away from the remains of Bate’s house, and the look in his eyes… Dragato’s never seen it before.
His wings raise automatically, in a gesture of defense.
“You know,” Meta says, and his tone oozes with something years in the making. “I tolerated your daughter because I knew Teacher wouldn’t want me kicking a fuss. His broken doors, his shattered windows. I dealt with it. Kids are kids, he’d say. They didn’t know any better. Even when he needed to sleep after babysitting because he was so sore he couldn’t do anything else. I dealt. Kids are kids.
“But this?”
Meta points. To the house, and his voice is acid. To the hospital, where the children are recovering.
“This? This? No. I don’t care if kids are kids. I don’t care if your daughter is too young to know better. Kirby is four and do you see him doing half the damage that your kid does on a daily basis?”
“Meta—”
“Don’t Meta me, Dragato. I’m not the only one who feels this way. You think Arthur doesn’t? When he doesn’t let his son around your kid? When the only time Atticus was, he got hurt? Guarantee you Arthur feels the same way I do – he just doesn’t have the gumption to speak up about it.”
Something feels weighted in his chest, and Dragato very carefully keeps his distance from it. Something of this feels too, too familiar.
“Kirby is in the hospital because of her. Teacher is in the hospital because of her. When is enough enough, Dragato? What is it going to take to get that through your skull? Does someone need to die for you to actually do something with her?”
“Meta,” Dragato steps in. “She is a child. You are getting angry over a child.”
“A child with no manners and no restraint who could have killed three people today!”
Dragato grits his teeth.
“You want to help?” Meta bites, and it feels good to let it out, every stray thought, every passing irritation, a ball of resentment settled like stone in his stomach bursting from his mouth like metaphysical tar. Dragato is angry? Let him be. Maybe he’ll hurt as much as everyone else does. “You two stay out of this family, out of our lives, out of this town. Go to North Nova – that’s where she ought to be.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Dragato says. “You know Bate loves her just as much as he loves all of his grandchildren. Please. Stop and take a deep breath. Just-- think. For a moment.”
“Think? Oh, I’m thinking plenty, and what do you think Bate is going to think when all of his belongings, his memories, all of it – is gone because of her? You think he’s gonna be happy? You think he’s gonna welcome her with open arms? Are you stupid?”
It feels far too familiar to Dragato. All of it feels like a tape on repeat, of so many different encounters, all ending the same way. North Nova, West Nova, it hardly mattered sometimes. Everyone was the same.
“Meta—”
“No, I’m done, Dragato. I’m done. You wanna help? Fine. Take that mutt and go to North Nova and actually teach her some manners and then maybe--”
Apparently family was no exception.
…
Meta has a curious moment in which things seem to blink in and out of existence, between one second and another.
One second, he speaks to Dragato. It’s about a lot of things, but mostly, it’s a lot of rage, not a lot of which makes much sense.
The next second, there’s a ringing in his ears, blood in his mouth, far too much sun on his face, and the feeling of dirt digging hard into his wings as something slams into his cheek with the full force of a lit bomb. At least, it feels that way.
And something blocks his view of the sky. Wings and blazing eyes that look like a demon beast ready to tear him apart.
Something holds him and drags him halfway up, and only distantly does he realize then that his mask is off, tossed somewhere into the distance.
Something presses against him, and dazed does he look down to see a foot, digging him into the dirt in a pin that he finds it hard to breathe through. He wiggles, just barely, and the foot presses harder, punishing.
He coughs.
“Shut up!”
It’s a scream, he thinks through the ringing in his ears. So why does it sound so muffled?
And Dragato, whose control was so resolute, who prided himself on a level head through thick and thin, who could no longer bear to hold on to it when Meta had deigned to slur his own niece.
Betrayal, it stung like. Betrayal and disgust that makes him want to puke. Because if Meta, his cousin, practically his brother, was willing to foul-mouth a child when it suited him--
What exactly did that say about how the thought of Tali? What did that say of the rest of their family?
(Maybe they were better off without them.)
“Dragato!”
He almost swings again, just for the sheer sting of it. Lost in his own head and he would be cursed if he let Tali’s own family demean her.
He would have, had his teacher not grabbed him and yanked his body back with far more force than the Sasuke would ever have been thought to have.
“Teacher,” He huffs, and he fights it on impulse, but Ramset knows him and pulls harder, gripping his shoulder in a vice. “He-- Let me go! He--”
“I know,” Ramset says firmly. “I know. But you cannot commit manslaughter over this. I’m not going to have my own student a criminal. Think of Tali – she needs you right now. Think.”
He gives Dragato a good shake. Just to get the nonsense out of his brain.
It does work. Somewhat.
“Go to her now, Dragato. I’ve taken her to Falspar and Pyrell’s for the moment, they have her handled. You can stay there. Don’t lose yourself.”
Dragato gives Meta one more look, and Meta, returning slowly to his senses, stares back with no words on his tongue to give.
“Okay.”
Even if it felt like some pyrrhic victory, being with Tali was better than being here, of all places.
In the end, Meta is left sans one Dragato, and a teacher who gives him a steady look that Meta cannot read.
Meta doesn’t know Ramset all too well. It isn’t that he doesn’t know Ramset at all, but the larger part of his child years had been spent in Bate’s care, and Ramset was more the fun uncle he knew by association.
As he cards through his memory of just a few minutes ago, and parses things together, and slowly comes back into a sense of rationality, there’s a kind of cold chill that crawls from his throat to his chest as the gravity of everything he had said settles in like a weight. Ramset continues to stare at him and says nothing.
Ramset is the fun one. The fun uncle, who annoys and teases Bate mercilessly even now. There’s something about the way that he pins Meta under his gaze like a bug under a magnifying glass that makes him feel very, very small.
He’d said a lot of things, and Ramset had probably heard him.
...He’d said a slur, he realizes distantly. Against Tali, Ramset’s granddaughter. And against Ramset’s own husband by association of the same species.
It’s a wonder Ramset hasn’t killed him himself. Honestly.
And then Ramset glances away. “So that just happened.” He says, and it sounds far too calm for Meta’s liking.
“That. Did happen.”
“You should get up. There’s a lot of work to do tomorrow.”
Meta realizes he’s still sitting on the grass. He does so immediately, awkwardly dusting grass off of his back. The pain in his cheek is going to smart, and Meta wouldn’t be surprised to find a very sizeable bruise by the time the day is over.
He...doesn’t know what to do.
There’s nothing Meta can say that can fix what he’d done. No easy way to just wipe off the mess and forgive and forget. Things didn’t work like that, and it’s his first time being in a situation like this.
He can’t. Quite looks Ramset in the eye. Feels afraid of something, and what it is, he doesn’t know. How do you recover from that?
“I would offer you my home, while all of this mess gets sorted out. But I imagine you won’t take it.”
Meta clears his throat. “Yeah. Sorry. Teacher and Kirby, they both need me at the hospital. Mends said I could stay, Kirby’s guardian and all, and teacher is…”
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time his house burned down.”
And that practically clocks him in the face for the second time that day. “I-- Huh?”
“Don’t worry about it. Point is – give your teacher – and your son! Great kid! - some credit. Nothing ever kept him down for long, else he wouldn’t be so spry!”
Ramset grins.
“Gotta look after your family, but don’t be too up in arms. Everything works out eventually.”
Meta stares, boggled.
Yes, look after his family. Of course, look after his family. It was one thing Kes loved about him, that he was so protective of them, and he prided himself on it. Family stuck together, and if it weren’t for Kirby’s training, he’d have probably moved back to West Nova some time ago.
That’s all he was doing, in the end. He had a right to be angry.
And, as Ramset looks at him keenly, that’s probably what Dragato had been doing too. He was as much a student and a father as Meta himself was.
Family. Different branches, not siblings, but still related, both doing the same things. And he’d opened his mouth and let it get him in trouble.
“Teacher Ramset,” He says. “About… About what I said, it--”
“I’m aware!” Ramset starts to leave, and that doesn’t feel right, to leave so quickly after- after everything, but, “I hear it well enough in your voice, but I’m not the one to be talking to about it. You probably know that!”
Yes, he knows. But how does he even go about fixing it? That, he doesn’t know at all.
“Regardless of what happens, I do hope the family stays together.” Ramset sighs. “Bate would miss Tali quite terribly, you know! She always gives him a good laugh when I’m not around. I think she got it from me, personally!”
Ramset winks.
Meta’s mouth twitches upward, just barely.
As Ramset leaves, Meta turns to take one more look at the house in the distance, still pluming with the smoke of long-faded flames. It’s gotten dark, he thinks, and now he can barely see it at all. Maybe it’s a little symbolic.
The house wasn’t the only thing that got burnt down today. Far from it. But a house...Dragato was right on that front. A house could be rebuilt in time.
Family ties, though?
That...was something Meta didn’t know the answer to.
He was afraid to find out.
-End-
Artist Comment:
December 13, 2023
-----------------
Dang, Meta- you really messed this one up. I have no idea how he's going to dig himself out of this hole. :T
So, I mentioned in this description here of a term that's considered derogatory towards the Bukiset/Zoos species.
And Meta.
Freakin' Meta said it. Which of course caused Dragato to completely lose his cool and attack Meta. After being separated and talking to Ramset, Meta realizes just how bad he messed up. The thing is, how is he going to fix such a big mess. He's really going to have to work hard to mend this massive rift.
---------
The amaaaaaazing literature written for this illustration was commissioned by my good friend, Dogblog. (dA- Shadowrealmprincess) ^v^
December 13, 2023
-----------------
Dang, Meta- you really messed this one up. I have no idea how he's going to dig himself out of this hole. :T
So, I mentioned in this description here of a term that's considered derogatory towards the Bukiset/Zoos species.
And Meta.
Freakin' Meta said it. Which of course caused Dragato to completely lose his cool and attack Meta. After being separated and talking to Ramset, Meta realizes just how bad he messed up. The thing is, how is he going to fix such a big mess. He's really going to have to work hard to mend this massive rift.
---------
The amaaaaaazing literature written for this illustration was commissioned by my good friend, Dogblog. (dA- Shadowrealmprincess) ^v^
Species © Nintendo/ HAL Laboratory
Interpreted characters created from said species © Rhylem
Interpreted characters created from said species © Rhylem