"Where are they?" Ivor asked (mostly to himself), frowning and pacing the floor back and forth with an anxious expression on his face. "They left at precisely nine this morning, and then they said they'd be back at three, but it's three thirty now and they're still not back-"
Harper looked up from where she was working on something, quill in hand and crumpled-up-pieces of paper littering the table and a bit of the floor around her with her goggles hanging off the edge of the desk and her hood flipped back to reveal her head full of white hair. She'd been working on the thing for about three hours, but with Ivor's frenetic pacing and anxious muttering to himself that had started up about 29 minutes ago, her pace had slowed to a crawl.
"Why don't you sit down?" she suggested gently. "You've been worrying about them for about half an hour. Pacing around like a caged ocelot isn't going to help calm you down, and despite the fact that you've said twenty times that you're not worried, you're clearly worried."
"Like you've seen a lot of caged ocelots," Ivor mumbled back without any acidity in his voice, simply revolving on the spot and continuing his pacing. If he kept this up, he was going to wear a hole in the carpet.
Harper gave her eyes a good-hearted roll. "And when you say something sarcastic without any sarcastic tone, you are definitely worried."
Ivor had to concede the point, lips twitching up into a half smile for about the length of a millisecond before turning on his heel again and making his way back to the other spot on the floor that he did a 180-degree-turn to continue pacing without slamming straight into a wall. "But they're not back yet, and both of the twins are very punctual people."
Which was true. Honestly, the last time Jesse had been late, she'd only been late by about half a minute but had apologized furiously until Petra punched her in the shoulder and told her to quit it.
Which then led to Petra having to apologize furiously as she accidentally knocked Jesse flat on her face. Jesse might be good at fighting, but she was still quite small for her age, and a good hard punch could easily bowl her over. As was proven when Petra punched her a little too hard.
"They're hybrids, Ivor." Harper pushed her chair back, inadvertently making a small avalanche of crumpled paper balls topple to the floor, and walked over to Ivor, setting her hand on the man's shoulder and keeping him from continuing to pace up and down the length of the carpet. "I'm worried about them too... but they can handle themselves. Besides," and Harper couldn't help letting a little smirk come over her face, "Jace would be extremely irritated with you if you were 'babying' him and his sister."
Even though Ivor was still clearly worried- his dark blue eyes glimmered with concern- he couldn't help but manage a weak little smile. "Yes... I suppose I do see your point..." He let his gaze travel out the window. "And he does get quite-" Abruptly, he cut himself off, eyes widening a bit as he spotted something, before narrowing his eyes as he moved to the window and pressed his hands to the windowsill, allowing himself to lean out and squint outside.
"Ivor-?" Harper began, but then Ivor jumped back from the window and ran for the ladder, nearly upsetting an entire bookshelf.
Concerned by the fact that his face had gone nearly pure white, and the fact that the glimpse of his face that she'd just spotted had just been filled with abject terror, Harper was quick to follow him, pulling her hood back up out of habit and following him down the ladder.
Once she dashed out from behind the octopus statue that someone had started building, Harper could see what Ivor was sprinting for, as if he was running an Olympic marathon, and she felt as though someone had just hit her in the stomach as she broke into a run herself.
Jesse was limping along and using Jace as support, one of her lower sets of arms dangling at her side limply. A cut near her hairline that Harper was ninety percent sure was the one she'd gotten from PAMA so long ago had opened up and was sending blood cascading down her face, congealing some of her hair together and staining her gold pin bloody red.
Jace didn't look too hot either, some of Jesse's blood smearing across his armor. A large bruise was on his cheek, the swelling caused by it causing one eye to be swelled shut. There was an area on the cheek opposite the one that was swelling nastily that had blood on it, oozing from a small cut on the cheek. There seemed to be a LOT of blood, especially with bloody footprints on the ground.
A quick look confirmed that the bloody footprints were coming from the leg that Jesse was trying to keep weight off of, and a closer inspection revealed that it looked as though the leg had just gotten smashed by a rock. Or put in a blender. Or mauled by a rabid dog.
A crowd was starting to gather around them, concerned mumbling filling the main area. Ivor was shoving through the crowd as gently as possible but with reckless abandon, muttering apologies as he made his way to the two. When he finally reached the center of the crowd, he sped up again, Harper scrambling to keep up with him with the pace he was running at, and ran straight for the two of them.
"Hey Ivor," Jace muttered, wincing as some blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth. He made a face as he shut his mouth again, screwing up his face as though in concentration, before arduously reaching up with a hand and spitting into his hand. A bloody molar dropped into his hand, as well as a bit of blood. He grimaced and dropped the tooth, wiping his hand on his armor and smearing more blood on the armor.
There seemed to be way too much blood; way, way too much blood.
"What in the world happened?!" Ivor demanded, reaching out and gently taking ahold of their shoulders as he examined them, dark blue eyes flickering over their injuries with worry invading his face, "you two were only heading to a different world to do a check-up, how on earth did you two get so beat up in six hours?!"
"We're not that badly beat up," Jesse mumbled as way of an explanation.
Ivor muttered something darkly and pointed at his lab, expression going from anxious and almost frightened to deadly serious. "Come with me," he said sharply, tone leaving no room for argument.
Neither sibling protested as they made their way through the crowd, the crowd quickly creating a path so that they could make it out without having to jostle against people. Each ponderous, limping step that Jesse took made little drops of blood free themselves and drip onto the ground, creating a small trail of blood drops and bloody footprints from Jesse's bleeding leg from the entrance of Beacontown (which is what the citizens had begun calling it) to where Jesse and Jace were slowly limping their way to Ivor's lab.
Well, Jesse was limping. Jace was letting his sister lean on him.
Harper walked next to Ivor, periodically checking over her shoulder at the two twins, who both looked exhausted and as if they'd just gotten tossed into a Soren's grinder (Lukas had described that thing at length once in his book. Besides, Harper knew Soren. She knew the type of stuff he made.), then a room full of broken glass, before being chucked headfirst into a blender.
She glanced at Ivor periodically as well, his lips pressed together in a thin line with dark blue eyes glimmering with some repressed emotion, but with his face so deadpan it was hard to tell what it was. Anger? Worry?
Getting Jesse up the ladder was a huge hassle in itself, since Jesse's leg looked as though it had been bitten by a rabid dog and she was avoiding putting any weight on it (Ivor's jaw tightened every time Jesse winced or let out a cut-off cry of pain. She was clearly trying to hide the fact that everything hurt a lot.), but at last they managed to get up inside and shut the trapdoor.
Ivor pointed at a chair, staring at the two hybrids with a stare so intense it could have melted glass. "Sit."
His tone was so sharp that even Harper flinched a little bit. If she didn't know how worried the man was right now, she would've said he was absolutely furious. Jesse and Jace didn't seem at all fazed, although Jesse's expression seemed to grow a little more worried. It might've just been pain, though.
Jesse didn't have to be told twice, quickly limping with Jace's help over to the chair and collapsing into it with a relieved sigh. Jace eased himself into the chair as well, giving Ivor a funny look. "Ivor, seriously, it's not that bad, it just looks worse than it is."
"What even happened?" Harper asked, trying not to sound as shocked as she felt. She didn't know how she was doing with that, but it definitely wasn't that good, since Jesse winced up at Harper with a concerned expression on her own face. Ivor's back was turned to the two of them at his potion-making station, setting down bottles with unnecessary force and rifling through the drawers for ingredients with excessive zeal. It was a wonder he wasn't smashing anything up.
"A horde of angry zombie pigmen happened," Jace said, scowling at the very thought of it. "It was crazy, we walked through the portal, and some idiot had built a Nether Portal and led fifty angry zombie pigmen through it before finally destroying it."
"Jace got punched in the face almost immediately, but it was an accident- the guy the pigmen were chasing tripped and punched Jace in the face in an attempt to catch himself," Jesse quickly explained, pointing at Jace's black eye.
Well, at least it probably wouldn't get infected, but Harper still had to bite her tongue to keep herself from making any sounds or comments to interrupt.
"Then one of the pigmen knocked me over and made me hit my head on a rock, which opened up this cut," and she reached up, absentmindedly mopping some blood off her face. "Man, I didn't expect that the cut could open up again. Though," and Jesse grimaced, looking a bit like she might projectile vomit any second now, "I'm not entirely certain if I got a concussion from that."
Ivor looked as if he might start darkly muttering again, he looked so absolutely furious right now.
Jace picked up the story again, rubbing his sister's back gently. "I tried to get them to stop focusing on Jesse while she was still recovering from slamming her skull on a rock, but a couple stayed on Jesse while most of them went chasing after me and she had to jump into a chasm to get away-"
Harper couldn't help but abruptly let out a vehement exclamation here, and there was the loud sound of glass smashing, and they all turned in time to see and hear Ivor swear loudly as he released the shattered bottle and let it fall to the floor, a small explosion of glass littering the area where he'd accidentally slammed the bottle down onto the desk and smashed it into a billion pieces, his hand now covered with several small cuts from the broken glass. "You what?!" he demanded, when he'd decided there was no permanent damage done to his hand.
"It wasn't very deep!" Jesse protested, as if this made it so much better. "Only about ten blocks deep."
"Oh, that makes it much better." Ivor's voice was practically dripping with sarcasm right now. "Only about ten blocks deep. Now I don't have to make you a healing potion, because the chasm that you jumped into was only ten blasted blocks deep."
Jesse's cheeks reddened, although it was hard to tell with the blood on her face. "I'd just practically given myself a concussion, the idea made sense to me at the time..." she mumbled, a little awkwardly.
"Which is how she broke her arm, and she hurt her leg by gashing it on a couple rocks in the chasm," Jace finished his statement. "Meanwhile, one of the pigmen threw its axe at me in an effort to keep me from running. It mostly missed, but it did scratch me on the cheek." As he said that, he probed said cheek with his thumb and flinched a little when he pressed a little too hard.
Ivor set the two new potion bottles, ingredients mixed in, on the brewing stand more gently than before, before making his way over to the two teenagers with an almost stern expression on his face.
Jesse wiped some more blood off of her face, smearing it on her armor, before giving Ivor an apologetic sort of expression. "Sorry, Dad."
Immediately, his face softened, and the older man crouched down next to the two of them, resting a hand gently on their knees as he stared into their eyes. "You two kids have got to be more careful, okay?" he asked, tone much softer than before. "I don't like it when you two get hurt."
Jesse lowered her gaze to her lap, almost shamefacedly. "Sorry, Dad," she replied again.
Harper couldn't help but hide a smile. Jesse looked almost like a little child being scolded, what with her height and general size and demeanor.
Ivor gently took ahold of his sleeve and reached out, eyes squinting shut a little bit as he tried to gently wipe away more of the blood on Jesse's face. Besides a couple of involuntary flinches as he touched a dangerous area, she didn't complain.
Jace looked up at Harper, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly as well. "Yeah... sorry, Mom," he apologized, looking a bit concerned.
If the situation had been different, Harper would've smiled at the accidental use of 'Mom'. It had started as a joke among the others that if Ivor was Jesse's adopted dad, then Harper was Jesse's adopted mom. (They ignored the fact that Harper and Ivor weren't married.) Now Jace often used the title when he was worried or when he wasn't paying much attention. As it was, Harper's lips still twitched a little bit.
"We didn't mean to get hurt, it's just... things happened pretty quick." Jace reached up and rubbed the back of his head awkwardly, biting his cheek slightly so that it dimpled.
Harper shook her head, walking over and giving him a gentle pat on the back. "It's not your fault. We should've warned you to be careful going into the worlds in case something odd or dangerous happened while you were there."
Ivor gently reached out and wrapped his arms around Jesse in a hug, being careful not to quash her damaged arm or leg, before leaning back, smiling endearingly at his adopted daughter in the way that Harper had only seen directed at her and Jace and occasionally herself, and ignoring the way blood had smeared down his front. "I added sugar and golden apple to your healing potion, Jesse, and I added some powdered bones and some milk to yours, Jace," he said, making sure to address the wolf hybrid.
The wolf hybrid's ears perked up happily. "Oooh, really?" he asked, eyes practically glowing with joy at the idea. (Harper couldn't help but shake her head a little, this wolf hybrid was practically in love with bones. And he was pretty okay with milk as well.) "Thanks, Dad!"
Ivor reached out and gently ruffled Jace's hair, making the wolf hybrid's tail wag furiously in joy. "No problem, Jace." His lips quirked up a little gently.
Harper couldn't help but hide a small smile as she continued rubbing Jace's back, the potions slowly brewing in their little corner as Jesse apologized for getting blood on her adopted father's front and Jace's tail kept wagging happily and Ivor rolled his eyes at his adopted daughter's fervent apologies.
Their little 'family' might be a little odd, but it was theirs.
Happy birthday, Toni42! (Also known as Toni, also known as the author of Movie Mode, Empty Echoes, and various other awesome stories! They're all much better than mine, haha. He is also super awesome and probably one of my best friends, and DEFINITELY one of my best online friends.)
I can't believe it's been a whole year and a half since we first met, and I can't believe how far we've come since then! I hope we can stay friends for a really long time, and that we can meet irl someday (maybe once we're in college, since that's not too far off for both of us!)
Here is the Dad!Ivor oneshot you requested. I also added in some Mom!Harper, and the two hybrids were both missing and hurt. xD xD xD
Just kidding, but I really loved writing this for you. I hope you like it as much as I enjoyed writing it! I feel like even if Ivor's Jesse's dad, he's going to react with heavy sarcasm when he's really worried.
Again, happy birthday!
x.X. A.L. X.x