The importance of a certain stuffed animal
Summary: The single stuffed animal holds its place in everyone´s heart. Even the boys remember it fondly. OneShot for the sake of a family of Hunters.
Warnings: Don´t eat. Don´t leave in reach of children. Other than that, no warnings. Maybe a bit out-of-characterness, but I tried to keep as close to the little we know about the Hunters as possible. So - last chance to run.
Set: Entirely story-unrelated.
Disclaimer: My name is Svetlana Chmakova and I´m currently working on these side chapters of my manga, Night School… My hobby is being sarcastic and ironic.
...You get the point.
There´s nothing personal in Rese´s room.
There´s just the bed, the cabinet, the chest of drawers, the desk and the chair. Sometimes even a bookshelf, but then, it´s mostly empty. Whenever they change houses – and they have done so a few times – there´s just one other thing she takes besides her few clothes.
Only two people know how Rese ever got hold of the little, gold-brown teddy bear with its violet ribbon she keeps with her whenever they swap one home for another. But everyone knows it´s there. It´s something like their talisman – their mascot, their lucky charm. Every single one of them has seen it, and everyone knows where it is kept – just in case. Sometimes, the boys make fun of her keeping the plush animal at her age. Sometimes, the girls fuss over it and its soft, brown fur. It even has a name, even though it varies from time to time and everyone has a different one. For Terrence, it´s just bear. Jay calls it Rese´s little baby and Jaq the thing. Nadya and Marina have a mutual name for it – it´s Tamara – and Ten named it Goldilocks. Cass never mentions it, if he has one, and neither does Rese. But at least that´s not a surprise, because Cass tends to be in Rese´s cross lines far too often and he knows when it is best to shut up, and Rese would rather bite off her own tongue instead of admitting how much she actually cares for the bear. Even less than admitting that it really has a name.
It´s the hunter family's best kept and un-kept secret.
-V-
Marina meets the stuffed bear – Tamara – one night, her first night with the others. Teacher has gone out after dinner, and Rese, Cass, Terrence and Jay are supposed to be asleep. The huge house they´re staying in is quiet, and Rese can hear the ticking of the old grandfather´s clock in the hallway. It´s quiet, too quiet for an eleven-years-old girl that can´t sleep. The door opens quietly, accompanied by the quiet beeping that shows the right password has been used to enter. The alarm system goes back to alert when teacher closes the door, steps up to the little grey box next to the kitchen door and enters the second code. Rese knows he´s doing it without having to see him. She also knows he´s wearing his black, long coat, and his soft boots. But there´s something different in his step – something that sounds like he is carrying a weight and is carrying it very, very carefully. Rese is nothing but curious, and she can´t sleep anyway, so she pushes her blanket aside and her bare foot move across the wooden floor noiselessly. She pushes open the door and peeks into the corridor. Teacher has switched on the light in the kitchen, but the rest of the house is still dark. Illuminated by the soft, golden glow, he comes up the stairs, carrying a tiny bundle of cloth in his arms. Rese watches him approaching and quickly wonders whether she should retreat into her bed and pretend to be sleeping, but then her natural curiosity wins. Teacher, of course, sees her.
"Teresa." His voice is quiet. "Come here."
She steps into the corridor and follows him to one of the unused bedrooms. The stone is cold beyond her feet. Teacher opens the door, steps to the bed and puts down a little girl, maybe five or six years old. The girl is watching them with eyes wide, Rese can´t say whether it is fear or curiosity. Teacher nods at her. Rese understands – and even though she wonders who the girl might be, and what she is doing here, and why teacher has brought her with him, she doesn´t ask questions. Teacher leaves the room and Rese is left alone with this little girl.
"What´s your name?", she whispers. It´s night, and she doesn´t dare to speak loudly. The girl just stares at her.
"I´m Rese. You´re not a hunter. Why has teacher brought you here?"
Suddenly, the girl´s wariness changes to horror. To pure, full-blown horror. She cowers away from Rese, clutching at the blanket, and buries herself in it.
"No", she wails. "Nooooo! I don´t! I won´t, I promise! I´ll be good!"
"Shhh!" Rese is so surprised she jerks away for a second. Then she´s hovering over the girl. It seems like she is having a nightmare, and that´s something Rese is familiar with.
"It´s okay!" She thinks hard. "I´ll be back in a second, okay?" The girl doesn´t even look up. She just lies there, shivering and trembling, tears streaming over her face.
Rese runs into her room and returns in seconds. In her arm she has the golden teddy bear that´s her best friend. In a house full of boys, she needs one. But maybe, this girl will stay with them, from now on, and she doesn´t mind sharing. Even though… She hugs the bear once, hard, and holds him towards the girl.
"Look!"
Marina always remembers her first night in the huge, dark, silent house which would become her home for the next few years when she sees Tamara. She remembers the slow ticking of the grandfather´s clock, the firmness of Daemon´s arms as he carries her away from the people who voted to kill her, the warm material of the blanket that is wrapped around her as she slowly falls asleep, a soft voice in her ears and the golden bear in her arms.
-V-
Terrence and the bear meet under extraordinary circumstances.
Since he can remember, Rese is something like a little sister to him, sometimes curious, mostly annoying, but he manages to tune out her worst fits. She´s two years and a few months younger than he is, and he never had a sister, but he reasons it must feel like that when Rese is around. She´s bossy, and annoying, and still – sometimes, he feels something like pride rise in his chest when he sees her train as hard as he and Jay and Cassidy do, because she hates it to stand back behind them. He puts in a veto, though, when she tries to force teacher to take her out onto a hunt when she´s barely nine.
He can´t know she has already seen more than enough blood and dead bodies for a little girl´s lifetime, so he reasons it´s not necessary to take her. He has been on a hunt, once, and he has seen the exploding vampires and the werewolves ripped apart. He still knows how sick he felt afterwards. He doesn´t think it would be good for Rese to join teacher that early.
Of course, she has to stay at home, while teacher leaves and takes only Cassidy and Jay with him. They´re only marginally older than Rese is, and they all know as well as she does. Rese throws a screaming fit, and trashes some of the dishes, for a good measure, and then storms up the stairs to barricade herself in her room.
Ten, the girl who sometimes visits them, just shrugs and disappears into the library, and Terrence has a few other things to do until he finally finds himself in front of her door.
"Go away!", she screams at the sound of him knocking. Of course, he doesn´t leave. Instead, he opens the door.
"Rese – "
He doesn´t get much further. Something comes flying and hits him square in the face, thrown with enough force to hurt, but not enough to do so seriously. The golden, plushy thing falls to the ground with a silent thump.
Dumbfounded, Terrence stares at the stuffed animal.
Stuffed animal.
He hadn´t even known Rese had something like that. Slowly, he bent down to examine it closely.
"Where did you get that from?"
From all the others in the house, he knows Rese longest. She was the second child teacher took in as a student, and Terrence was the first. He has known Rese for almost three years now, and she never appeared to be a person who kept plush animals.
With a wordless scream of rage, Rese launches herself at him and grabs for the bear.
"Give it back!"
"Hey, it´s okay! I´m not going to kill that bear!"
Ignoring him, she stomps back to her bed, disappearing under her blanket, clutching the animal tightly. Terrence sits down at the door and waits a while. As predicted, she stops trashing around after a few minutes.
"I wanted to go training in the hall", he finally says quietly. "You want to be my sparring partner?"
A small, black-haired head appears underneath the blankets. Brown eyes stare at him.
"Honestly?"
He nods. Rese scrambles out from under the sheets, her eyes shining. "Okay."
Terrence often wonders where she has the bear from. But then, he figures, she wouldn´t tell him, so he might as well keep his question to himself.
-V-
For Jay, of course, the stuffed bear is the perfect tool to annoy Rese.
Some people have a secret theory – Rese and Jay have to be twins, two sides of a coin, because they´re so similar it´s scary. Because they are so like each other, they can´t go along without fighting. Jay teases Rese and Rese hits him and Jay hits back and Rese starts chasing him around the table and Jay makes fun of her because she can´t reach him and Rese uses a flower vase to "catch" him. When they´re scolded, Rese shuffles her feet and tells it has been Jay´s fault, and Jay smirks and says of course, only a stupid girl like her would think of using a flower vase as a weapon and she´s on the best way of getting the first female household hunter. Rese tries to hit him and he hits back and immediately, they´re on the floor, kicking and punching and tearing viciously. And then, again, when teacher says they are staying at home as a punishment, they both erupt in protest simultaneously, backing up each other with arguments and concluding each other´s sentences. There´s no mistake in that: They have to be twins.
Even though Jay holds a high regard for Rese and her fighting abilities, he still can´t stop teasing her for the fact that she´s a girl. He tries to tease Ten too, but Ten doesn´t react whereas Rese erupts in lava and flames and therefore is the perfect target. One day, he makes up his mind to sneak into her room. What he hopes to find, even he himself doesn´t know, but the little golden teddy bear with its violet ribbon is almost too perfect. He snatches away the little bear from its sitting place next to Rese´s pillow and carries it downstairs.
When Rese, Cassidy and teacher return from their hunt, there´s a little cot in the hallway, fashioned from a potato basket, complete with blue curtains and golden stars (a blue towel and some paint, and Ten almost killed him for the misuse of her pastel colors). The little bear stares at them accusingly. It has been adorned with a little bib and a rattle, and Jay is standing over the cot, making funny noises. When they enter, he turns to Rese.
"Oh, Mama, there you are! You´re late. Your little baby has been crying… I think it´s hungry."
There, he takes out the bear and holds him so they can see it. Rese blanches to a white so startlingly pale Cassidy is afraid she will faint on the spot. Teacher watches, as always, without expression. Then blood comes rushing back into her cheeks – and deathly determination shines in her eyes.
"You…"
Jay is only saved by the fact that Marina comes down the stairs and comes to a still-stand between Rese and her prey. Jay throws her the bear and makes for a run, and Rese chases him the whole way to the academy and back. And he still wonders if she was so upset because he called her "Mama" or because he stole her bear or because he went into her room or because he embarrassed her in front of teacher and Cass.
Or maybe, it was all at once.
-V-
Sometimes, Ten just walks into Rese´s room and fetches the stuffed bear. And Rese never tried to kill her for it, Jay always mumbles, but he is ignored.
It´s not that Ten needs the bear like Marina needs it sometimes, or that she uses it to annoy Rese, as Jay does. For her, the bear is a lucky charm. After she has seen what it could do with Rese and Marina, and later with Nadya and Jaq, she firmly believes in its powers. Sometimes, she takes it and puts it next to the front door, on the little table on which they normally deposit the pocket calendar which tells them which missions they are given and when. The little black leather book is somewhat magical, because dates and times of their routine patrols, their missions and their exams appear two days before they are due. Every morning, the first one awake will check on the little book to see what missions they are given and what paths they will be patrolling the next nights. Sometimes, there´s nothing in it and some of them get twitchy. But sometimes, things arise unexpectedly.
Then, sometimes, Ten sneaks into Rese´s room and fetches the little golden bear that reminds her of the girl Goldilocks in the story her foster mother always told her. She puts it down next to the black leather book, bends its arms and legs correctly and re-does its ribbon. And then it sits there and waits.
It´s a ritual.
They see the bear and know someone has died.
When Goldilocks sits there, nobody dares to touch it. There are several reasons for it, but the greatest two are the facts that nobody wants to shatter the charm that seems to lie on the bear whenever it acts as silent guardian. The second one is that nobody dares to touch it because it belongs to Rese, but that is just the second-greatest reason. Whenever they pass through the hall, whenever they leave the house, whenever they return, they are reminded that this is nothing that is given: they´re hunters. They hunt. They fight. They die.
They take care no blood is splattered on its golden fur when they return from a hunt, tired and injured and bloody. Not a single dark fleck stains the golden coat and the violet ribbon. Violet, the color of mourning. Golden, the color of the sun rising after the night.
Ten starts with the tradition when she´s nine and her foster father dies on a hunt one night. She keeps it up, even when they turn fifteen and twenty and twenty-one. Nobody objects. Nobody ever mentions it. But everybody acknowledges it.
-V-
When Jaq first meets the bear, he has spoken not a single word.
It´s Jay who… introduces… them. From the first moment the boy has entered the house, always keeping a step behind teacher, Jay is fascinated. The boy has long, white-blond hair, grey eyes and something that makes Jay want to touch him, but at the same time, he fears the boy will break. He´s ethereal, somewhat unearthly.
"Is it a boy or a girl?", Ten whispers, nothing but interest in her voice. Rese throws her a glance and returns to whatever she has been doing before teacher entered. Terrence follows her. Cass, Ten and Jay remain in the room and try to talk to the boy.
He´s so thin it seems one can look right through him.
He doesn´t answer.
He doesn´t say a word.
Jay is enthralled. The boy just stands there, in the middle of their living-room, and doesn´t do anything.
After ten minutes, Cassidy gives up. Ten shrugs and follows him into the kitchen. It´s their turn to prepare dinner. Jay and the boy remain in the living-room, still staring at each other like wild animals.
And then, Jay turns around and runs up the stairs. The boy remains motionless, he can tell, because when he comes back, he hasn´t moved at all. Jay carries the little bear he took from Rese´s room. It´s the only thing in the house that remotely resembles a toy, hunters have no need for toys. For once, Jay is glad Rese still keeps the bear even though they are fourteen and thirteen years old.
He uses the bear as his puppet.
"I´m Jay. Who are you? What are you doing here? Will you stay here with us? You´re one of our kind, aren´t you?"
The boy stares at the other boy that is using a stuffed bear to communicate. Something in his eyes unfreezes, slowly, carefully. Jay continues.
"We´ll have dinner soon, Cass and Ten are setting the table. Do you like sandwiches? Cass´s sandwiches are really good, he uses a lot of mayonnaise… Are you hungry?"
Softly, almost invisible, the boy nods. Jay smiles brightly. He can feel the thick armor of the strange, fascinating boy slowly draw back.
"Let´s have dinner, then. Don´t worry about the others. They don´t bite – well, at least everyone except Rese doesn´t bite. And even she´s quite okay, you´ll see…"
He has taken the boy´s hand and is pulling him towards the kitchen before the other realizes what he´s about to do. And Jaq follows him without a word.
Thinking back at that time, Jay starts to come to the conclusion that Rese knew pretty well what he had done. She never said a word about the fact that she found her bear on the staircase. But then, years later, many things Rese had done then suddenly made sense.
And since then, Jaq is with them.
-V-
The circumstances of Jaq´s meeting with the bear and Nadya´s are quite similar.
Both, Nadya and Jaq, are quite similar. Maybe that means that Marina and Jay are similar, too, because where it was Jay who helped to integrate Jaq into their family, it is Marina who wakes Nadya from her guilt-filled stupor.
The darkness outside is palpable, as is the darkness inside her. There´s nothing that can fill the gaping hole in her chest. Nadya hasn´t lost her parents, as so many other hunter children have. Maybe it´s because her parents aren´t real hunters. She knows where they live, she knows she can visit them anytime, but she also knows her parents have purposely given her to the Council, so they wouldn´t have to feed another child. Nadya always has been the unwanted one, the one given away, and she always felt like a burden until Felian came along. Quite old for a hunter, but as skilled and agile as any other one, he was the first to tell her she was wanted. She was needed. He taught her, he trained her, he loved her – and she loved him, like a child loves its parents. He was her mother and her father and her best friend.
And then, he died.
Because she wasn´t strong enough.
Now, she is left in a living-room, in a strange house, and five pairs of eyes are staring at her. Six. There aren´t many teams as big as this one. She shudders inwardly, outwardly too frozen to react. The smiles on their faces seem genuine, but they could change to hostility within seconds. Not knowing what she is supposed to do, she stands there and doesn´t move. Until someone pulls her sleeve.
"What´s your name?", a small girl asks her and smiled up at her. "My name is Marina. Welcome to our home!"
Nadya wonders why she seems so young compared to the others.
"Rese?", the little girl asks and the dark-haired one smiles at her. "I´ll show her around, okay?" The girl named Rese nods, and the others turn away. Following the tugging hand at her sleeve, Nadya follows the little girl upstairs. She doesn´t show her around, though. She takes her straight into a room.
"It´s Rese´s room", she says, her tone apologizing. "I just want to show you something."
The girl grabs something from the pillow and tugs her down so they sit on the floor.
"You´re like me", she says, but she smiles. "Nobody wanted me. My parents wanted to kill me."
Nadya´s brows rise.
"But now, this is my home. When I came here, Rese let me hold her bear. It´s name is Tamara. It´s cute, isn´t it?"
How old was this girl? She couldn´t be older than ten.
"This will be your home, from now on, okay? Because we want you to be here. We want you. You´re part of us now."
With those words, she presses the bear into Nadya´s hands.
And Nadya doesn´t even wonder how the girl knows everything about her when she sees the sincere, bright smile.
-V-
It carries many names and meanings in their home.
For Marina, the bear is a reminder that she´s not alone and that nothing will harm her as long as she´s with the others.
For Terrence, the bear is a reminder that Rese is a girl, whatever she does and says. A reminder that she´s like a little sister to him and that he´ll protect her.
For Jay, the bear is a reminder of the times when they could fight and laugh and bicker like children. And that life should never be taken too serious as not to have some fun.
For Ten, the bear is a reminder that they´re hunters, and that they´re mortal. And that, as long as they´re together, only death can part them.
For Jaq, the bear is the reminder that he has sworn to protect Jay and the others. He´s not going to fall into the darkness as long as his life has a meaning.
For Nadya, the bear is a reminder that people have to look forwards but are allowed to remember the dead. That she is wanted. That she is needed. That she is in the right place.
For Daemon, the bear is a reminder that there is something, something that doesn´t need words and is deeper and more elemental than friendship between his students.
For Rese, the bear is a reminder that there´s one person in her life she trusts with everything she was, with everything she is and ever will be. That there is one person she can give herself to completely.
As for Cassidy – whenever he looks at the bear he is reminded of the fact that it is the only thing Rese has ever let him give her. And that she still holds it in such high regards means more than everything she ever can do or say.
In this way, the one single stuffed animal holds its place in the heart of the entire family of hunters.