Family ain't easy.
Stone knows it for a fact, and when the Clipping Book shows them a bizarre sinkhole opening in Oklahoma, so close to where he grew up, he gets a sinking feeling in his own stomach which can only mean something bad is coming. What makes it worse is that Baird practically pushes them out the door and orders them to fly solo, without her, on this one. He's a big boy and he can take care of himself, but it does make him feel better to have Baird around. He's the oldest of seven children, so having a big sister to watch his back is a novel experience, and one he rather likes. The sinking feeling gets just a little worse.
As they walk through the Back Door, Addy is padding along so close to his leg that her fur brushes his jeans every other step. He rests one hand on her head, gently stroking her tall, tufted ears, though he isn't sure which of them he's soothing when he does. But it does make him laugh, a little bit, when Jones begins singing Oklahoma! under his breath, with Zhu humming along merrily with him, grinning with all her sharp white teeth in a way that means she's trying to make them feel better.
Sometimes, he wonders if maybe the Library gives its Librarians some kind of good-luck charm, because how is it that wherever they go, all they have to do is say "We're the Librarians," and poof, they're let in? Addy shrugs and murmurs, "It'll be interesting to see what happens when that doesn't fly."
He's only listening with half an ear as they walk across the dig site, because there is something itching him about this place, something he can't figure out, but it makes Addy's fur stand up, and even Zhu has stopped her infernal humming. His reply to the claim of Choctaw not being local is only a reflex.
His thoughts grind to a halt when a truck drives past them, and he can see the logo decal on the door. His stomach relocates itself somewhere in his feet, his hand burying in Addy's thick ruff as his breath catches. Luckily for him, though, Cassandra and Ezekiel don't notice his abrupt blanch, so he turns to one of the supervisors, standing off to the side with a clipboard. "Where's your foreman?" he asks.
"Haven't seen him since this morning," the worker, a tall burly man with an armadillo dæmon on his shoulder, answers.
"Then where's your nearest bar?"
Stone is almost certain he's going to be sick.
When he was fifteen and the only teenager with an unsettled dæmon, he and Addy decided to lie. He couldn't take the hushed murmurs as he walked past, the not-so-subtle staring, the relentless torment from other kids his age, and the glaring disappointment in his father's eyes every time the man looked at him. From that day on, whenever they were in public, Addy was always an Irish wolfhound and only changed when they were alone. A dog dæmon was fairly typical for working-class families like the Stones, and it made some of the disappointment in his father's gaze ease off. Not all of it, though.
But thing is, Addy is actually settled now, and she is certainly not a dog. In fact, she's about as far from a dog as can get, and he doesn't know how in the hell he is ever going to explain this one to his father. He stands in the doorway of the bar for a moment, answering Ezekiel and Cassandra's questions on autopilot.
Isaac Stone is sitting at the bar counter, already halfway into his bottle, with Clara lying across his booted feet. The man doesn't look different than the last time they saw each other; only a few new grey hairs in the fur of Clara's muzzle give any sign of time's passage. The coonhound lifted her head, catching sight of him, then Addy, and she rumbles out a low growl.
Isaac glances back at them, and again, there's that look, some shadow passing through his eyes, the same one he's been bending on his oldest son for the past twenty years, except it's a lot sharper, because he's seen Addy now. "What the hell are you doin' here?"
"Hey, Pop," Stone murmurs quietly.
Yep, that's what that sinking feeling is. Family.
Sometimes, it's very easy to forget that just because Cassandra isn't with him, didn't mean that she isn't there. She cares so much about them, and after witnessing how his father treats him, he knows she'll be worried about him, but he still forgets that she can be in two places at once. Neither Stone nor Addy notice that Asten is padding along after them on silent little feet, keeping safe distance so as to not be seen after they split up and she goes off with Jones and Zhu.
He's not sure what he would've done, if he knew that Asten, and therefore Cassandra, was watching. Certainly, he wouldn't have provoked his old man so much. Or rather, maybe he would've, and Isaac would've had more care in how he answered.
But either way, when he talks to his father in the garage, the sneaky little genet is crouched in a shadowy corner behind stacked boxes, observing the scene carefully, and father and son are none the wiser.
"Did you even try to save the company, or did it just go into the bottle?" Stone asks despite himself, driving the nail home. He's never spoken to his father like this before. Even at his worst, he would always shut his mouth and growl out a few choice words as he walked away, but he isn't who he used to be. The Library has helped him, so have his friends, helped him to shed some of that insecurity, make him more than the good ol' boy on the oilrig, and he isn't going to shut his mouth this time.
Clara lunges forward with a snarl, and Addy doesn't even have the chance to get away as sharp teeth tear open her shoulder.
Stone staggers back with a little gasp of surprise and pain. His father's never hit him before—not that it matters, his words can do far more than his fists ever could—and Clara might always growl and show her teeth at them, but she's never actually hurt them. The hound bristles angrily next to Isaac's leg, blood flecking her jowls, and Addy limps back to huddle against Stone, favouring her left foreleg now.
"Get out of here. Go on. Get," Isaac snaps, voice tight and sharp; that look is back in his eyes again, raw and burning. "I ain't too old to knock your ass through that wall, boy, so get steppin'. Go crawlin' back to your bosses, you lying-ass son of a bitch, and don't bother comin' back, either."
They find the trickster just as it's about to blow up its own prison. Stone lures it back into the pit. Shouting at the trickster whilst it wears his father's skin—it can even mimic Clara, to an extent—is a kind of catharsis, able to let out what'd festered in his heart for so long. And it does bring him a certain, twisted sort of pleasure to knock his not-father on his ass into a deep pit. Just a little.
Bitterness is like cancer, it eats upon its host. But anger is like fire; it burns it all clean. One of Maya Angelou's more known quotes and a surprisingly true one, too.
Telling the truth takes away its power, and for once, Stone is on a roll. He shouts his fears at the trickster, so brazen as to try imitating him, watches it weaken to the point where it cannot even keep up its façade of a dæmon anymore. He watches as the false mirage of Addy fades away into nothingness, the real Addy, his Addy, stalks around them, hissing and spitting. And each punch that lands on the trickster makes it stagger, and he feels a wash of relief and satisfaction to beat this embodiment of lies and deceit, which is all his life has been made up of until now, into submission and drag it away to its prison in the bowels of the earth.
To know that Cassandra chose a day to die is disturbing to say the least, but it does the job. She's giving him that look again, that look that he always feels can see right through him, and Asten is fixing him with an unblinking stare. As they are leaving, Isaac is arriving, and Stone feels the ghost-pain of Addy's torn shoulder radiating down his own arm.
But he has left the lies below the earth where they belong, and he says goodbye to his father, probably for good.
They return to the Library, and Baird love-pats his bruised cheek a little too hard, but there's a glimmer of pride in her eyes that makes it alright.
The feeling doesn't last. Stone has held onto his bitterness at lying for so long that it's eaten out a place inside him, and he can almost hear his heartbeat echoing in that hollowness. He shuffles absently through the stacks of the Annex, grateful that it's so late and everyone's gone except for Jenkins. The old man knows him, though, well enough to leave him be, and he's grateful for that.
He looks at Addy's settled form and for just a moment, just a heartbeat, he hates her, hates that she couldn't just settle when they were kids, hates that she, him, they couldn't just be normal. That isn't good. To hate one's own dæmon is to quite literally hate oneself, but as soon as it comes, it's gone and he's sliding down to sit on the bottom steps, head bowed to his knees. Addy pushes her head beneath his arm and stays there, ears pinned back to her skull, and he wraps his arm around her, careful of her torn shoulder. He is still sitting there when Cassandra and Asten find him.
She sits down right next to him, so close that her side is pressed along his, and he's reminded sharply of the night they sat there together after he freed Asten. Stone doesn't shake off the arm she slips around him, but he doesn't lean into her either, doesn't relax. He has a feeling that if he loosens his grip, even a fraction, then he's just going to break completely, and he can't do that. He doesn't cry, not because he can't or doesn't feel the need to. But because since he was a boy, it had always been his father's creed that men didn't cry and if there was even a hint of tears it became I'll give you somethin' to cry about, boy. So he can't, even though he feels he might be sick if he doesn't give somehow. Addy presses her muzzle into his chest a little harder, and he curls his fingers in her thick fur until it hurts them both.
Cassandra leans up until her chin rests on his shoulder, and she murmurs very softly, "Glory be to God for dappled things."
Oh, God... Stone shudders, just a little, under her arm. She still remembers it, even after all these long months, the poem his mother used to read him when she was still alive.
When she gets to 'All things counter, original, spare, strange' he breaks. He turns towards her and buries his face in her neck and that long spill of burnished copper hair until all he sees is red and her, and he finally breaks, choking on sobs and gripping her so tight she'll end up with five small bruises on her waist, perfectly spaced to his fingertips. He breaks and cries because Jesus, it hurts so much, tearing open old wounds and bleeding them anew. Cassandra slides her other arm around him, stroking his hair and rubbing his back like he's a child, murmuring wordless noises of comfort in his ear.
Stone comes back to himself slowly, aware that there's a fine trembling in his body, his breath catching on little hiccups of air the way it only does after you've really cried. He doesn't lift his head from Cassandra's shoulder just yet, though, and through the fiery curtain of her hair he can see Asten perched on her knee, watches in a detached, numb sort of way as the genet stretches his pointed muzzle forward until his nose touches Stone's hand, still curled on Cassandra's waist.
The sensation is indescribable. It is wrong but it is so very right and simultaneously the most unnerving and satisfying thing he has ever experienced. Cassandra Cillian feels like a newborn star, white-hot and so full of light and raw power that it makes his eyes water, an electric current beneath his skin, like flying and drowning and burning all at once. She tastes like a summer storm in Oklahoma, the way the air goes heavy right before lightning strikes, of rain hanging in the air, on the back of his tongue. He is set on fire, electrocuted, gripping ice so cold it tears his skin when he lets go, except more because it's his soul and not his body, the best kind of torture, being so alive that he can burn in it.
He gasps and nearly jumps back, except that she's holding him so tightly now that he can't. "Don't you dare, Jacob Stone," Cassandra whispers against his skin. "Don't you dare."
So he doesn't. He hides his face in her neck again, gasping softly as realises he can feel her, and there is so much love and trust and acceptance and pride in her, there shouldn't be room enough for it all inside her little body. But then again, as Asten weaves in and out between their ankles, there doesn't have to be.
She doesn't pity him, she never has, and for that he's going to be forever grateful. The one thing he cannot stand is having people pity him. She doesn't, she's proud of him, proud that he's made of more than what he is made up of, that he isn't his father and never will be. And that, Stone knows, is a fear that's always lurked in the back of his mind to leap out at him when he's at his lowest.
He breathes in the smell of her skin and knows that even though it hurts so terribly now, he's going to be better for it, because all that bitterness has been purged, like an infected wound being drained so it can finally begin to heal instead of simply festering. And even if there is a hollow place in his chest for now, he knows there's room for much more there, room for his love and trust of this place, these people (his home, his family) to finally breathe and grow.
She strokes his hair with one hand and scratches behind Addy's ears with the other, until he's almost asleep against her, though how he could ever sleep with so much lightning in his blood is a mystery. But then she kisses his temple and reminds him, "You've got an article to finish, Dr. Stone."
Dr. Stone. Huh. Now that he thinks about it, nobody has ever actually called him by his appropriate title before. Even Jenkins calls him "Mr. Stone."
He likes the way it sounds, though.
Isaac Stone – Clara, blue-tick coonhound
Jacob Stone – Adrasteia, called "Addy," Siberian lynx
Cassandra Cillian – Asten, common genet
Ezekiel Jones – Zhu, red fox
Col. Eve Baird – Karys, Siberian husky/grey wolf hybrid
Jenkins/Galahad – Menerva, snowy owl