ON THE EDGE OF SUMMER
By Eekz

Disclaimer: Blue Sky owns Epic, which is loosely based on William Joyce's "The Leaf Men and the Good Bugs." I reap no profit from playing with their fictional world.

A/N: This is essentially a series of sequential scenes which explore the characters' lives after the movie. There's some obligatory Nod/MK and Ronin/Tara, followed by a gradual shift to MK/Ronin. Background characters engage in all kinds of shenanigans and the two main characters… well, there's a reason I couldn't pinpoint a genre for this one. Please note that most scenes are more fun than the first scene.

I can't see the stars anymore living here
Let's go to the hills where the outlines are clear
Bring on the wonder, bring on the song
I pushed you down deep in my soul for too long

-- Susan Enan, "Bring on the Wonder"

1. SUMMER

One week after, she crouches beside him and murmurs, "I'm sorry."

It's vain to feel so large and awkward here, in the place where her world both shrunk and grew. And it's selfish to think of how ridiculous this helmet is or how stupid her voice must sound when the man who saved her life is thinking only of the woman who died in his arms.

"Don't," Ronin orders.

MK inclines her head but stays where she is, staring at the white lilies blooming where the former queen wilted. They're beautiful. She remembers the queen was beautiful too, in a strange flowery and oh-my-god-oh-my-god-what's-happening? kind of way.

Then he whispers, like it's a secret he doesn't mean for her to hear: "I never told her."

"Hm?"

"I loved her for a hundred years and never told her. A hundred years. Now I look back at my life and see only a hundred years of missed opportunities and wasted moments, a century we might have shared together as more than the queen and her faithful guardian." He snorts. "Her faithful guardian who, I might add, failed to guard her when it mattered most."

(Mom smiled, weak and brittle, as MK gripped her cold hands. "Mary Katherine," she said in her rusty voice, almost lost in the cacophony of hospital noises, "there was nothing you could have done, okay? Promise me you won't ever blame yourself."

"Of course, mom. I-I promise," she lied.)

There's nothing she can say to make this better, nothing she can do to ease his pain, so she reaches out and carefully—very carefully—brushes the tip of her finger against his shoulder. The giant equivalent of a comforting touch on the hand.

His lips twist into something approximating a smile. "Thank you, MK."

:

Nod activates the sensors at least once a day. Ronin thinks he's being obnoxious and overbearing.

"You mean 'charming and present,'" Nod replies, grinning.

"No, I meant exactly what I said."

Nod's grin doesn't falter as he lands his decrepit old bird beside the northeast camera—the one with the crack in its lens. It's good to see him like this, all joyful and smitten, but it's only a matter of time before MK meets some handsome stomper and leaves them behind. It's only a matter of time before she breaks Nod's heart. Ronin wants to hate her for that.

The camera flickers to life, and they see her dad about fifty seconds before she shuffles into view. There are dark shadows under her eyes and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, but she smiles sleepily when Nod starts prattling about his day. Ronin, who actually witnessed Nod's day, is pretty sure Nod didn't fight off a chipmunk single-handedly. Or at all.

"Hey Ronin," she says when Nod finally stops to take a breath. Her voice is a few notes too low.

He narrows his eyes. "Are you well, MK?"

Nod blinks at the cracked screen like he hadn't noticed anything amiss.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I mean, I will be fine," she says, and then ducks out of view as she sneezes. She sniffles and reappears, holding something square-ish and white. "I was just out in the rain last night, so… yeah." She wipes the white square-ish thing against her nose.

"That shouldn't make you ill," Nod says, furrowing his brow. "We're out in the rain all the time."

"She's a stomper," Ronin reminds him gently. "They're more fragile than we are."

She makes a sound that might be a laugh and might be a hiccup. "I can step on you, you know."

"You can certainly try."

:

Queen Marigold squirms self-consciously as she views her reflection in the pond, and then struggles to smooth down her petals. All of this insecurity and fear makes her seem somewhat less than queenly, but Ronin knows better than to say so.

"I—I don't know how to do this," Queen Marigold says suddenly, looking at him with panicked eyes. "She made it look so easy but it's—I don't know what to do. What do I do?"

"Breathe," he instructs flatly.

"Right, right, right," she mutters, and closes her eyes before drawing in a long breath and exhaling slowly. One breath only. She opens her eyes. "Now what do I do? She—in my dreams, she doesn't tell me. She tells me everything else, but she doesn't… What do I do?"

"Keep breathing."

"I have to address all of these Jinn, as their queen! How is breathing going to help?"

"Well, it'll keep you alive long enough to make the address."

She scowls at him. "What did Queen Tara do?"

"She breathed."

The young queen makes a strangled, frustrated sound.

"And she used to rehearse every speech five times," he adds thoughtfully. "But it took her a good six years to find a pre-address ritual that worked for her, and she always did it alone. I never knew what it was."

"You," the queen says irately, "are very unhelpful. Nod, what do you think I should do—or what do you think MK the Brave would do?"

:

Two months after her mom's death, MK remembers only fragments: her mom, frail and dwarfed by an enormous bed; the lawyer, treating her like an ignorant child as he gave her mom's savings to the state; her friends, who tried but just didn't get it, who made it worse with their solicitous sympathy; the sun, shining bright and hot over her head, casting the hospital and funeral home and headstone in cheery light. Packing her things and unpacking her things and finally leaving most of it behind.

(And the funeral—that blur of pity and dark-clothed strangers, people she knew too well and others she'd never met. All of them dancing around her like she might break. All of them with forced apologies on their tongues. She can't remember now how many times she told them, "Don't.")

She meets Nod in the depths of the forest, and can't bring herself to smile when he scales her arm to perch on her shoulder. The sun is hanging overhead, just as yellow as it was the day mom died, and warmer today than it's been all summer.

"Hey," Nod says softly, touching her face with his tiny hand, "what's wrong?"

"My, um, my mom died today. Two months ago."

"Oh." He's quiet for a moment. "You never told me she died."

"I never wanted to say it."

Nod shifts uncomfortably on her shoulder. "My dad was all I had growing up. Never met my mom. So when he died, I thought the world had ended… And we—we fought that day, it was the last conversation we had before he died in the Boggan hive. He said I was wasting my potential."

"Is that why you became a Leaf Man?"

"Yes… and no." He reaches up to tuck some stray hair behind her ear. "I became a Leaf Man because Ronin showed up one morning with the uniform and before I even knew what was happening, he had me in training. I never thought I was cut out for it. I never thought I'd end up a chief member of the queen's guard. But that's not my point. My point is that even though it hurts, it will get better. You won't ever stop missing her, but life goes on."

MK knows he's right, she does, but it's not what she wants to hear right now. She doesn't know what she wants to hear right now. So she makes up an excuse—something about needing to give Ozzie his flea treatment—and leaves him behind.

:

Some time passes before Ronin ventures, alone and under the cover of darkness, to the southwest camera. These bulky unnatural heaps of plastic and lightning have always intrigued him, but he's always been keenly aware of their purpose—and how easily the images they capture could reveal the Jinn's secrets.

Back when the Jinn were still hiding from their resident stomper, anyway.

The small screen beside the camera lights up only a few seconds after he lands, displaying her father's office and her face.

"Ronin," she says, surprised. "It's good to, um… hi. Is-is Nod okay? Is everything…?"

"Everything's peachy." He taps the screen curiously. Nothing happens. "How does this work?"

"The camera?"

He nods, and peers up at the black nobs lining the screen's plastic sides. The nobs were clearly designed to be pressed, so he touches the nearest one experimentally and watches the screen brighten. The next button up causes the image to jolt forward and enlarge, until her left eye fills the screen.

"So these nobs perform different functions," he concludes.

"Yep," she answers. He reaches up to press another and she says, "But don't touch th—"

The screen goes dark.

He presses the button again, and again, and then pushes it in and holds it down until finally the screen lights up again, revealing her empty chair and the monitors on her father's desk. He's privately thankful for her absence; he doesn't need an audience while he learns to control this mechanized beast.

He walks the perimeter of the camera, climbs atop it, reads the large labels affixed to it and feels the symbols engraved on the nobs; he holds the cables in his hands and follows them with his eyes, trying to determine where they lead. There's no need to keep time; he doesn't know how long he's there before he hears a stomper approach. The stomps are too gentle, their reverberations too contained, to belong to her oaf of a father.

"Ronin?" she calls from the base of the tree.

She's wearing that helmet. It still takes most of his self-control to refrain from laughing at the silly thing, but he closes his mouth and mounts his hummingbird and doesn't even mention it when he flies down to flutter in front of her goggles.

He tells her, "I fixed it."

She squints up at the screen, using the light from some handheld rectangular device to view the cables in the dark, and says, "Yeah, it looks like you did. Do you mind if I check it, though, just in case?"

"Not at all."

MK climbs the tree slowly, more careful about where she places her feet than he has ever needed to be, and it seems so laborious to be a stomper. He can't imagine how they do it, and has an even harder time imagining it now that he knows they're not as dimwitted as they sound. That's probably why they invent all this gadgetry, he decides: it makes their cumbersome lives less cumbersome.

She pokes at the camera, saying something in her slow voice, and he flies upward to hear her words. She indicates each nob and explains its functions, its name, and then answers his questions as thoroughly as she can. He wonders if all stompers are so well-versed in their technology.

"But—" she tries and fails to suppress a yawn, "if you're really interested in all of this, you should come by the house tomorrow night. I'll show you the computers."

"Tomorrow night may be impossible," he reminds her. It takes him a moment to connect the dots between her perplexed expression and his statement, and he says slowly: "Tomorrow's the negotiations."

"What negotiations?"

"Nod didn't tell you?" What else does Nod talk about every day?

"… No."

"We're meeting the Boggans tomorrow to establish the new boundaries," he says at length. "Nod was supposed to ask you and your father not to enter the forest tomorrow, in case they launch another attack against us. We don't want you to be caught in that."

She frowns, "Maybe I could help."

"You're too slow," he counters instantly, and she recoils like he's stung her. "I don't mean that as an insult, MK, merely a fact of life. You wouldn't be able to stop them."

"No, of course," she replies softly, and this time she doesn't even try to swallow the yawn. She starts to descend from her perch high in the tree, taking care not to step on any fragile branches, and doesn't speak again until she's standing between its raised roots. "I—I think he didn't tell me because he knows tomorrow is the first day of school. I can't miss it. I'd love to, but I can't."

Ronin arches an eyebrow and, rather than asking if stompers learn about cameras at school, asks, "Why would you love to miss it?"

"Let's just say," she answers, not quite looking at him, "that Mandrake is a lot less intimidating than a new high school."

:

The negotiations begin at the first light of dawn. He assumes his place beside Queen Marigold and watches the hoard of Boggans approach.

Quickly.

Too quickly.

Ronin reaches for his sword.

TBC

A/N: As a rule, I do not plead for reviews - but I posted two fics in a nearly dead fandom last month and the fact that I still haven't received any reviews is steadily driving me mad, so kindly forgive me for mentioning that I do greatly appreciate feedback. Even if you don't leave a review, thank you for reading this far and I sincerely hope you're enjoying the story. :)