A/N: Hey, wow, next to last chapter! Pretty exciting stuff. Also, fair warning, but I sort of got all maudlin and flashback-y. Thanks for reading!
Also, it just occurred to me that I totally stole the phrase 'sparkly and magical' from a review someone left for this story. Because it's just that funny and appropriate.
Summary: Nora said their summer trip to the country was going to be an adventure. She didn't mean it quite so literally, but when have Casey and Derek ever been any good at doing what they're told?
Rating: T for content, but M for language, so I'm hedging my bets
Disclaimer: I own nothing you see here. Big shock, I know.
What We Did On Our Summer Vacation
by: Hayseed
Chapter Twelve: Where at the Top of the Tallest Tower
"So if it's so hot out here, where's the Island?" Casey asked.
He glanced around with raised eyebrows. "You're asking me? You're the one who's all sparkly and magical. Shouldn't you know?"
"Well... maybe we should just follow the heat," she said after a while. "Unless you have a better idea."
He thought about it. "Nope. But if we get burned to a crisp or something, I'm blaming you."
"I think that's a risk I'm willing to take," she said sardonically. "You got your sword?"
Unsheathing it, he waved it at her. "How about your bow, tiger?"
An arrow was halfway to her bowstring before he even finished talking.
Silently, they walked forward, feeling the heat envelop them.
Casey kicked at the ground. "Why isn't the snow melting? This doesn't make sense."
"Duh, magic island," he muttered.
"But even magic has to follow the laws of physics, right? I mean, snow melts when it gets hot, and it's got to be at least eighty degrees right now." She scowled at the snow-covered ground. "I don't like this."
He grinned humorlessly. "I've felt that way since we got here, Case. Welcome to my world."
Whatever snappy retort she was going to make never happened. They rounded a corner and everything came screeching to a halt.
They'd found the Island.
Casey's bow slid out of her hands and fell into the snow. "Oh, no," she said frantically. "I did not sign up for this shit."
"Casey," he said in the most patient voice he possessed.
"Derek," she replied in a mocking parody of his tone. "There's a fucking lava moat!"
Okay, he had to admit that was some pretty scary stuff. Island of Fire was apparently a really literal name, because it looked like the whole damn thing was burning up.
There was a castle sitting on rock, surrounded by a terrifying lava flow. The air was thick and steamy, but the snow on the ground remained stubbornly intact. Derek was beginning to understand why that freaked Casey out like it did.
Of course, she didn't seem all that bothered by the magic no-melt snow any more. The lava had her full attention.
"Casey," he tried again, laying a hand on her arm for good measure. "That's the only way home."
She shook her head. "Derek, I saw Lord of the Rings -- I know how this is gonna end. I think raising goats in a shack back in town sounds awesome. Why don't we go right now?"
As she spun on her heel, he grabbed her shoulder. "Casey, you gotta just put the drama shit away. You can flip out later, after we get through this."
"See, that's the thing. I'm not going to get through this. Do you see that bridge, Derek?" She pointed.
Now he saw what the biggest problem was.
That was probably the most rickety, broken-down bridge he'd ever seen in his entire life. Admittedly, he hadn't seen a whole lot of actual bridges, but he'd seen a lot of movies featuring bridges. Even freaking Indiana Jones probably wouldn't have set foot on this one, even if he had a whole damn army of Nazis running after him.
"We... it doesn't look that bad," he heard himself say lamely.
She gave him a wide-eyed look. "Are you nuts?" she cried. "That thing looks like a death trap!"
Even if he privately agreed with her assessment, there was no way he was going to admit it out loud. "It's our only option," he said.
"No," she said, shaking her head so that her hair went flying all over the place. "We've got lots of options, and they're great ones. Really. I mean, you had fun fighting for money, right? And I'm good at accidentally shooting stuff, and I bet that could be a good job skill somehow. So I think we could be really happy living here if we just--"
"Casey," he said sharply. "Stop it."
"Well..." she said in obvious desperation. "Can't we, like, flip for it or something?"
With a sigh, he dug around in his pockets for that quarter he'd been carrying around. "Sure. Heads, and we cross the bridge. Tails, and I knock you unconscious and drag you across the bridge."
"De-rek!" she shrieked.
And he was done. "Look, Casey," he said exasperatedly, "a week ago, you all but told me that if we stay over on this side of the Door, I'm gonna die a virgin. Do you really think I'm going to let that happen because someone isn't willing to cross a fiery pit of death?"
"You're such a pig, I can't--"
"Yeah, yeah," he interrupted. "Real original comeback, there, Case. Now, which is it going to be: heads or tails?"
She fiddled with her bowstring with a sullen air. "I should just shoot your ass and be done with it."
"You've been threatening to do that, like, daily for the last three months. So put up or shut up, princess," he said, glaring at her.
After returning his glare for a long moment, she just shrugged. "I was right."
"What?" he asked, baffled at the non-sequitur.
"I said we weren't going to get home without having to do some stupid 'togetherness' stunt, and this is it. Because there's no way in hell I would even set foot on that thing if I was alone," she told him, gesturing emphatically at the bridge.
He grinned. "Heads it is, then."
"Oh, shut up," she said, poking at him with the tip of her bow. "I'm only doing this because I can't bear the thought of never taking a shower again."
"You know..." he drawled in his best effort at a sexy bedroom voice. "I wonder if maybe..."
"If you're about to say something about water conservation or washing my back, I'm totally going to slap you," she said tightly.
Giving her a companionable nudge, he started walking toward the Island. "Come on, fun-killer. Home awaits."
"Or, you know, a fiery, horrific death with no chance of escape," she said glumly, trailing behind him.
On the one hand, dealing with Casey's not-so-little panic attack was annoying and nowhere near his responsibility, but on the other, it did take his mind off the fact that he was going to have to cross the bridge too.
Her hand suddenly clapped over his forearm in a death-grip, nails digging deep under his skin. He thought about saying something, but her chalky expression and panicked eyes suggested she probably would either just ignore it or finally make good on her promise to shoot him with an arrow.
Although he had made her put her bow back over her shoulder. Even if they ran into something on the way across, it wasn't like she'd be in control enough to do anything about it, and he couldn't get rid of the mental image of her dropping the damn thing into the lava and instinctively going after it. She shouldn't have mentioned stupid Lord of the Rings -- now he couldn't think of anything else.
"No rails," she whimpered. "Nothing to hold on to."
He bit back a retort when he felt her nails go in deeper; he was going to have freaking scars from this. "It'll be okay," he told her, feeling stupid.
Together, they stepped onto the first plank, and Casey let out a loud sigh when the wood failed to collapse and send them falling into the swirling lava below.
"See?" he muttered, offering her a smile. "Nothing to it. That's one down."
"Jesus, don't say down," she moaned.
Step by step, Derek all but dragged her across. There was a tricky moment when they came across the first broken board. Casey had started breathing really hard and her eyes slammed shut, and he'd had to talk her through stepping over the hole even though she wouldn't open her eyes for anything.
As soon as there was solid ground under their feet again, Casey fell to her knees with a cry of relief, her whole body shaking.
"You owe me for life," he said mildly. "You also better hope we don't have to go back that way, because I only do that sort of shit for someone once."
Her eyes were wide and moist as she looked up at him. "How the hell were you not going out of your mind?" she asked with only an edge of nastiness. "You scream at the mere suggestion of a mouse in the house."
Really, what harm was there in being honest? It wasn't like anyone would believe her even if she told them. "I kind of had other stuff to focus on," he admitted. "If you hadn't gone completely psychotic, I might have been able to express my anxiety a little more freely."
Blinking, she tilted her head. "Are you saying that I helped you?"
"No," he said a bit too quickly. "I just... it's like in a hockey game, okay? I'm freaked and puking my guts out for a week beforehand, but when I get out on the ice, I've got too much other shit to do to be scared. Same deal."
"So I helped you," she said again, lips twitching.
He sighed and folded his arms over his chest. "You're not going to let this go, are you?"
Scrambling to her feet, she wiped her eyes and took several deep, calming breaths. "Nope."
"You helped me, all right?" he shot back, scuffing his sneaker in the dirt. "Can we go in the scary-ass castle and figure out how to get the hell home now? I'm getting kind of worn out from all the drama and touchy-feely shit."
She pulled out her bow again and gave him an inscrutable look. "Thank you, Derek."
What the hell was she thanking him for? "Come on," he moaned, bouncing on his heels.
He let her lead the way; she had the bow, after all, and would be in a much better position to take out someone lurking in the distance. And he hadn't been joking about the castle, either. It did kind of freak him out, and he wasn't exactly looking forward to going in. Casey had done a good job of keeping him too distracted to worry about the bridge -- and how sucky was it that she knew it, too? -- but she didn't seem too fazed about the castle.
The enormous door loomed in front of them. And it was seriously looming. There were some big football players at Thompson that were pretty good at the basic loom, but this door was a champion at it. If there was a World Series of Looming, this door would take it, hands down. The Mafia could take lessons from--
You're babbling.
He forced himself to focus on Casey's hand, reaching out to grab the door ring. Metal scraped against metal as she twisted it.
The latch lifted, and Derek tried to push his panic deep down into a place where he didn't have to feel it.
It didn't work.
When Derek was nine years old and his parents were just starting to realize that being married to each other required more effort than either of them were willing to put into it, they had gone through a brief stint of marriage counseling. Which Derek thought was incredibly lame even at the tender age of nine, but if it distracted them from the fact that he was flunking... pretty much everything, then whatever worked, right?
But part of their counseling was a weekly 'date night,' to get reacquainted with each other and remember why they fell in love in the first place. Derek knew that this was the purpose of 'date night' because Abby had shrieked it at the top of her lungs several times before George would agree to go. In hindsight, he realized that George probably went along with it just to get her to shut up.
The big problem with 'date night' was that, over the years, Derek had done a spectacular job of running off each and every babysitter that they'd ever had. Even the draw of fifty bucks an hour wasn't enough to bring a sitter into the Venturi household. But 'date night' had been mandated by their therapist, and kids weren't allowed to tag along, so they had to figure out an alternate plan.
So Derek had been put in charge of six-year-old Edwin and infant Marti and begged to please, please, for the love of everything you hold sacred, even you hold something sacred, right, Derek not burn the house down or do anything that might require medical intervention. It had occurred to him even then that neither of his parents apparently thought much of him if he couldn't be trusted to not kill his little brother and baby sister. But, whatever.
'Date night' had started off as calmly as it could: Abby and George were fighting as they walked out of the house, and Derek had to lug Marti and Edwin next door to ask Mrs. Davis if they had any milk he could use for Marti's supper because they didn't have any at home. Nothing too out of the ordinary.
He fed Marti with a bottle and threatened to feed Edwin with a bottle when he spilled his bowl of canned ravioli. And later, they had their traditional 'Mom and Dad aren't here' potato chip fight and had a competition to see who could make Marti laugh the hardest with funny faces. Derek had been so distracted by being in charge that he forgot to steal the remote and make Edwin wash the supper dishes.
To really throw their parents for a loop, they'd even gone to bed on time. Derek and Edwin played 'campout' in Marti's room, partially so that Derek could hear her since the baby monitor's batteries went dead weeks ago, but mostly because he didn't think he could fall asleep knowing that his parents weren't home.
He must have fallen asleep at some point, though, because he remembered waking up to the sound of a very distant baby cry.
Jerking awake, young Derek realized three things. Number one, Marti was screaming her head off. Number two, Edwin was making these weird wheezing noises. And number three, he was feeling sort of itchy and tickly at the same time.
As he jumped up to see what was wrong with Marti, he noticed that the blankets were covered with little black spots. A lot of little black spots.
And they were moving.
He didn't remember doing it, but he apparently went and switched the lights on.
Spiders. Hundreds, thousands, millions of spiders, crawling all over the room. Into and out of Marti's wailing mouth, all over poor Edwin and their camping blankets.
He could feel them in his hair, under his pajamas, even in his ears and up his nose.
But nine-year-old Derek did the best he could. He grabbed Marti and Edwin and hustled them all into the tub, washing the spiders down the drain and scrubbing until their skin was bright red. All three of them had numerous spider bites.
Edwin's breathing only got worse and worse, and in the end, Derek had to do exactly what he knew would send his parents through the roof.
He called the emergency people.
'Date night' went very blurry after that, after the ambulance got there and he was no longer in charge. He did remember throwing up a lot, though. And every spider he saw floating around in his vomit made him throw up all over again.
They called his parents from the hospital, once Edwin had been given a shot that made him start breathing better. George and Abby came rushing over from wherever they'd been, and Derek had been sure they were going to start yelling at him. After all, he'd done exactly what they'd told him not to, hadn't he?
And at first, his fears were realized. Abby marched into the ER, jerked him off the cot he was sitting on in between his bouts of nausea, and asked him what the hell he had done to his brother and sister.
But before he could answer, the big EMT who had carried him over his shoulder into the ambulance and calmed him down from panic attack that started right about when they pulled up to the hospital stepped in. He told her that it looked like the spiders got in through a hole in Marti's ceiling and maybe they ought to check their attic for wood rot instead of screaming in public at a nine-year-old who'd probably just saved his brother's life.
Abby had turned really red at that, and Derek spent the next six months telling everyone he met he was going to be an EMT when he grew up.
But everything turned out more or less okay. Marti seemed uninjured and just as happy as she usually was. And now they knew about Edwin's allergy to spider bites, and he carried around one of those kit-things. And Abby basically moved out of the house the next day without so much as an 'I'm sorry' to Derek, while George called a contractor to fix their roof, apologized to all three kids pretty much every hour on the hour, and took them grocery shopping for the first time in weeks. By the tenth time he told them things were going to be better now that the fighting had stopped, Derek actually believed him.
Derek had gotten three things out of the ordeal: the two-wheeler he'd been begging for, bike-riding lessons that resulted in a broken wrist (George's, not Derek's), and a lifelong terror of spiders.
The door creaked open, and Casey grinned at him. "Creepy, huh."
"Yeah," he said, trying to keep his voice even and not-at-all-worried sounding. "You can hold my hand if it gets too scary for ya, Case."
"I'll keep that in mind," she retorted loftily, stepping through the door without a second's hesitation.
There was no real way around it-- he was going to hesitate. The trick was to make sure she didn't notice it. "How come the bridge wigged you out, but you're all happy and excited to go charging into the freaky, sinister castle?"
"Oh, I don't know... maybe the ten tons of molten lava had something to do with it," she said in a sarcastic tone. "You can't kill it, and you can't run away from it unless you get a really awesome head start. But this isn't any worse than any of the other bizarre shit we've had to deal with."
He forced himself to take a step inside. "Not a bad point," he said through grit teeth.
And then something rustled.
"Did you hear that?' he whispered.
"My sleeve got hung up on a bit of wall," she said. "Quit being a baby."
Okay, so that did it. Straightening, he stalked through the doorway and made his way over to her. "I am not," he said sullenly in her ear.
"I plead the fifth." Light from a nearby crack in the wall illuminated her face as she turned around, and he could see that the corners of her mouth were twitching.
He rolled his eyes. "We're Canadian," he said exasperatedly. "You've got to cut out the crime show marathons, Casey, or people are going to start thinking you're dumber than you actually are."
"Maybe I've just been planning your murder and doing research on how to keep from getting caught," she shot back.
"Nuh-uh," he said, shaking his head. "There's no way you'd kill the guy offering to make out with you on a daily basis."
She opened her mouth to reply, but there was a louder rustling noise, and she shut it again with a confused expression.
"Jeez, Klutzilla much?" Derek exclaimed. "Tuck your shirt in or something and stay away from the walls."
"Derek," she whispered, "I haven't moved. Have you?"
Somehow, he'd forgotten they were standing in the middle of one of the scariest places he'd ever been, but the rustle turned into a weird scratching sound, and the panic came crashing back down.
"What is that noise?" she asked no one in particular, holding her hand out and summoning her little light ball.
As she lifted it high in the air and light flooded the dim room, Derek's stomach clenched and his mouth went totally dry.
A spider as big as a Mack truck paused in mid-scuttle and made a hissing noise. Derek's terrified eyes followed a drop of venom that formed on one of its fangs and splashed on the floor.
"Oh, shit," Casey muttered, fumbling an arrow out of her quiver and banishing her light ball in a single motion.
He couldn't help it. He really couldn't.
He was nine years old again and he could feel them crawling around in his mouth.
The sword fell out of his hands and clattered to the floor.
"Derek," she breathed, half-turning to take in his pale and frozen expression.
The spider hissed again, scuttling closer, and Casey turned away, focusing all of her attention on the monster.
The first arrow missed completely, and the second one bounced off a leg-- if anything, the spider started moving faster.
Another one took out one of its eyes, and it made a horrible sort of screaming noise, but still kept coming.
It took everything he had not to clap his hands over his eyes and scream in terror, like one of those stupid girls in those horror movies he and Edwin thought were so funny.
Fourth, fifth, sixth arrows, and Casey was swearing because the spider didn't seem fazed. "Derek!" she shouted.
He blinked, feeling like he was trying to move underwater.
"I'm out of arrows!" she cried. "I need your help, Derek!"
Stooping to pick up his sword, his trembling hands couldn't manage to grip it. "I... I can't... I just..." he stammered.
They were in his nose and Edwin couldn't breathe and Marti was screaming and his mom was gonna be so mad...
"Derek!" Casey said, tears running down her face. "Derek, please..."
"Oh, fuck," he whispered, forcing himself to hang onto the sword hilt even though the blade itself was waving around so wildly he almost cut himself. "Oh, fuck..."
Whatever it was Casey was shouting at him got blocked out as he came face-to-face with the house-sized spider.
"Just so you know," he told it, voice shaking, "I couldn't look during this part of Lord of the Rings, so I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing."
He lashed out blindly, which didn't seem to accomplish anything other than whacking the flat of the blade against a leg and make the spider scuttle even more frantically.
"The belly," Casey shrieked. "Hit its weak spot!"
"No," he moaned. In between him and the spider's belly was a furiously snapping mouth full of venom-dripping fangs.
No way.
Not gonna happen. He knew the best way to deal with a phobia was to confront it, but this was stupid. Confronting his phobia meant something like, holding a baby spider from the garden or some shit like that. Killing a spider the size of an elephant was not the way to go about it. He had to work his way up to doing that kind of thing.
Casey screamed as the spider flipped its head around and venom splashed in Derek's face. His skin went unpleasantly numb; thank God his eyes had been closed.
Okay, so he was going to work his way up to it quickly.
"Motherfucker," he said, taking another swipe at the creature with his sword. It took out a chunk of flesh, and he used the opportunity to slide in between a couple of legs while the spider was preoccupied with flailing in pain.
Now or never...
"Now or never," he said, jaw clenched tight and sword tip pointed upward.
Closing his eyes again, he stabbed up and through a thick layer of skin and muscle.
He jerked his arms back and felt the muscle tear.
A hot flood of something unspeakably gross came washing over him and he hit the ground rolling before the spider could collapse.
It went deadly quiet.
And then hands on his face, wiping it off. As soon as they came away, Derek flipped onto his hands and knees and vomited. "That... that was disgusting," he said, coughing.
"I... I didn't know you didn't like spiders," Casey eventually said, surprisingly tactful for once.
"Not something I share," he said, retching again. "But if I didn't like 'em before, now they really fucking piss me off."
She chuckled. "I just hope there was only one."
"Don't say shit like that," he told her seriously. "Or I won't save your life any more. And you not even saying 'thank you.'"
"I find myself unwilling to properly display my gratitude until you've changed your clothes," she admitted.
He cracked an eye open. "Are you telling me that we have clean clothes?"
She shrugged. "Clean-ish. Don't you remember bringing the bags over the bridge with us?"
In his haste to get back to the corner where he'd dropped everything, he slipped three times in his puddle of spider guts. "Oh, my God," he breathed, stripping down to his boxers and using a blanket to scrape off as much ick as he could. "I could scrub for a freaking month and not feel clean."
"Come on, Superman," she teased. "The sooner we get started again, the sooner you can start scrubbing."
He was not going to feel embarrassed. "You know, Casey, the more you make snide remarks about my underwear, the more I become convinced that you're fascinated by my delightful sense of child-like whimsy."
"Or child-like something," she said with an eyeroll.
Tugging on a pair of trousers and a shirt he hadn't worn for a few days, he began the slow and repulsive process of putting his spider-encrusted sneakers back on. He would have left them, but for all he knew, there would be a room down the hall full of broken glass or something equally stupid. "Says the girl wearing neon underwear," he said lightly, giving up his efforts to retie them. "At least my undergarments make an appropriately ironic fashion statement, whereas yours are just tacky."
"I can't believe I'm having this conversation with you," she said, putting her face in her hands.
"Right after an evil spider battle, even," he agreed solemnly.
She shot him an incredulous look, but after a second, she leaned over and planted a chaste kiss on his lips. "Thanks for saving my life, Superman."
He grinned. "Thanks for thanking me even though I probably taste like spiders and puke."
"De-rek!"
"Well, I'm lost," he said, sitting on a nearby staircase and grinning up at her. "Got any suggestions, magic girl?"
They'd been wandering around the castle for a little while, basically opening doors at random and getting nowhere.
"I'm thinking," she replied, sounding sort of frustrated. "It just... all Magic Man told me was that to find home, we had to want to find home."
"There's no place like home," he said dryly, lifting his feet up in the air so he could click his heels together. They didn't actually click so much as squish.
She rolled her eyes. "You're an idiot."
"Yeah, but at least I'm cute, right?"
"You might be on to something, though," she said, apparently ignoring his remark. "Fairy tale rules and everything. But, I don't... why can't I remember?"
"I know in those Disney movies Marti watches over and over, they always have to run like hell all over the place and up stairs all the time," he offered. "Of course, in those a fire-breathing dragon is usually after them, and I really don't want to have to deal with--"
"That's it!" she interrupted. "Derek, you're a genius."
He blinked. "While truer words were never spoken," he said, bemused, "I don't recall that I've ever heard you say them before."
With a light punch in the shoulder, she started pulling him to his feet. "Come on, Derek. I know which way to go now."
"Are you sure? 'Cause it looks like all the other doors in this damn place," he said, giving both her and the door a skeptical look.
Sighing, she just put her hands on her hips. "It has to be," she replied. "It's the smallest room at the top of the tallest tower. That's, like, fairy tale law."
"So, basically the hardest and stupidest thing we could be forced to do is what we're going to have to do?"
She grinned. "You're finally catching on."
"Well, ladies first," he said, stepping back from the door and waving his hand.
"How about only person with a weapon first?" she retorted. "We don't know what's on the other side."
With zero hesitation, he pushed the sword into her hands. "Sure. Fine by me."
"You suck, Derek," she grumbled, hefting the sword and giving it an experimental swing. She grunted a little bit, and some of her hair escaped its ponytail to flop into her face. A bead of sweat started to make its way down her neck, and it occurred to him in that moment that he'd never seen anything sexier in his entire life.
"Jeez," he said before he could help himself, "chicks with swords are kind of hot."
The sword aimed itself clumsily at his throat. "They're also kind of deadly," she said pointedly. "So unless you want to go first..."
"I'll ignore your obvious sexual charisma and let you get on with it," he completed in a rush.
"Sexual charisma?" she echoed with disbelief.
He grinned and shook his head. "Hey, I can't be suave and charming every second of every day, can I?"
"You are making a pretty decent case for being delusional, though," she said, nudging the door open with her foot.
Holding his breath, Derek followed Casey through the doorway.
"Oh, Jesus tap-dancing Christ," Derek cried. "You have got to be kidding me!"
They were standing in Marti's garden, right in front of the Door they'd come through in the first place.
"Derek," Casey said softly, letting her sword arm go slack. "Maybe it's not..."
"Of course it is, Casey," he said in a furious voice. "It's just this universe trying to fuck us over again. Well, you know what? Fuck you!" he screamed, looking up at the sky. "I did not go through all of that bullshit to just have to do it again, so you, Universe, can just cram it in your--"
A disdainful and weirdly familiar voice interrupted his ranting. "You are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most crass, unintelligent boy I have ever had the displeasure of knowing."
Casey's wide eyes met his. "Is that..." she whispered.
"And you, girl, are not much better," the Keeper said, strolling into their line of sight. "Although I see that you have managed to gain a measure of control over yourself."
"I, uh, yeah," she stammered, eyes widening even further. "Wait, how did you know about that?"
The Keeper sighed, sending a wash of foul-smelling breath toward them. "Just because I'm not a mage doesn't mean I'm blind, child. Now, I believe you both have something that belongs to me."
"What?" Derek asked, sort of confused but mostly still pissed beyond reason. "You threw us out without so much as a 'screw you.' All you gave us were those stupid..."
He cleared his throat. "Yes. And they're not yours."
Casey threw the sword at his feet and started fumbling for her bow. "You can keep them, you horrible old man," she said with a scowl. "They've brought nothing but trouble."
"Imagine the trouble you would have had without them," he said, giving her a grin that revealed a whole row of rotting, broken teeth. "The dagger, too, young lady."
As soon as he had the weapons back, he thrust a pile of rags at them. "What's that?" Derek asked curiously.
"Put them on," he said. "You cannot take anything from our world to yours, including clothing."
"But... but we threw those away," Casey said with obvious confusion. "We left them at the inn."
The Keeper cocked an eyebrow. "Did you? I can't imagine how they wound up here, then."
They swapped out clothes as quickly as possible. "Oh, God, they're just as rank as they were when we got rid of them," Derek moaned. "Worse, maybe."
"Yours have blood all over them," Casey pointed out unnecessarily.
"Yeah, well, yours smell like rotten fish," he snarled.
The Keeper rolled his eyes. "Are you two quite finished?"
"Let's see... you've taken away all of our possessions and made us put on our old disgusting clothes. I guess we're about as humiliated as we can be," Derek said, hands folded across his chest. "What, do we have to do it all over now? Was there something we didn't do right; Casey not get hurt often enough or something?"
With a loud sigh, the Keeper just waved his hand at the Door. "I'm trying to send you home, foolish boy!"
"Newsflash, weird old dude, we've already tried that door," he said, voice tight with frustration. "It doesn't work."
Tilting her head to one side, Casey looked back and forth between him and the Door. "Derek, maybe..." She put a hand to the wood and gasped when it swung open at her touch.
His mouth fell open. "But that doesn't even make sense! You said the Door could only be opened with lots of concentration and magical training. Casey can't even make a bottle float more than, like, five feet."
"Thanks, jackass," Casey shot over her shoulder.
"This is the Island of Fire," the Keeper told him. "The two of you have met the necessary requirements for safe passage."
"No, it isn't!" he practically howled. "It's the same damn Door -- it's even got the same weird flowers growing around it. And how did we go from being inside to outside, anyway?"
Casey put a hand on his arm, but he waved it away.
"I mean, we were like five stories off the ground, in the middle of a bunch of lava and snow. We opened a door, and now we're back in sunny, warm Fairyland. You people are all fucking nutjobs!" he shouted. "I am sick and tired of being jerked around like..."
He might have continued yelling at the Keeper, but after a fair amount of eyerolling, Casey just gave him a hard shove and pushed him right through the Doorway.
Before his field of view went totally dark, he could have sworn he saw the Keeper smile and give him a cheery little wave.
Bastard.
