Kyou Kara Maou : Wolfram Takes a Break

Summary: On Cheri's wedding cruise, Wolfram takes a break from parenting, but doesn't return. Can Yuuri and the children find him? Short sequel to The Pirate Wedding.

Disclaimer: I have no rights to Kyou Kara Maou, of course.

Warnings: this is a sequel – I'm not going to explain things or introduce people from The Pirate Wedding. But there are summaries and illustrations for all of these stories (click the homepage link on my author's profile).

Please review.

Chapter 1 : Togetherness

"Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you to bits," Wolfram told Bertram, snuggling his face into the baby's tummy until he giggled. "Now go to Wimpue. I'll be back soon, yes I will." Wolfram shoved Bertram into Yuuri's hands, still dripping from his last ten trips down Cheri and Manfred's new hydrofoil's waterslide with Greta. Wolfram had waited on deck with Bertram, getting steadily angrier. "Here, Yuuri. The kiddie pool is warming, don't let him get sunburnt. I'm swimming to the island to look around. Be back in an hour… maybe three."

"Ah… that sounds like fun! I'll go with you!" said Yuuri. Year-old Mazoku baby Bertram, dressed only in a diaper in the August heat, glowered at him and began blowing bubbles on his lips.

Wolfram continued to the hydrofoil's diving platform without stopping. "Yuuri, the babies cling to me all day. Don't you start clinging, too." And with that, he executed a perfect dive off the hydrofoil into the deep aquamarine waters, and set off with a clean crawl stroke to the closest of the craggy black Khrennikov Fire Islands. He looked absolutely gorgeous. Yuuri desperately wished he were going with him, to frolic alone in those azure waters by a deserted island…

"Next time, you might give Wolfram a turn at the water slide," suggested Friedrich mildly, relaxing in Manfred's wheelchair on deck. He was modeling it being a perfectly reasonable place to sit, to urge Manfred use it more often under sail. Friedrich himself didn't need it in the slightest. Also dripping from the water slide, at age 783, Bertram's great-great-great grandfather Friedrich was in better physical shape than Yuuri himself. He looked to Yuuri's Earth-born eyes to be around 50, just a few silver highlights gracing his yellow-blond hair, compact and trim as Wolfram and Manfred. He'd swum a mile every morning of this vacation so far. "Mommies want to have fun, too."

"He doesn't like being called a Mommy," Yuuri replied, still holding Bertram at arm's length, bobbing him up and down a little in an attempt to improve his bubble-blowing mood.

"I don't blame him," said Friedrich. "But I'm not the one who treats him that way. Yuuri, you do realize you're pissing that baby off, don't you?" Friedrich got up and dived off the platform.

"Ah…" said Yuuri, who hadn't realised that.

"Ch. Chu!" demanded Bertram.

"Ah, Bertram," said Yuuri, clasping the baby to his bare wet chest with a sinking feeling. "Chichue's taking a break. You get to play with Wimpue – ah, otousan Yuuri for a while." Dammit, now they've got me calling me Wimpue… It was truly heart-warming how bonded Wolfram and Bertram had become. And when it came to Wolfram sleeping in every morning, Bertram was promptly trained to accept substitutes. Other than that, though, he attached himself to his Chichiue Wolfram like a starfish.

"Chuuuuu!" moaned Bertram thinly, sounding heartbroken.

"Ah… Here's Greta! Hello, Greta, would you like to play with Bertram and me?"

Greta had just climbed up for another run down the waterslide. The year from eleven to twelve had brought big changes – her sexy white bikini top looked to be about a 34B. Yuuri had been horrified by this bikini, which Cheri gave her for the family vacation. Wolfram shrugged and said it looked great on her – which it did – to adolescent Efram's whole-hearted agreement. Yuuri meant to ask Manfred to have a chat with Efram about that.

"Sorry, Wimpue – I mean, Yuuri – Efram and I are –" The rest was cut off by Efram tackling her down the waterslide, face in her bikini top. Maybe… I should have a chat with Efram about that, Yuuri thought with a sinking feeling. Maybe… like, now…

"Yuuri…" muttered Manfred, hobbling past on his way to the side. He yelled overboard to his son, "Efram. Inappropriate contact – you're beached, one hour. Greta. Next time, I'd better see a convincing objection, young lady." Yuuri couldn't make out the words wafting up from below, but the wheedling tone was unmistakable. "Want to make it two hours?" replied Manfred. The wheedling tone abruptly switched to apology.

"Chuu…" said Bertram sadly, and started to sniffle. Yuuri, deeply in accord with Bertram in missing Wolfram, snuggled him closer.

"Ah, thank you, Manfred," he said. "Um… Are you going to… um?"

"I'll speak to him." Manfred sat down on the wheelchair to chat. "You're in agreement? That any… kissing cousins thing… between those two would be a serious mistake? On a number of levels… Are you going to discuss it with Greta?"

"Ah…" Actually, Yuuri's mind was stalled, still refusing to wrap itself around the 'kissing cousins' comment.

"Would you like me or Cheri to discuss it with Greta?" Manfred persisted. "It takes two, Yuuri. Saying Efram's guilty and Greta's innocent is just begging for trouble."

"Have a heart, Manfred," interjected Adelbert, sitting under an awning nearby, his huge frame looking completely incongruous huddled on the deck coloring with toddler Frieda. "We're still new to this, and Yuuri's only an adolescent himself. I probably would have knocked them both into next week."

"A bit hypocritical, that," said Manfred. "I'm remembering a certain camping trip with your little purple-haired cousin from Walde – what was her name again, Adelbert?"

"Ah, yes, we were about Efram's age, weren't we?" Adelbert grinned bashfully, scratching his head. "And she was about Greta's… shape."

Yuuri really didn't want to know what which of them did with the cousin from Walde. He especially didn't want this conversation delving further into sexual-firsts, his first and only being Wolfram, which didn't shed any obvious light on what to say to Greta. "I think… I should talk this over with Wolfram first, Manfred. Um… think the baby pool's warm yet, Adelbert?"

"Let's go try it," Adelbert replied, eager to grasp any excuse not to think about boys like himself in Frieda's future. Manfred could handle things here. "We're really kinda pathetic without Wolfram around, aren't we?" he said, when they'd passed out of Manfred's hearing. Yuuri sadly agreed. So did Bertram and Frieda.

The pool was cold, and their fathers forgot to keep them out of the sun, but Bertram and Frieda let it pass.

-oOo-

Wolfram swam hard for the island, to work some anger out of his system. The first beach was occupied by Brendan von Gratz's family, having a daylong picnic. Brendan and Hilde – who took their kids camping about one week in four – rose at dawn to toss together their expedition. We should –, Wolfram thought, but then he pictured how it would really go, with him doing all the work, completely inept compared to Hilde, while Yuuri and the adolescents played, until Wolfram blew up at the lot of them… Well, Yuuri was an adolescent, too, wasn't he? Wolfram was getting damned tired of being the only grown-up. Well, everyone warned me, but I didn't want to hear it.

Freshly inspired into another anger-fueled stint of crawl stroke, he made it to the next inlet, but didn't look in. Conrad and Yozak's voices – well, moans – suggested company wasn't welcome. Well, I could have brought Yuuri with me, he thought sadly. We used to be sexy lovers. Now I'm a bitchy Mommy, and he's one of the kids. Unhappy with that thought, he settled into a slower stroke for another island across the way – the first island's deserted shore wasn't nearly deserted enough, family all over the place. No family. Just for a few hours, I want to escape family… The thought made him feel guilty – he loved them all so much! But…

His strength and anger were both about spent by the time he reached the second, truly deserted, island, much bigger than the one nearest the boat. He rested a few minutes on a little crescent of diamond-glittering black sand, the hydrofoil with all his nearest and dearest still in view. The mini-beach not offering much but scraped knees and a place to sit, he strapped on his heavy wet leather sandals to protect against the viciously sharp volcanic rocks, and started swim-scrambling his way around to the side of the island hidden from the hydrofoil and the other island.

After the third headland, he stopped and said, "Oooh…" No question – this was a view he hadn't seen before. It was possible that no one had seen it before. The Fire Islands were both wildlife preserve and under-charted navigational hazard. The price of admittance was a working vacation – Cheri's crew was surveying blank areas of Lord Khrennikov's master charts, with a coast guard captain along to supervise.

Wolfram's water view, an expanse ringed by larger islands, was dotted with small craggy spires and humps of tortured black rock. Some rogue current had striped the local black sand with white, showcasing the pure turquoise waters in bands with darker blue-green. The sheltered water was like glass, clear ripple rings emanating for yards from the leaps of iridescent flying fish, surface perfectly reflecting islands and birds and the few high puffy clouds. Some of the rocks held flocks of stately seabirds and squat knee-high penguins, others held seals sunning themselves. Beneath his feet, gaudy fish swam among colorful corals. He dipped a hand in, and cupped out six of the tiny clear jellyfish that phosphoresced at night in a rainbow of colors.

Wandering in toward the island from his little headland, Wolfram saw the inlet kept going into a lagoon, even more placid, with a hot spring burbling beside the pure sea water, beneath a tiny cool waterfall. Strange scarlet flowers and vivid foliage had managed to take root in crevices holding tiny bits of soil, and the shallow lagoon acted like a fish tank, offering an easy view of the multicolored fish.

Wolfram grinned. He felt like he'd finally arrived on vacation. All his grumbling, cranky, everybody-wants-something-from-me feelings vanished. He stripped his shorts and took a brief shower in the little freshwater waterfall, which tasted delicious. He lay down to float by the hot waters gushing into the lagoon from the hot spring, eyes closed, just feeling the cool and hot waters mix and lap around his body. He flipped over to gaze down at his fishy companions now and then.

After a while, grinning in delight, he put his shorts back on, added a scarlet flower to his hair just for fun, and set off to explore the interior of the island. He'd already been gone half of his promised three hours, but… He'd never come this way again. His maryoku was singing within him – this place seemed to be a mecca to the fire elementals. They'd been unusually strong on the other island, but he'd never felt their company as strongly as here. He felt far too good to worry about his family back on the ship. If he made it back by suppertime, that would be good enough. He scrambled up through the jagged black rocks, to see what he could see.

Over half an hour later, not far from another pretty lagoon with even prettier fresh waterfall, with dancing blue dragonflies, he stopped dead in his tracks. A stunning scarlet and gold plumaged bird was building a pile of sticks. Never, anywhere, had Wolfram felt the fire elementals this strong. He felt a tingling all over his skin, a faint version of the lapping of fire healing tendrils. Looking at his hand, he saw he was glowing a fire healer halo, all over, without even trying. Far from expending maryoku, he felt like he was recharging it, and overflowing. And it kept getting stronger, as though more and more fire elementals were swarming into this bay of rock by the lagoon. Even the few clumps of flowers and deep green leaves were beginning to glow orange halos.

Among the living things there, only the bird didn't glow. Three feet tall, with a three foot tail, colors like jewels and metallic gold, somehow the majestic bird looked tired. As everything else glowed stronger, its colors seemed to slowly dim. Suddenly Wolfram's eyes opened wide. Of course he'd seen that bird before, though only in pictures, usually stylized. The phoenix was the centerpiece of the von Bielenfeld family crest, the most powerful fire family of all the Mazoku.

And the phoenix was building a pyre.

He did consider going to get the family. To his knowledge, no one had seen a phoenix in living memory. And their awesome ceremony of rebirth happened only once in 500 years. But he had no idea how much time he had. And not for worlds would he miss seeing the phoenix light his pyre. He felt he'd been drawn to this spot as surely as the fire elementals, to pay homage. He settled in to watch and wait.

-oOo-

I love reviews… They encourage me to write more.

Please review.