To the Power Born: A Tale of the Slayers
Part 8: Friends for Life
Over the next three days, not a lot happened. Friday, the rest of the year's crop of newbie Slayers got in (only six, which brought us up to that year's twenty-three), went through the same drill as the first seventeen, and threw themselves into the work of learning to be Slayers.
Mi Kyong stayed the night alone that night, or part of it. Royal wasn't in bed with me and Colin when we woke, or in my room when I checked. He'd woken up when Mi Kyong had come awake from a nightmare about three in the morning (he'd been awake and heard her cry out— sharp ears, pseudo dragons, which is funny since they have no visible ears), and gone to finish out the night with her, knowing that would make me happy, since she was already a dear friend. Besides, he loved her himself. (Big hearts on pseudo dragons— they may love one person more than any other, but they can love a whole lot of people.)
She actually tried to apologize for needing company, but I didn't get a chance to step on that— Colin beat me to it. He reached out and covered her mouth, gently but firmly, before she'd gotten farther than "I'm sorry, I—"
Once she'd stopped talking, Colin shook his head at her, slowly but broadly, then shook a finger at her in a "shame on you" gesture. Then he pointed at himself, held his hands up as though gripping the bars of a prison cell, held up one hand with all four fingers and his thumb spread, pointed at the calendar on the kitchen wall— then twirled the index finger of his right hand near his temple while flapping his pursed lips up and down with the index finger of his left hand.
Mi Kyong laughed hard for a second (as did everyone who saw this little pantomime)— and Mom said, "Whitey, in case you missed that, he said that if he'd been in that prison camp for five years, he'd be crazy as a one-legged man in a butt-kickin' fight."
"I got the crazy part," Dad said with a chuckle.
"He's right," I said, still giggling. "Mi Kyong, no need to apologize for needing company. Ever!"
"I… all right," she said with a sigh. "Thank you."
Saturday went quietly and well— nothing big happened, just lots of little things. I spent some time getting to know the new girls, some time with Colin, some with Mi Kyong, some with my family… good day, overall.
Xander, Buffy and their kids were scheduled to go back to New York Monday morning on a chartered plane— only one airline thus far treated pseudo dragons as passengers, not pets, and they didn't have any openings for their NYC flights that day, so they chartered a plane, not being willing to submit their friends to cages and cargo compartments. (And if they'd been willing, their kids wouldn't have!)
So it was nice that, when we went over to breakfast at Scooby Mansion Sunday morning, we found Linnea waiting in the kitchen to take us all in small groups to see Lightning's babies, who had hatched around three in the morning.
I went with Colin and Mi Kyong, and watching their faces as they stared in delight at the tiny little dragons tumbling and tottering around in the hoop made by their mother's curled up body was a treat. One was pale lavender, one the color of polished brass, one a faintly silver-sheened gray, and the last a gorgeous shade of deep purple-blue. Once Lightning sent us permission, we stroked the tiny little things, and I didn't miss the way the gray one seemed to not want Mi Kyong to leave, and the purple-blue one seemed to love being stroked by Colin more than either of us girls. I hoped that meant what it often did— about half the time, baby pseudo dragons attached themselves to someone on first meeting them, but only half the time.
When we left, Colin had that little smile on his face that was, for him, a broad grin, and Mi Kyong looked utterly exalted. Not like I blamed either of them….
Buffy took one look at them, grinned and said, "Pseudo dragon fever, huh?" She reached up to stroke her own scaly companion, a deep, shiny-brown girl named Pointy (don't ask me why, but it probably came from Buffy's head— pseudo dragons here on Earth tend to name themselves for things or from things that they get from their preferred humans). "Don't worry, I understand. When we came home and found some six hundred of these guys in the mansion after the Battle of Bloomington, pseudo dragon fever was a household epidemic. And when I woke up the next morning to find Pointy, here, sleeping on my pillow? Yeah, that was a hell of a treat. Then Xander started talking to Solder—" Xander reached up and fed his silver pseudo dragon friend some bacon as Buffy spoke. "— and things just went pretty much straight from 'this is neat' to 'I think I'm addicted to pseudo dragons.' Nice feeling!"
"I think… I think the little gray one liked me," Mi Kyong said. "I hope…."
"We all hope," Kelly said. "But if not from this batch, sweetheart, then later. We have no bad eggs in this crop of new Slayers, or so Titania and Bookmark assure us— if the pseudo dragons as a bunch seem not to like a girl, we get worried, as that's usually a sign of a girl with emotional problems, at least— so I expect there will be some very happy girls, over the summer, as more of the lady dragons lay and hatch. Of them all, only Tamara— the Australian girl? Aborigine, gorgeous smile? Only she already has a dragon-friend. Gorgeous thing, orange-pink, named Walkabout. He attached himself to her last summer, it seems."
We had breakfast, then spent the day goofing off. Dad came to me after the morning meal, while Colin was in the bathroom, and handed me the three trade-paperback books that collected Colin's adventures as Starpulse, and I looked at them for a long moment, thinking.
"Dad," I said slowly, "is there anything in here that I really need to know?"
"Well… no, I don't think so," Dad said, looking puzzled.
"Okay, then never mind," I said. I handed them back to him, and in reply to his curious look, I said, "Daddy… I want to know who he is. Not who he was. I know enough about that already, from the things Aunt Dawn told us that first night.
"Who he was may affect who he is… but I don't need to know the 'was' to appreciate the 'is.' So… no, thank you."
Dad took them back, looking at me with searching eyes… and slowly, he started to smile. It grew to a big, proud grin, and he said, "Sweetheart… your mother and I do half so well with your siblings as we've done with you, and we're gonna get awards for parenting.
"And may I add… you, young lady, have it bad!"
"I know I do," I said, hugging him. "But I don't mind at all."
"That's how it should be, then," Dad said. "What are we having for dinner, honey?"
I grinned and said, "Well, I haven't decided totally yet. I have it down to bologna sandwiches or chicken parmesan."
"Impress your boyfriend," Daddy said. "Go with the chicken."
"Okay," I said, and he laughed, tickled my sides, and went off to his wood shop, where he was making training stakes for the newbies.
After dinner— which went over really well, but I can't take the credit, Mom, Dad, Kelly and Xander all helped teach me to cook— Colin and I went to the basement with Mi Kyong and my siblings and Buffy and Xander's twins to watch a movie while Mom, Dad, Gwen, Buffy and Xander played poker. We watched a couple of science fiction movies, the original Star Wars (Mi Kyong had never seen it, poor girl!) and the latest super-epic from Jack Calloway, who'd been making hugely successful movies since I was five or so. After that, my sister Belinda leaned forward to look at me and said, "Jocelyn? Dance the Heavens Home?"
I grinned and nodded. Mi Kyong, from the look on her face, didn't know what that was, and Colin probably couldn't know, since he hadn't been here but for a week or so.
Dance the Heavens Home is the name my Aunt Elaine put on the dance video she made from her performance of the first-ever zero gravity dance, a thing she'd done from the inspiration of her favorite-ever novel, Stardance. She's scary-shocking rich from the video sales, and she toyed with the idea of opening a dance studio in space, like the characters in the novel had, but wrote it off as impossible, even given her wealth. Still, once a year she and her whole family would go into space for a month, stay at the Asimov Hilton, and she'd dance in zero gee, play around, look for something that would be worthy of taping in the aftermath of Dance the Heavens Home. She hadn't found anything yet, but I didn't care— I could watch that video daily, and not get tired of it.
Belinda put it in, let everyone get settled, hit play— and the first thing we saw, before the titles even, were the words "For Spider and Jeanne Robinson, who wrote Stardance, the book that taught me to dream… and gave me the specific dream that became this performance." Aunt Elaine has class, and she insisted that those words be the first thing on the video.
We all watched, though Belle and I did look away from the screen occasionally to look at Colin and Mi Kyong's faces.
Both of them wept over the sheer, unbridled beauty of Aunt Elaine doing dance moves that would have been completely impossible in any environment with more than micro-gravity, dancing in her thirty million dollar spacesuit, clear and thin and much more form-fitting than "normal" spacesuits (paid for by Uncle Ballard, who was obscenely rich because his billionaire-asshole father died without changing his will), dancing against a backdrop of naked space… it hurt. But that hurt, it was a really good hurt, the kind that makes you stronger and more aware of everything good in your life, because that hurt is what makes us try.
Okay, I'm just— I'm not going to try to describe it. I can't— Aunt Rose can't, and she's a professional writer. If you haven't seen it, run— do not walk, RUN!— to the nearest video rental place and rent it. If you can tell me in the presence of a pseudo dragon that you regret the expense, I'll refund your money. Personally.
When the video finished, I had a pair of happy-awed-weeping people clinging to me, one on either side, and I didn't mind at all.
"Again?" Mi Kyong said softly after a couple of minutes. "Again, please?"
Belinda started it over, and no one got up and left, not even my brother Stephen, who's only twelve, and sometimes gets a little over-macho.
"Tomorrow morning," Mi Kyong said after the second run-through, "I am going to make a fool of myself. I will probably weep while I hug your Aunt Elaine, Jocelyn."
Colin raised his hand at that, tapped his own chest and nodded vehemently.
"Kids?" Mom called down. "It's gettin' late, y'all should think about goin' to bed."
"Coming, Mom," Belle called back. "Be up in a minute."
We put the video away, grabbed the bowls that had held popcorn and our glasses and trooped upstairs. Mom was in the kitchen putting the glasses from the poker game in the dishwasher. When she saw the number of red eyes and noses from the weeping we'd all done, she smiled and said, "Haven't watched that lately— thanks for reminding me."
"You know?" Mi Kyong said. "How…?"
"Ain't much in this world can affect as many people as the Dance," Mom said, her voice putting the capital in there. "So when you all look sniffly and happy-stunned? Yeah, y'all watched Dance the Heavens Home."
"It was… I lack the words," Mi Kyong said. "I wish I didn't, I wish I could say to Elaine how she made me feel."
"Don't feel bad, sugar," Mom said. "None of us has ever managed it. Just hug her— that'll tell her."
"I very much will," Mi Kyong said. "At breakfast."
Again, Colin raised his hand, tapped his chest and nodded like a bobble-head doll.
We went upstairs, all of us, after telling Mom and Dad goodnight, and hugging them. Colin and I stopped on the second floor landing so that I could hug my sisters, and I got a pleasant surprise when Stephen hugged me, too (he's twelve, and not so big on the hugging anymore— I chalked it up to the Dance). Mi Kyong stayed after the kids had gone, and looked at me with a tiny blush showing in her cheeks.
"I think that tonight… tonight, I will not have bad dreams," she said. "It will be a relief— and one more thing that I will owe Elaine."
"Good," I said immediately. "She'd approve, I know. And you know that if you do— well, Royal will come stay with you. Neither of us minds that, so close your mouth, Mi Kyong."
She did, blushing a little— then hugged me very hard, and Royal wrapped his wings around both our heads.
"Aww, that's cuter'n a speckled puppy in a little red wagon," Mom said. Royal retracted his wings, and we looked down to see Mom grinning up at us. She shook her head a little in amusement and added, "Mi Kyong, I know my girl and her dragon— I had to play interpreter for him until Jocelyn could talk, after all— and I'm here to tell you that they both mean it. So don't get to feelin' guilty if you need company and Royal comes."
"See?" I said. "Ratification from the highest authority in the house."
"Thank you, Chantelle," Mi Kyong said, and Mom smiled and waved to her.
Mom went on to the front door to set the security system (vampires can't enter a home uninvited, but other demons and monsters don't have that problem) as Mi Kyong said, "Your family… I am so glad that they are becoming my family that I cannot tell you— the words keep failing me."
"Are you kidding me?" I asked. "I'm getting an extra sister out of the deal, Mi Kyong, so don't imagine that I'm not just as glad."
Mi Kyong smiled brightly at that, hugged me, hugged Colin, and went off to bed, as we did.
Monday morning, Uncle Ballard and his family and Giles, Kelly and Riley came over to our house for breakfast, and Linnea brought Lightning and her babies with, the babies in a box that she carried with great care. They tumbled around on the dining room table all through breakfast, begging bites of sausage, ham, bacon and eggs, wrestling with each other and providing better entertainment than any TV show ever could. But before that… as soon as Aunt Elaine walked in the door, Mi Kyong went to her, hugged her very, very tightly, and said softly, "Thank you. Watching your Dance… it made me forget much of my remaining fright, and I slept through the night with no nightmares at all. Thank you!"
Aunt Elaine lit up like a kid on Christmas morning, and she gave Mi Kyong one of those super-hugs that you know comes from all the way inside. "You're more than welcome, sweetheart. That's what dance in general is for— and that dance in specific."
"The book that inspired you," Mi Kyong said. "May I read it? After I finish Chosen to Stand?"
"Betcha," Aunt Elaine said. "I have a few dozen copies to hand out, I'll give you one after martial arts class today."
Mi Kyong thanked her again, stepped back— and Colin stepped forward and hugged her just as long and intensely as Mi Kyong had. Then, unable to articulate his thanks even as well as she had, he took her hand, bowed over it, brushed her knuckles with his lips before straightening.
"You're still a hit, Elaine," Aunt Rose said as Aunt Elaine blushed, but stepped forward and hugged Colin again. "Which, okay, that's just like it should be."
After breakfast and a whole bunch of hugs, Dad drove Buffy, Xander, Alex and Joyce to the airport in Bloomington and saw them and their pseudo dragons off. He said that the plane's pilot and stewardess, both standing in the door to greet their passengers, each had a dragon of their own on their shoulders, so we knew that they were in good hands for the flight home.
Monday night, sometime around two-thirty (okay, technically Tuesday morning), I woke to find Royal slipping out of Colin's room, and he told me that Mi Kyong needed him. I thanked him for going, he told not to be silly, he loved her as much as I did, and I went back to sleep.
Thursday morning, when Linnea came into the dining room at Scooby Mansion for breakfast, she walked in a miniature cloud of baby pseudo dragons— all four were flying around her head, and we laughed in delight at the sight.
After we'd finished eating, the brass-colored one flew over to Diane Hodges, landed on the counselor's shoulder, and nudged her cheek with his head. She turned to pet him, kissed his head lightly— then went wide-eyed with shocked delight.
"My god!" she gasped. "Oh, my god!
"He says… he says his name is Endorphin, and that he wants to stay with me!"
We whooped and applauded— and in that noise, we missed Mi Kyong's gasp of joy. When we all calmed down a little, she sent us right back into the land of clapping and cheering by holding the little gray girl on her hand and saying, "Please allow me to introduce you all to Fog— she would like to stay with me."
The other two babies didn't commit to anyone that day, but I did notice that the purple-blue one didn't leave Colin's shoulder very often or for very long at all that day, not while we were over there.
Fog slept in Mi Kyong's bedroom that night, and Mi Kyong didn't have any need of Royal's company.
At breakfast in our dining room the next morning, Friday, the deep, purple-blue baby pseudo dragon went straight to Colin and sat on top of his head, perched comfortably. After the meal, she flapped down to Colin's shoulder, head-bumped Colin's cheek— and I saw Colin's eyes go wide with delight and amazement. He put his hand up and the dragon walked onto it, sat staring into Colin's eyes for a moment, then turned and looked at Linnea, who sat up straight very suddenly.
"Oh, wow," Linnea said. "Okay.
"Um, since Colin can't talk yet, the young lady on his hand would like me to tell you all that her name is Nightfall, and that she's going to be his friend and stay with him, now."
Cheering ensued.
At the morning martial arts classes, the lavender baby committed himself. I'd been working with Dad, Berachah and Marie, and the lavender baby had been watching. When we took a break at the halfway point, he flew over, landed on Berachah's shoulder and nuzzled her cheek. A second later she "meeped" (as Aunt Rose would say) and turned to look him in the eyes.
"His… his name is Sling," Berachah said in a tiny voice. "He says we're going to be friends forever!"
Dad let us have a slightly longer break than usual for the sake of cuteness, as Berachah sat with Sling in her hand and cooed at him for several minutes.
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Interlude: New York City, Friday afternoon.
Alex Harris almost didn't go to his friend David Tower's birthday party when he found out that they were going to start with lunch at Future Perfect Pizza in Manhattan. Future Perfect didn't allow pseudo dragons inside, and he hated to go anywhere without Chief, his fire-engine-red, scaly best friend. But David was Alex's best human friend— so he went. The theater and the mini-golf place they'd be going to after lunch were both dragon-friendly, so Chief would only have to wait outside while they were in the restaurant.
Mr. and Mrs. Tower didn't mind Alex bringing Chief along at all, and David just loved him. In fact, that went both ways— Chief approved of David completely. When Leia, Joyce's pseudo dragon, got around to having babies this year, Alex planned to have David over for the weekend, see if he could get his friend bonded with a dragon. All the family dragons said that there was a good chance of that, so… he had hopes.
When they got to Future Perfect Pizza, Chief looked around, pointed at a nice, high ledge on a building across the street, accepted a hug, and flew off to wait for Alex.
Lunch was great, they had a room to themselves, and the waiters and waitresses in their science-fiction movie costumes— some old, some new— were very fun, staying "in character" the whole time they were on the floor. He recognized the X-wing pilot's coverall, and the guy from the Terran Hegemony Security forces— rated R and all, he and Joyce got to see the movie it was from, since it was based on one of Aunt Rose's books— but didn't know what the guy in the black and blue coverall was supposed to be….
They all came out about two, David having opened his presents there at the restaurant, and headed for the Towers' van and big sedan. Alex looked around, saw Chief standing and stretching up on the tenth-floor window ledge where he'd made his perch, and whistled a rough approximation of his friend's name in the pseudo dragon's language— as close as a human could come anyway.
"Hey, Alex!" said a voice from behind him. "Alex Harris!"
Alex turned to see a guy standing behind him, a guy he'd never seen before, but who looked… sort of familiar.
"Yes, sir?" Alex said.
"Just making sure," the man said— and his hand dipped under the loose T-shirt he wore, came out and pointed at Alex's head, moving too fast to be seen as more than a blur.
Alex had time to see the gun pointing right at his face, to feel a moment of terror— then the gun's muzzle flashed— and Alex Harris died.
People screamed all over the street— but louder than all of those screams was the high, almost-human shriek of the fire-engine-red pseudo dragon that flung itself down at the shooter, wings beating furiously, tears streaming from its eyes.
Again, the shooter's hand blurred— and a second gunshot went off. Chief hit the pavement next to his lifelong friend, dying, with only a second or two of life left— and even as he pressed his face to the already-cooling hand of Alex Harris, he did what he could to insure that his friend's killer would pay.
With the last of his fury and pain, he forced the last of his life into a sending, sent his litter-sister Leia an image of the man who'd killed Alex and himself.
Then, having done all he could, he followed his best friend into the afterlife, where they would play together… forever.
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Jocelyn:
That Friday afternoon, we ate lunch outside, burgers on the grill, and were all sitting around talking still— Aunt Dawn was telling the newbies about the night she first saw Buffy kill a vampire— when Giles's cell phone went off. He glanced at it, flipped it open and said, "Hello, Buffy."
For a moment, he stared at nothing, his face going through multiple expressions— shock, disbelief, rage… and then his features settled into an expression of horrible sadness and pain, and for the first time since I could remember, he looked his fifty-nine years, even older.
"Oh, god, no." His voice broke, Giles let out a single, harsh sob— and everyone went silent. Kelly grabbed his free hand— and she winced when, all unknowing, he squeezed her hand back hard enough to hurt. When he spoke again, his voice was watery, but he wasn't sobbing… quite. "Is Xander there with you, Buffy? And… yes, all right. Yes, of course. We'll be there directly. No, Buffy, all of us. I don't think… we can't leave the newly activated here, Buffy, not now. Yes.
"Buffy… oh, Buffy, I am so sorry."
Giles sat silently for a moment after closing his phone, then said, "There is no right way to say this, no easy way— so I am simply going to say it, and ask that you… understand that if there is a better way, I cannot think of it at the moment.
"Alex Harris has been murdered in New York City, and his companion Chief with him."
I burst into tears of shock and hurt, and I was a long way from the only one to do so.
Murdered. My brain went back to that word, locked on it, held on to it— it was a reason to feel something besides hurt. Apparently, I wasn't the only one to think that way.
"Murdered," Dad said, his voice a thing of ice and razor-edges. "Not killed, but murdered."
"Shot," Giles said. "In front of a dozen other boys. He… a man approached him as he was coming out of a pizza parlor with some friends and one boy's parents and shot him, then shot Chief when Chief tried to attack the man. That's all I know, right now."
"All right," Dad said. "Giles, Kelly, you go help take care of Dawn—" Aunt Dawn was in the middle of a big group hug from her family, all their kids, shocked and hurt more than many by the murder of their friend, someone our age, trying to climb in her lap. "— and start packing. I'll make the travel arrangements."
Dad stood up and went inside, and I turned to bury my face in Colin's chest, Royal in my arms and Mi Kyong stroking my back as I lost the battle to keep my anger at the forefront of my mind, and all the hurt and sadness washed me away for a while.
We were all on a chartered plane for New York in less than four hours.