Biting Back

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While in general the activation of Origin had, eventually, restored everything exactly as it had been in the physical world, with varying mileage of lingering memories in the heads of the heads of states excepted, one soul found his long-suffering form...altered, once again, as the bi-global clock struck its final, and thus first, zero.

Cole's reappearance as Minoth had been a quiet one. Only what might be termed his immediate family, which is to say Nia and hers, really had grasped that the playwright who once stooped in Mymoma now stood statuesque, in presiding over the same and taking backseat advisory duties for the cat-eared contact with the other world.

(What? Alliteration wins over accuracy.)

It had been ten years he'd spent rejuvenated. Iona was now a young woman, and what with her hardship-handed independence, she handled things for her grandpa's business affairs, which had been winding down with the modern war anyway, without complaint nor count of incompetency. Crime in Fonsa Myma was down. Garfont had become Rex's charge. Most all the stories that mattered had been written.

Cole's, Minoth's, work was...done.

So, having seen the shadow of Aionios come and go (and hearing Nia's impassioned, if scattered, account of its particulars in short succession), Minoth figured he didn't have reason to mind skewing rotted, if not rotten, again. Just another wrinkle - another swirling color - in the tapestry of his long, storied life. Right?

Not like he'd really seriously bucked fate in a while. Or ever. Right.

There was just one problem. An even more decidedly cat-shaped problem.

A problem in the shape of a Mio. And any Mio one might have the good fortune of finding was very, very shaped indeed.

Young Mio, not so much of a "daddy's girl" as her siblings, when times were easy, had made it her happy tradition to visit Uncle Minoth most every morning, in order that she might hear the opposite of a bedtime story, in the darling form of a breakfast story. These tales always carried less of adventure and more of everyday magic; of affection and the little things people could do to brighten others' days. Indeed, of the wonderful impacts one might try to leave behind, whoever it was Cole found himself hinting at as he spun.

Cole had managed to skirt this cheerful quotidian appointment right around the time of the Intersection (a few days before and a few days after), given that everybody implicitly understood the hush-hush rush-rush good-gosh mood of it all, but to every dusk comes the next dawn. He'd need to have a story to tell. And he'd need his throat not to have frogging croaks in it.

Nia had told him, in no uncertain terms, that it was very much not to be Uncle Minoth's - or Grandpa Cole's, as it were - job to sneakily elide and allude the truth of Aionios into the fanciful perceptions of those youths who'd played party. There was to be none of this waxing about regretful selves and the power of friendship (at least, no more so than usual) nor even any especially heavy leaning on the old-hat tales of the Aegises as metaphorical stories of those who'd once only been weapons learning about the possibility of something more.

"Don't get thinking you're clever, old man," she'd snapped, all afrenzy. "Maybe a little less fear, but a little more caution, too."

And Minoth, working out an old friend of a crick in his back, had replied, "It'd be just a bit too clever if I asked if you were projecting, wouldn't it?"

"Much."

They were all to be on standby, the queen had said - and what the queen said, the playwright did. For the most part. Unless overriden by the other queens. For the most part.

Speaking of standbys, as Cole waited, he paced through the major points of the Smellactite story in his head. He usually left out the bits invoking Evie, and made sure never to toy with Jin's dialogue, seeing as, well, he wasn't exactly around to defend himself. But the main gist, about special stones that could, all of a sudden, make you see just how much you took for granted, was--

Oh, for Azurda's sake.

So maybe he'd get Mio to come up with a story of her own, this morning. It'd been a while. She didn't usually need much convincing.

She also usually flew through the door on fleet paws, instead of trudging like she wore a consul's armor.

Melia, over the thankfully-still-functional visual link between worlds, had advised Nia to warn her daughter of the effects the Intersection had had upon some. Some, to their current count, was only Minoth, or Cole, or whichever, but in a case like this, would a little overestimation in generality hurt? Certainly not.

Mio, thus, knew to enter delicately anyway. But there was delicate, for the exceedingly well-mannered yet secretly devious child, and there was hesitant. This might even have surged past reticent to recalcitrant. Mio had been getting better with her moods...

But, nothing for it. Cole called up the hallway, "Well, Mio, I'm glad to see you're none the worse for wear."

Her sensitive ears, of course, took up the change in his voice's timbre at once.

"Uncle Minoth?"

"Indeed, but not as I once was - except, that too."

She had seen pictures, after all. Iona had gleefully shown her, as teenagers about their aged attachments ought.

Hell, for all he knew, every time any of his designated young folk (Nia, Mythra, Iona, Pandoria, once) came down that ramp they shuddered to see what a wreck he'd become. It was impossible to say. He did like to think he had a particular penchant for not scaring children, but who really cared what he intended?

So distracted was Mio, however, that she only sidelong blinked at the returning wrinkles, grayish tinge, and fraying hair that Minoth now once more owned.

"I had such a strange dream..."

"What, no good morning?" Because it definitely wouldn't do if she left, following tea whether with cookies or biscuits, absolutely none the wiser - if only because he didn't feel like dealing with it again by virtue of a flop in the first place.

Mio fidgeted with the bow at the collar of her dress. Cole prayed it wasn't her Core Crystal itching.

"S-sorry," she said at last. "Mam told me you might look...different."

"But nothing you haven't seen before?" Cole prompted.

"I guess not. But in my dream-"

Putting up a single finger, which crooked more than he'd like it to, Cole paused Mio in her impending tirade just long enough to get her to sit down at the breakfast table. Then, as invitation, he said, "Tell me what you saw."

The torrent was immediate. "Giant Artifices! Red soldiers, and people with glowing eyes!" Her own flashed, but only gold. "A theater, like yours, but I hated it. Oh, I was much older. Or, at least a few years. I felt trapped."

Now she turned. "Do people who get older always feel trapped?"

Oh, joy. A colossally loaded question, and Cole hadn't even had his Sour Avocado toast. But once again, nothing for it.

"Not all of them," he replied, after a poorly-stifled cough. "Some of them feel trapped before they get older, actually."

Curious that she hadn't mentioned either Noah or N. Very possibly, her dream hadn't included either of him. She'd said giant Artifices, after all, and not stopped to describe the different look of the Kevesian Ferronises.

(Sometimes, Minoth had to wonder if he himself had been there, in whatever form of actuality. Nia was a good storyteller, and he an even better listener, poking in with clarifying questions of detail at every appropriate point, but this was another thing altogether.)

Apparently quite a bit tuckered, Mio said nothing, only tracing an index fingernail about the inner circumference of her saucer.

Cole inched just a bit closer. "Have you told your mother?" Any of them, really, but Nia in specific.

The chair flew back with the force of Mio's wild shaking head. Were she any taller, the hair that reached to her mid-back would have dipped itself into Jenerossi Tea.

"Do you want to?"

"Mm-mm."

"I think you might have to, eventually."

Mio gave her uncle a fearful look.

"Just in case it turns out to be important. But, it probably isn't. No more than anything else you dream about, when your eyes are closed."

Mio considered this, and thankfully didn't appear to be offended. "But what about the red soldiers?"

Cole waved his hand (his wrist, obediently, gave a resounding crack). "Oh, I know what those probably were."

"You do?! But you didn't even see them!"

Why not indulge her? "So, describe them."

From the sound of it, Mio wouldn't know that the consuls were named after the alphabet passed up to them from Klaus's world, and she might know instead that each had a different mask, which would count none about Cole's conclusions of conformity. Still...

"They were all mean, and full of themselves," said Mio resolutely. "They laughed at me, whenever I was confused. But I thought they were stupid. And so were their outfits. Sort of...guh..."

"Gaudy?"

"Yeah! Gawdy."

Perfect! Nia never said anything about speaking nonsense, after all. Maybe the nonsense would happen to be true, but anyone who spoke from a minimum of prompt had plausible deniability. Right?

"Just as I thought," Cole nodded. "Fascists."

(If it please the reader, take no cues from this extrapolation about normal forms of logic involved in deducing membership into this group or that. Cole just so happens to have an important point, here, that he doesn't care to write himself around a bridge onto.)

"What are those?"

"Well, in a few words, they're nasty clowns. They suppress the knowledge of the people they're trying to hold power over, they try to make everyone believe that there's only one right way to look and feel and be - be born, even! -, and they control everyone with a tight red rope that, for those who've lost enough hope, they shape into a carrot."

Oh, yes, indeed. Talking nonsense.

Mio blinked.

"Power and privilege for the few, at the expense of everyone else's individual and collective liberty."

Mio blinked again.

Cole tried one last time, now actually focusing on the comprehension of his conversation partner: "They were the ones who made you feel trapped, and they did it by beating as many people down as they could, so that they'd do anything for a taste of what the fascists kept from them."

That would have to be good enough.

Though she was no longer blinking, Mio now stared despondently at her plate, hands in her lap.

"How could I dream about something so horrible...?"

"Not all dreams are good ones, honey."

Mio nodded, clearly only half listening.

"How's about this -" Cole gave her a gentle nudge, both verbal and physical "- tell me what happened right before you woke up. Do you remember?"

Yes, she could have been woken up by sunlight filtering in the window, or Glimmer giving a kick in her sleep, or Ino bursting in with some no-news news, but she could also have triumphed, just when things looked bleakest. Always darkest before the dawn, indeed...

Cole held out hope that it was none of the easy answers as he watched Mio's brow furiously scrunch and unscrunch, scrunch and unscrunch. It was, for sure, the deepest conversation they'd ever had, but some things about their world now were inextricable. The children held dual experience, whether they knew it or not. Whether they remembered their dreams or not. Whether they'd met their parents or not. Whether they'd lived over, and over, and over, or just once.

When Mio finally produced her answer, it was just as Cole had hoped.

"I killed a red soldier. The biggest one."

"The cockiest one?" The old man couldn't help a cocky smile of his own.

Mio, grinning every tooth and fang, nodded.

Killing! Kids love killing.

"This cat kills fascists," he pronounced, lightly tapping said cat on the tip of her nose. The blink in reaction was no longer one of confusion, but instead one of whimsy. "Good for you. I was never very good at it, myself."

"No?" queried a wide-eyed Mio, eyes glittering.

"Well...my Driver was one."

"Great-Grandad Addam?!"

(Which was what they called him, even if there was no relation. It was really just hard to say. But heartwarming, nonetheless, yes?)

"No, no. The, uh...other one." And somehow Cole felt as though he'd made this clarification at least once, if not many times, before. Something that would come as no surprise to those familiar with his Flesh Eater status, yet it was less like routine and more like déjà vu. Very funny, that, considering how Alrest didn't even have France.

Not that it really mattered.

"In a manner of speaking, anyway. Certainly, he held his power over me. That's why I felt trapped."

"He's dead, isn't he?"

"At least a decade."

"Good," Mio declared with a triumphant nod. "Because if he wasn't..."

The fist that would one day punch just such a POS straight in the shell struck tiny feline palm.

What a wonderful story she had to tell, this Mio.