30 Day OTP Challenge (Young Wizards), day 11: Wearing kigurumis

[dianeduane]

“I will kill her.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Kill. Her. Kit. Destroy her. When she gets home I will decimate her.”

“Uh, you can’t do that.”

“Yes I can. Prepare to watch me.”

“No, I mean you can’t decimate her. Decimating means killing one out of every ten of a bunch of people.”

“Thank you, oh great history freak.”

“I am not a history freak — “

“Oh yes you are. Increasingly. Even Mars is taking a back seat lately.”

“It is not! I just — “

“Kit, face it. Machiavelli has lured you over to the historic side of the Force. Don’t even try to pretend.”

“…So, all right, it is kinda cool. So it started sinking in finally. The way everything connects—”

“Fine. I don’t care. If I can’t decimate her, tell me a good word for how dead I’m going to kill her.”

Kit searches his mind for suitable vocabulary, but is having trouble finding anything that sounds quite as deadly as Nita’s voice right now.

They are standing outside the curved pink-and-grey Old Country Road entrance of Roosevelt Field, the biggest of the shopping centers near where they both live. Nita’s father calls the huge glass-roofed place “the Temple of Mammon” and swears under his breath every time he’s forced to go near it. Normally the swearing first has to do with parking, and then with the way prices have been going up. Until now, Nita has always found this funny. But today it has stopped being funny. In fact Nita is searching for swear words of her own, now, and Kit is not helping her mood.

“Destruction,” Nita says. “Absolute annihilation. Not one subatomic particle of her will be left sticking to another.”

“Neets.”

“I’m going to take Callahan’s Unfavorable Instigation to her.”

Kit pauses on hearing that. Normally Nita is fairly modest about the spell named after her: she rarely goes so far as to mention it by name, even though he knows how secretly proud of it she is. “Might be interesting, but…”

“Interesting! You have no idea. Gonna turn it right up to eleven and see what happens.”

“Not that I don’t understand where you’re coming from—”

“I should think you would!”

“But it’d speed up entropy a little, don’t you think?”

Nita is deadly silent for about five seconds. “Entropy,” she says then. “Speed it up!” She laughs bitterly.

“Neets—”

“When I get my hands on her, the Lone One Itself will stand there with Its mouth open and say ‘And I thought I knew something about how complete ruination goes.’ And afterwards It’ll shake me by the hand and say, ‘Let’s do lunch sometime and you can give me some tips on how I can learn to do it like that.’”

Kit opens his mouth, closes it again. Not that anyone can see.

He and Nita are handing out flyers for a charity that raises money to give homeless people a place to stay over the holidays, and which also runs a food bank for people who have trouble making ends meet at the end of the year. This is a good cause, and Nita has no problems with it, none at all. Like any wizard, she understands that service is one of the highest mental states from which any work, physical or mental or wizardly, can be done. Most wizards do volunteering outside of errantry, just on general principles or for any number of personal reasons: because it’s fun, because it feels good, because it gets them out of their heads when life isn’t running smoothly.

But volunteering is one thing. Being volunteered is another.

There are, of course, circumstances under which being volunteered can work out all right. Nita has had this happen to her before, and Kit was part of that too. She wound up having a prolonged beach holiday on another planet, both holiday and planet becoming memorable in the extreme.

That, however, was nothing like this. And the same person, as it happens, is responsible for both occurrences. The last time, Nita eventually forgave the transgression.

This time, never.

“Where is Dairine?”Kit says eventually.

“Where do you think? She’s on Wellakh. And if she’s smart she’ll be planning a very, very prolonged sleepover.”

“Mmf,” Kit says.

“Destruction,” Nita says. “Utter and absolute. Without pity.”

“Uh huh.”

They go back to passing out leaflets for the charity. This by itself wouldn’t be so terrible.

Except that they are doing it while wearing costumes.

Fluffy mascot costumes.

In fact, they are passing out leaflets while wearing teen-sized versions of the costume worn by the New York Islanders hockey team mascot. (This is because the team is sponsoring the charity drive, and has had kids from the area doing this all week.) Said mascot goes by the name of Sparky. He is, or purports to be, a dragon. His fur is in the Nassau County colors—navy blue, and a shade of orange that goes back to the canting arms of the House of Orange in the Netherlands—and he is wearing an Islanders jersey, and has a large goofy grin and a long draggy tail.

“Possibly,” Nita says in a growl, “the lamest team mascot ever seen.”

Kit doesn’t get to hear her growl that often. He decides to push the point a little, just for amusement’s sake. “I don’t know,” he says. “Dragons are pretty cool.”

“Not these ones,” Nita growls.

“No, I mean, remember that one we met at the reception at the Crossings that time—”

The other big fluffy dragon mask turns toward him.

“The one with the, you remember, those really big glowing eyes—”

The big fluffy dragon mask regards Kit with a blank stare so terrible that it can barely be described. Kit begins to think that reminding Nita at this juncture about a creature that could breathe out raw plasma is possibly not the best idea he’s had today.

“And the team isn’t even staying on the Island,” Nita growls. “They’re moving to Brooklyn.”

The venom with which she pronounces the word suggests that Nita has something against Brooklyn, which seems out of character. (The logic might also at first glance seem questionable, as Nassau and Suffolk Counties are on the same long island as Brooklyn; but if you're from Nassau or Suffolk, it makes perfect sense.) “I didn’t think you were into hockey,” Kit says at last, not quite sure where this is going.

“I’m not.” Nita pauses to speak politely, if with audible restraint, to a couple of people who take the leaflets she hands them. When they’re clear, she turns to Kit and says, “Just another sign of how things are generally going totally wrong. As in us standing here doing this while wearing these things. That smell like other people’s sweat. On a day for which, I don’t know about you, but I had other plans. Besides sweating. In a good cause. Which I did not sign on for myself. But was signed on for. By. My. Sister.”

His twin mini-Sparky turns away from Kit and stares meaningfully at the ground. Though he can’t see her face behind the little patch of black gauze under the oversized fuzzy dragon-chin, Kit can feel Nita’s gaze fix on a spot on the ground which, he somehow knows, is exactly in sightline with that part of Earth’s sky which contains the rather unstable star called Thahit and its planet Wellakh. It occurs to Kit that all Dairine’s recent intense tuition in the handling of massively powerful, out-of-control, furiously-blazing bodies with nuclear fusion ravening at their hearts may not be enough to save her this time.

“Dead,” Nita says. “Dead, so very, very dead.”

I wonder, Kit thinks as he hands some nice people leaflets as they pass, who I can sell tickets for when Dairine gets home…

Nita straightens up, hands some more people leaflets, and very, very softly, growls.

Kit starts making a list of potential invitees.