Gt Sideblog

1) I will never be free

A certain Siren is having a bad day. King thinks she knows where to find him.

Warnings: Mentions of drug use (questionable in both responsibility and accuracy), mentions of paranoia of a loved one dying, general January blues

King groans and slams the front door behind her. Bag down (on the bench, don’t leave it there), boots off (can’t get the damn zipper with these stupid-!)- gloves off, then boots off (hope that leather’s okay in the snow…), scarf and coat on the rack. She grabs her bag and hops into the foyer of her and Icarus and Kraken’s home, avoiding wet boot prints and chunks of sidewalk salt as she lands near her slippers.

“Kraken! I’m home! Holy shit, it’s worse out there than we thought- a dragon isn’t built for this kinda weather! There’s over a foot of snow out there!” She hollers into the house.

There’s no response.

“Kraken? Hello?” She sniffs the air- it’s hard to tell if he’s here or not. His scent is all over the dang house. Wrinkling her nose, she projects a little further into the house in the only way to talk to a seemingly empty room. “HEWWO?”

Nothing.

She shrugs. There’s a distinct possibility he’s in his game room, so she tests her wings (a little numb, but she’s not going far), crouches, and springs into the air. Her talons curl around the railing through her fluffy socks but she gets no traction, sending her careening to the floor of their upstairs hallway.

“Ow,” she says, despite the fact that it’s been a long time since she wasn’t mildly invincible. “Misteww Obama??? Hewwo? Did you hear that? I’m okay by the way, Misteww Obama, UwU!” She lolls her head to the side and at least expects to hear footsteps from wherever Kraken is. Preferably frantic ones, but casual with an added oh my god can you not with that fucking VOICE would be just as well.

Alas, she gets nothing.

“Am I just yapping to an empty house?” She pushes herself to her feet, padding down to the siren’s domain and poking her head in. “Am wasting a perfectly good bit when it won’t even be unappreciated?”

The answer appears to be a resounding yes, as she checks from room to room. There’s a cold cup of coffee sitting on the dining room table, but other than that there are no clues as to where Kraken could be. His car is in the garage, but his snow gear is gone, but there are also no new prints in the fresh, clean snow- he loves stepping in it. There’s a line of boot prints by the front walk where he’s just had to feel the crunch.

At a loss, she makes an attempt to cyberstalk him. Their locator app is often forgotten- or used to locate lost phones, more like. King pulls up the map:

King

At Home

Icarus

Location Unknown

Levi

Location Unknown

“Oh.” King says. Icarus’s location is very much known to her- his ‘hometown’ burrow, sleeping out the shitshow of Daylight Savings and snowstorms. It’s better suited to his hibernation than their house in Cloverfield. She has a sneaking suspicion she knows why Kraken’s location is also unknown.

Sighing, she drags herself back to the mud room, griping through every step of putting on warm winter clothing. He could have at least shot her a warning text, geez.

She steps through the front door a second time, imagining her feet won’t hit snow. They still do, but the scenery around her changes in the blink of an eye- instead of the suburban neighborhood she, Icarus, and Kraken spend most of their time in, she’s suddenly in the forest she spent a good portion of her life in with Icarus. It’s bright out here with the sun and the snow. She squints, pulling out her phone and checking the locator app again. The map is stuck in its gridded loading screen, but something did update:

King

Location Unknown

Icarus

Location Unknown

Levi

Location Unknown

Map or no, she knows the way like the back of her glove. There’s a dented path where someone else slogged through a while ago. The shoe prints have been dusted over, but King is fairly certain she knows what the soles look like. Instead of trying to step where the boot prints are, she just launches herself up again- there’s hardly snow resistance in the air.

She flies and glides until she reaches the clearing- Icarus’s burrow has been made to look like a whimsical fallen log half sticking out of the ground. She assumes that’s some sort of in-joke between the basilisks who made this place- they seem far too serious to have made a cute design decision. Still, she opens the door and is immediately greeted with all of Kraken’s winter gear slung haphazardly across the entryway.

“Found you.” She murmurs, slipping off her coat and boots once more.

Last door on the left, she heads down the unlit hall, and even she hesitates in the open archway. She remembers this. Lonely winters, the lack of sunlight and her own very recent exile tearing her apart at the seams, her only support system completely unreachable.

She shivers. Kraken.

She does see him as soon as she enters. He looks like a famous painting- she can’t remember which one right now. Someone mourning their dead lover or something. He’s splayed over the serpentae’s chest, his long tentacles spread everywhere. His eyes are open when she looks, but they’re red and puffy. His mascara is dripping. His hair is a mess.

He doesn’t acknowledge her.

“Hey.” She says quietly, kneeling beside him.

His eyes flicker over to her and he turns away. “King? How’d you…?”

“Lucky guess.” She shrugs, wrapping one wing about the hopefully-asleep basilisk (he gets awake, a little, sometimes, not enough to really do anything though) and one around Kraken’s shoulder. “You miss him too, huh.”

He nods.

“And are you high or were you crying?”

“Both.” He murmurs. “I didn’t… not here. His lung.”

She nods, making a mental note to check his smoking spot on the back deck next time he vanishes. “I think he appreciates that.”

Kraken curls in on himself more.

King sighs. “Hey, you want to talk about it?”

“No.” Kraken shivers.

She thinks. “Then can I interest you in a ‘we sit here silently and don’t acknowledge each other until you feel like talking?’”

“Works.” He mutters balefully.

She stands, moving around to Icarus’s back and leaning against his shoulders. A lot of things are fair game with a sleeping Icarus- as far as moving him around goes, they can use him as a table to play scrabble on for all he cares. She’s got stuff to do anyway, so naturally she falls into the hole of Mobile Game Hell for several minutes.

“It was… really stupid.” Kraken says softly, breaking her concentration.

King perks up. “Okay…”

“I uh… remember that new strain I got at the dispensary?” He asks. “The one that’s supposed to give you more energy or something?”

King nods. “You were thinking of long and boring studio nights when you bought it.”

“Yeah, well… I thought I should test it out, just to see what the effects were and how long they last, and… turns out it just made me really paranoid.” He shuffles awkwardly.

King tilts her head. Neither she nor Icarus care for his weed habit- Icarus because he’s only got one lung, and King because she’s a weenie and can breathe smoke for free. That said, she has no idea what to do with this information. “And… then what happened?”

“I uh… got it in my head Icarus was gonna die over hibernation. So I came here to make sure he’s uh… breathing. And I kinda… freaked out on him. And then it wore off, so I felt awful for disturbing him, even though he’s… you know… so now I’m just… rotting here.” He looks up at her.

King sighs. “Can’t be worse than the screaming, crying tantrum I had the first year we lived together.” She pats Icarus’s shoulder. “This is rough for all of us. I get it.”

“Christ.” Kraken says. “I- I kinda don’t want to leave. I mean, I know it was the weed talking, but that one was really intense.” One of his sprawled tentacles finds her tail to curl around. “Like, what if they cracked the code for future-vision-weed on accident?”

King rolls her eyes affectionately. “Future. Vision. Marijuiana.”

“Okay, well, it sounds ridiculous when you say it.” Kraken backpedals.

“At an entirely random dispensary in Cloverfield, Illinois, that wasn’t even trying-”

Kraken finally looks at her. “Fine! I get it! I get it! I’m being delusional!” He’s got a tiny smile- not at all like his normal face-splitting grin, but King knows to take a win when she can.

“Besides,” King says, “if any controlled substances turn up with magic powers it’s gotta be mushrooms, right?”

Kraken finally cracks a real smile. “I’m glad you found me here. I was uh… moping, I guess, after all that.”

“Sorry you had a bad trip.” King says.

“How was your interview?” He asks suddenly. “No inane questions about whether Kyra gets trapped in a love square?”

“Ugh.” King groans. “Remind me to vet these guys for basic reading comprehension before giving them my book.” She pauses, glancing down at Icarus. “Do you… feel like you can leave him alone?”

“Mostly.” Kraken says. “I can be brave.”

It’s a quaint little place, the type of street you would find in a big city lined with local shops. Historic something or other. But here every shop’s facade is that of a castle, or a more modernized building with castlesque decals. He looks to his right- down the street is a lot with a big mural on it featuring a grizzled old man in an army uniform with roughly a thousand medals. Across the street, though, is a castle building on a square of land with a tall gazebo on the closest corner. Shining silver letters on the wall read KNIGHTHAVEN COURTHOUSE.

He glances down the road and, seeing it’s clear, runs across. The ground is littered with acorns and orangey leaves, and, to his surprise, a concerning amount of garbage. Street food wrappers and styrofoam cups mostly, with the occasional patch of party popper confetti. It looks like a festival happened here.

There’s a lazy looking guard at the door to the courthouse. He sends Kraken through a metal detector, shrugs when it goes off, and tells him to be good. Kraken thanks him and starts up the stairs in front of him. He feels like he should know what he’s looking for, but it isn’t clear what until he reaches the top.

<- Museum

He turns down the hall and walks the corridor. A few heads poke out of doors. It’s all older men, though, who don’t seem to recognize his face. He probably could have disguised himself, but it’s too late for that now.

He pushes through the double glass doors at the end of the hall and finds himself in the middle of a very narrow, windowless room that smells overwhelmingly of mothballs and old books. It appears to be split into four different categories: town founding, Knighthood, local ghost stories, and a section dedicated to some old military guy.

Somehow, it’s the biggest. Against his better judgement, Kraken starts there.

The glass cases contain the old man’s uniforms, his school yearbook, a pair of his glasses, more weird and various personal effects. Below them, multiple newspaper clippings of articles all written by him. Kraken reads over a few and decides this guy was single-handedly keeping the paper in circulation with his complaints editor’s letters. He was apparently a major influence in just about every town dealing, from real estate to education to heading an alliance of local churches to, of course, the overwhelming population of Knights in town. If he didn’t have his hand in it, he certainly had an opinion on it, most of them being doom and gloom. The next generation is hopeless. There is no future for a Knight of our Order.

He shuffles down to the other end of the section. The last article is dated to late 2016, and he is for once hopeful; only because a local kid turned into a dragon ‘recently’ and he believed it would awaken ‘Knight instincts’ in the youths to try and slay her. Kraken can picture the old man gleefully sharpening a sword as he writes about murdering a teenage girl.

Some hero. He growls, flexes his nails into claws, and scratches several Xs into the glass over the article.

He moves on to the Local Legends section- this one is full of journal entries, bloodied swords, a sheaf of dark scales, and a massive piece of charred wood. It all relates to a family that lived at the founding of the town who had a pet dragon. As the story went, they lived just outside of the town line at its founding, and the resident Knights would go try to slay the dragon at night. Most of them died. The town’s survival is blatantly attributed to a miracle, because obviously they were all only doing the right thing.

He doesn’t like that much, either. The dragon, thankfully, apparently died of old age. There’s a fall festival about it.

He skims over the Knighthood and Founding sections, which are essentially anti-monster propaganda presented as history and tradition. He quickly decides ‘fuck that noise’ and leaves. At least he’s in the right place- if anything would give King Aurum nightmares, he’s pretty sure the town museum on its own is enough. She must have been here at some point. But why would a dragon willingly come to Knighthaven?

He doesn’t want to walk past the offices again- they’re probably all Knights, too. He’s struck with the possibility they somehow know he’s a siren. Instead he snaps a picture of the museum door and sends it to Moira with the additions of ‘urgent’ and ‘get me out of here!’