Dear Lina,
Yes, I am settling down very well in Saillune now. I appreciate your support of me at the death of my father, and I'm happy to report that the people seem to like me and appreciate my work as a leader.
As always, I'm wondering if you have any news of Zelgadiss. Since he's been missing, I've felt a void in my life- I know you probably feel it too. He seems to be deliberately hiding from us. If you ever see him, please write me. I am very lonely.
Love,
Ameria
"Poor girl."
"What is it?"
"Ameria's letter," Lina explained. "Zel never showed up, I guess. He's still being a jerk."
Gourry reached across the table and, taking it from her, read the letter. When he finished, he said, "We should go and find him."
"Maybe you were right after all," Lina said thoughtfully.
"I think he needs a good talking-to," said Gourry with a grin.
"Zel always needs a good talking-to. We're in a rut here anyway. Let's find him," Lina decided.
"Right," replied Gourry, still smiling.
Knock, knock, knock.
"Zel! Are you there? It's us! We've come to visit! Hey, Zel!"
"He's just not home, I guess." Lina tapped her foot. "Damn! We tracked him all the way to New Zoana and he turns out not to be home. How's that for irony?"
"Let's go to the cafe downstairs," said Gourry philosophically. "We can at least have a snack while we wait."
"I love the way your mind works." Lina wandered down the hall, but stopped when she realized that Gourry was still standing there. "Coming?"
"Yeah, yeah." He followed, only glancing back once.
"It's five already," sighed Lina, playing listlessly with a drink stirrer.
"Yeah?"
"And it can only mean one thing."
"What?"
"Zel's not only living at a fixed address, he's holding down a job somewhere."
"That's terrible," said Gourry sympathetically.
"I know. I only hope he can explain."
Lina was so busy joking that she didn't see the door open.
"Hey! Hey! It's him!"
"Hmm?"
"Zel! Over by the door!" Gourry whispered.
Lina furitively twisted around to see. Suddenly she narrowed her eyes.
"Gourry?"
"What?"
"Why are we whispering?"
"I don't know!"
"Hey, Zel! Over here!" Lina yelled.
It was the last voice Zelgadiss expected to hear in the middle of saying hello to the waitress. Turning around, he saw Lina and Gourry waving to him. It was like seeing a ghost - he was half-tempted to run, but sternly told himself to stand his ground.
They were getting up now, and coming to meet him despite his not making a move in their direction. Lina gave him a hug, without seeming to notice that he wasn't acknowledging her existence.
"Zel, say something," Gourry prompted.
"....Hi..."
"C'mon, Zel, what's with you? We haven't seen each other in six years!"
"I'm just really surprised." It wasn't really it, but Zel didn't want to explain.
"You look good." Lina was still smiling, but it seemed a little more forced.
Zel shrugged. "You guys too. What have you been up to?"
"The usual. Oh, and we got married." The ultimate weapon- the shock value of this revelation. Lina knew that this one would work.
"Oh."
Forget that. "Well, and you? What have you been doing?"
"It's...a long story."
"Stop being evasive."
"And stop trying to fool me into thinking that you're really happy to see me."
"He's still Zel," commented Gourry, sitting on a nearby table.
Lina dropped the smile once and for all. "Okay, I've had it. What's wrong with you?"
"I told you. It's surprise, and - um - "
"It's a secret?" asked Lina dryly.
"I'll explain later. Do you guys want to go to my apartment?"
"That's a quick change of mind."
"Like I said, long story. I don't want to spend the day here."
Zelgadiss led them up to the third floor, walked down the hall, and knocked on a door.
Lina and Gourry exchanged glances. "Um, this isn't the room that they said was yours," she said doubtfully.
"It isn't."
An elderly woman with almost snow-white hair answered the door. "Evening, Zelgadiss."
"Hello, Yukie. Was she okay today?"
"Oh, yes. She played with the others very nicely, not like the first week at all. I think she's getting used to being here all day. Do you want to come in for a moment while I get her up from nap time?"
"I'm in kind of a hurry tonight," Zelgadiss replied. "I'll stay out here, I think."
"Be right back, then." Yukie left the door.
Throughout this conversation, Lina and Gourry had exchanged more glances, to the point where they were both getting a little dizzy from the constant eye movement.
Yukie reappeared a few long moments later, carrying a still-sleepy little girl of about five.
"Bye-bye, Tori. See you tomorrow."
"Bye," said the little girl as she was handed down to the floor. She had long, straight and very pale blue hair and slightly darker blue skin. It seemed to be her favorite color - she had on jeans and a neatly tucked-in navy blouse.
Once the door had closed, Zelgadiss knelt down to Tori's eye level. "How was your day?"
"Okay. I painted a picture and I had a fight with Mike but he's okay now. Who're they?"
"I was getting to that," said Zel carefully, glancing up at the two traumatized-looking people currently gawking at them. "This is Lina Inverse. Lina, my daughter - Tori Graywords."
"Hi," said Lina in the calm, flat tones of total shock.
"Hi, Tori, I'm Gourry. Want a piggyback ride?"
"Okay!"
"He's always been good with kids," said Lina as they followed Gourry and his new girlfriend back to the stairwell.
The apartment turned out to be a one-bedroom affair, and when Zel cast the Lightening spell it also turned out to be a somewhat bare, but relatively livable one.
"I'll make some tea." Any excuse to escape to the kitchenette for a moment, Zel figured.
"Is he ever going to explain where in the hell he picked up a kid?" Lina wondered aloud once he had disappeared.
"I have a feeling it's a pretty good story."
By mutual consent, they went and sat on the couch, the room's only furniture besides a small coffee table and exactly three chairs.
"You seem to be quite an artist, Tori," Gourry noted, motioning to the two paintings (medium: poster paint on construction paper) taped over the couch. This was difficult because Tori was still perched on his shoulders. He carefully removed her.
"Yeah."
"What are they called?"
Tori sat down on the coffee table, swinging her legs. She pointed at one consisting of a blue stick figure with a long stick against a background of blue and purple blobs. "That one's a picture of me fighting bad dragons and Mazoku and stuff with my sword." The other picture was two blue stick figures smiling and labeled DADY and ME. "And that one's my family."
"They're very good."
Tori beamed.
Lina sighed. People who were good with kids terrified her. Besides, she had another question. "Where are the other people in the family?"
"There aren't any other people." Tori looked confused.
"Oh. Okay." Lina was really too busy figuring out why the Zel stick figure was smiling to think deeply about the ramifications of this.
Zelgadiss came out of the kitchen holding two tea mugs in each hand. "Here you are."
"Thanks."
"Thanks. Story?"
"What story?" Maybe I can still pass this off as a normal state of events...if I act really innocent...
"Why are you here? Why aren't you in Saillune? Why are you avoiding us? Where's the MOMY - M-O-M-Y probably, you should teach the child to spell - in Tori's picture?"
No. "Well, it all started a few months after we parted ways after the Darkstar thing..."
"You know, life is like a box of chocolates."
There were two people on the park bench, despite the efforts of the one who was talking to avoid the one who wasn't.
"You look around for all of the good ones, but it's been picked over already, and all that's left is the stupid caramel ones that make your teeth stick together, and the little nutty ones that nobody likes, and all of those. If you just bite into one, it turns out that you made a stupid choice, and your life will be misery for awhile. Or you'll toss the whole thing away and starve to death." The person who was speaking finally wound down his speech and crossed his arms.
"Hey, what's your name?" said the other occupant of the bench, a black-haired woman carrying a small dog in her arms.
"Zelgadiss."
"I'm Carmine."
"Hi." Zel did his best to convey the message, I am depressed. Let me be.
"Pardon me for asking this, but are you busy this evening?"
This threw off his entire rhythm. "What?"
"She asked you out? A total stranger?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I found out later that her boyfriend had just left her, and she wanted to be seen with someone else.
"Oh. So it wasn't your looks, then?" she said to cover the embarrassment.
"Shut up, Lina."
Zelgadiss hadn't been doing so well recently.
He had been worrying whether he hadn't made the wrong choice after all by staying on the road. Every day he'd look at Ameria's bracelet and wonder.
There was, too, that it seemed to be ever less likely that he'd ever find his cure. Years of work and fighting for it. It seemed to be for nothing.
For three months now, he had been staying in New Zoana, dealing with unhappiness and doubt as best as he could, which was not at all.
In this situation, it was inevitable that something terrible would happen.
"For a few months, we went everywhere together," said Zelgadiss, back in the present. "I really thought that I was in love with Carmine. I wasn't."
"Just desperate for human companionship and too pathetically emotionally weak to resist someone who barely likes you but flirts anyway?"
To Lina's incredible surprise, Zel didn't deny her diagnosis outright. "Maybe not when you put it exactly like that."
"Um, Zel?"
"Yes?" "This relationship resulted in a baby?"
"Yeah."
"How can we avoid exposing the gentle readers to the steamy bits of this story?"
"Do what Victorian novelists did. Use lots of asterisks."
***
Zel and Carmine went out for a few months.
***
***
***
"There we go."
"All right. Now how did Tori come to live with you?"
Zelgadiss hadn't seen Carmine in almost a year.
She had simply stopped responding to his calls, notes, knocking and every trick in the book for finding people.
Zel, of course, had been miserable about it. Even he, however, couldn't be depressed forever and constantly. This was partially due to the fact that, his savings having run low, he now had a job at a local magical lab. That took care of a fair amount of his day, leaving only the evening hours to stare catatonically at the ceiling in.
One such evening, he was following the progress of a crack in the bedroom wall when he heard a knock.
"Carmine!"
"Don't hug. She's fragile."
"What?"
Zel had spent most of their relationship saying that, it now seemed to him.
"Here." Carmine handed over the bundle she carried. "She's yours. Keep her."
Shocked, he could do nothing but stare at her. "A baby? But how - "
"It was probably the night that we went to the bar and the guy threw up on my shoes." Carmine avoided his eyes. When he finally got her to look at him, she said quietly, "I'm sorry, I didn't know how to break it, and then I didn't want to see you, and then it was too late to tell you. Only now I've found someone else, and I can't tell him. He wants to marry me."
"Oh."
That was all there was to say. Zelgadiss took the baby inside, named her Tori, and was forced by the demands of parenthood to get his crap together once and for all.
"That's all there is to say. I took the baby inside, named her Tori, and was forced by the demands of parenthood to get my crap together once and for all."
"This Carmine girl...did you ever get a note from the nuthouse thanking you for taking care of an escaped inmate?" was Lina's only comment.
"No. And I don't think about her anymore," said Zel flatly. "She was a lunatic, but she saved me."
"And just from what and how?"
"She gave me Tori. Now I'll never be lonely again."
"Oh."
"You say that a lot these days, don't you?"
"Zel..."
"Why did you come here, anyway?"
"We came to get you back to Saillune," Gourry said.
"I won't go back to Saillune," said Zel simply. "This is my life now. You two are already trying to destroy it."
"So you're just going to forget the past completely?" asked Lina, somewhat sarcastically.
"If I can, absolutely."
"Why?"
"What's there to like about it?"
"What's not to like?"
"Let's see." Zel got up and started pacing. "Well, I didn't have a life, I was depressed all of the time, I didn't act like a rational adult, I didn't take responsibility for anything, and my entire existence was only vindicated by a string of 'heroic' acts that any idiot with a sword could have done." To his credit, he didn't glance Gourry's way when saying the phrase 'idiot with a sword'.
"On the other hand, you had Ameria."
"Now I have someone else. So it goes."
"Read this." Lina handed him Ameria's letter. After a moment he looked up from it. "That's terrible, but she should find someone else. I'm not available now."
Lina shrugged. "Maybe you're not. Personally, I think that you're just afraid to face her with that kid of yours in hand."
"I think that's doubtful."
"I think that you're lying."
"I think that you should get the hell out of my home."
"I think that maybe you're right."
Lina got up and walked out. Gourry got up, glanced forward at the open door, glanced back at Zel, and left too.
They slammed the door a little harder than necessary.
When they were gone, Zel sat for awhile finishing off his tea.
"Daddy? Daddy? You look a little weird. Are you okay?"
"Not really," he said softly, pulling Tori up onto his lap, "but that's the way it goes."
"What's wrong?"
"They want me to go to Saillune."
"Where's that?"
"It's a big city east of here." How to explain this one? "There's...someone who lives there who I used to know."
"Who?"
"A friend of mine. You would probably like her."
"My mother?"
"Who told you about mothers?"
"The other kids at day care."
Damn. "Oh. No, she isn't."
"Oh. Is my mother there in Saillune?"
"You're really hung up on those tonight, aren't you? No. Probably not," he added, thinking back on Carmine's nature.
"Well, I want to meet her anyway."
"Your...mother?"
"No, the lady who lives in Saillune."
Zelgadiss Graywords, this is your life. Foom. "Are you sure about that?"
"You want to see her, too, though, right?"
"You're too smart to be six. Are you sure you're not seven yet?" he asked playfully.
"Yeah! I didn't get any presents yet."
"Anyway, it's somebody's bedtime."
"But are we going?" she asked, holding onto his arm as he put her down on the floor.
"Well, maybe. Maybe we could do that. Under one condition."
"What's that?"
"I get to tickle you?"
"No! Hee hee hee hee hee! Stop it!"
The next morning, Lina and Gourry stood arguing outside of Zel's door.
"He kicked us out," Gourry was saying. "I don't see how he'd let us back in there again."
"Maybe, but I'm coming in anyway." Lina resolved herself, poised for a moment, and then knocked.
The door seemed to open by itself. "Zel?" Lina called, a little too timidly for her personal taste.
"Look down," said Gourry, smiling.
"Oh, hi Tori. Is your father at work?" Lina bent over to talk to Tori, who looked very happy.
"No, he's packing. We're going to see a lady in Saillune!" The little girl skipped back into the apartment. Lina and Gourry exchanged yet another glance, this time a happier one, then walked in and shut the door behind them.
Zelgadiss was in the bedroom, tossing his remaining shirt into the duffel bag of clothes, when he heard the footsteps outside. "Hey, Tori, who's there?"
"Lina-san and Gourry-san." Tori came over to stand in the doorway. "I'm all packed, Daddy."
"Let me check your backpack, then." She handed it to him, and he opened it. "Hmm...maybe a few more clothes and fewer toys, Tori. I think you need more than an extra shirt, and, you'll have plenty to do in Saillune."
"Okay." She skipped over to the closet and pulled some jeans out as Zelgadiss hesitantly walked into the main room.
"Zel. You've decided to come back, then?" asked Lina.
"Yeah."
Nobody apologized. The very fact that Zel had changed his mind spoke for everyone.
"Ameria will be very happy."
"Hopefully."
"Show a little less enthusiasm. The room's getting too bright with happiness."
"Sorry, sorry."
Tori came out of the bedroom again. "I put in some more clothes, Daddy. Are we ready to go?"
"Isn't this a little sudden, Zel?" said Lina wonderingly.
"Well, Tori wants to go."
"She wants to meet Ameria?"
"She might be my mother!" said Tori happily.
"Um...no, Tori, I told you last night that Ameria and you aren't related," said Zel.
"She might start being my mother, I mean."
"Whatever you say." Zelgadiss opted to agree, rather than giving Tori a talk on the facts of life.
"Well, shall we go?"
Zel's mind rebelled. His mouth, however, said "Yes. Let's go."
For Ameria Wil Tesla, the young Queen of Saillune, it started out like a normal day.
It was normal in the respect that she woke up and lay in bed for ten minutes before taking a bath and going to breakfast. The food was absolutely normal. Back in her room, she put on a normal dress, brushed her hair normally, and headed down to her office for a normal day's work.
What she found there was decidedly abnormal, and, in fact, made her drop the papers that she was carrying.
"Oh my God," was all she could say. It was like a dream - Lina, Gourry, and Zelgadiss, all sitting in a row on her couch. Usually when Ameria had this dream, she was wearing leather, but still.
"Zel! Say something!" hissed Lina.
Zelgadiss and Ameria stared at each other for a few more minutes, and then he decided to take the initiative.
"...hi..." he said.
"Hi," she said.
"What a beautiful reunion," said Lina sarcastically to Gourry. Zel and Ameria didn't seem to hear her.
"Where were you all this time?"
"New Zoana. I was - well, I - I - " I'm making a fool of myself?
"Let me give it you straight, Ameria," Lina broke in. To Zelgadiss' frantic "no! no!" hand motions, she told Ameria, "Okay. He's been living relatively happily in New Zoana with his daughter, Tori, who's a really cute and nice little kid who he seems to think the world of. Problem is, he doesn't want to break the news about this to you, because he's too hung up on his having a daughter who's not yours to say anything."
"Is that true?" Ameria was shocked.
"Yeah, it's true." Zel confirmed.
"Oh." Ameria looked down.
It was then that Zel finally came through. "Listen, it was a stupid mistake that brought Tori to me. I haven't seen the, um, other person since she left her with me," he tried to explain, pulling Ameria's face gently up so that they saw eye to eye. "If you want, we can move here to Saillune and you can get to know her more."
Tori had come out from behind the couch and attached herself to Zel. This provided an opportunity for his next visual aid. He hoisted her up. "Tori, this is Ameria."
"Hello, Ameria-san," said Tori solemnly.
"Hi," whispered Ameria.
"Do you want us to go? You don't seem very happy."
"No, um, Tori. I'm happy. Right." Ameria smiled, for the first time since they'd arrived. Zel's heart started beating again.
"So, Zelgadiss-san?"
"What?"
"What are you two doing for dinner tonight?"