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It has been more than a year since Fakir has last touched pen to paper.
More specifically, it took five months to figure out that he not only loved Duck but was *in* love with Duck, then six more months to work up the nerve to discuss his emotional situation with her, and two solid days of stammering (and random changes of topic and rather alot of confused quacking on Duck's part because Fakir was being weird, and she huffs then peers at his sandwich to make sure he didn't eat any funny vegetables).
However, Fakir is perhaps just a wee bit more stubborn than the root of a mountain so he gets over himself as much as he could and blurts out his feelings and had a prize like none other when Duck blushed straight through her feathers and got all flustered and flappy and unbalanced the both of them right into the lake. The dampness was more a bother to Fakir than to Duck so it took Duck considerably less long to admit that, well, she kinda *like* liked him too. A lot. Which made Fakir feel like he could dance on the water.
It was thus in Kinkan Town that a boy dated a duck, with picnics and operas and just spending time together, which not only was it not much different from how they acted before but also not so odd in the scheme of things considering that most of the town was in a frenzy of preparing for a winter season and a holiday that hadn't appeared since Drosselmeyer's death. Discussing the weather actually became a truly vital conversation to have, as opposed to the topic of love between a boy and a duck, which, it's none of their business if the lad chooses to go the way of shepherds and Duck makes *such* a darling little babysitter/lifeguard for the toddlers in the park.
That being said, it also wasn't like the citizens of Kinkan Town didn't wonder at the sheer *logistics* of their relationship. Most people just winced, briefly, and made no comment out of politeness.
Autor is not most people.
He decides to give Fakir's Christmas present early; the gift being a lesson on extended metaphors. He raps smartly on Fakir's cottage door, taps impatiently, then knocks again. There was a shuffling noise and then the door opened.
"Autor?" Fakir's face screwed up into a yawn that was not allowed to get out.
"Fakir. I think we should discuss metaphors."
"...at one in the morning?"
"Would you perfer that we discuss the birds and the bees during lunch?"
"What?"
"Granted, the metaphor works exceptionally well in this case." Autor smirked, "That would mean you're the bee."
Fakir escaped Autor as fast as he could (which was not nearly fast enough, as he'd got shown *diagrams*), he caught up with Duck at the pond who was being given a severe quacking to by a matronly mallard. She was blushing madly as well.
"Duck."
She looked over and seemed relieved to find him there, as she made quick apologies and an even quicker exit.
And then they talked, Duck in his lap while he was curled into the chair in front of the fireplace, though it was less talking than it was mumbling and blushing. At the end of it, they both fell to silence, because they both know that there's a simple solution in Fakir's hands. The power in Fakir's blood that can reshape reality, literally.
Fakir traces the scar on his hand, and worries.
It took them until spring dripped in and tempered the winter before Duck convinced Fakir that she trusts him with a pen in hand and before Fakir himself felt fully prepared to write again.
In hindsight, he'd probably should've given himself an extra month or two to practice.
Fakir writes, blushing madly as Duck's skin glows in the firelight. She is *happy* and he is *relieved*, even as he is kicking himself for not writing her with clothing, even as he is trying to keep his eyes on the manuscript but sneaking glances peripherally. He is glad to have had this work, even as he worries at *how* it works; he still questions whether it was right to use his abilities this way.
"Honk." Fakir.
Fakir whips his head up.
A blue-eyed swan blinks back at him, then looks down at herself.
They exchange aghast expressions.
"Um," Fakir mutters.
"Honk," Duck agrees. She tries to waddle towards him but she is, if anything, more ungainly and ungraceful as a swan than she ever was as a human.
She is, wretchedly perhaps, more graceful as a duck than in any other form. Fakir's forehead furrows like a clenched fist; he still hasn't worked out the give and take of storytelling yet. His stories, he was chagrined to realize, haven't yet learned how to dance. He was even more chagrined to realize that he needed to learn this dance from Duck, who dances her own story so truthfully and so faithfully that to dance anything else...she stumbles.
And Fakir stumbles too. This time, it is even his fault, and he bows his head and starts to write them back into rhythm.
Fakir sets down his pen, beckons to Duck, and sets action to word.
Fakir tries writing again the next day. He tries writing of their dance at the bottom of the Lake of Despair, and how he wishes he could dance it again.
He, later that day in front of their excited choreographer, finds himself learning an new dance, oddly old, disquietingly familiar, with a probationary member of their company for a partner. She was beautiful and was colored fair to his dark, hair shimmering like a precious metal. She danced like a masterpiece; which is to say she had perfect form and felt like a statue in his arms. He felt like his hands were nailed to cold stone and like his feet slid along pre-ordained grooves on the floor.
She had eyes like glass beads, sewn on.
Fakir went straight to the pond afterwards and looked and looked and looked at Duck until he felt clean again. She paddled towards the pier and asked him what was wrong, in her way. He told her that his writing failed again, and she said that was okay and good things aren't easy and ooo is that bread for me?
It was. Fakir broke bits off for her and bemoaned about how ballet was so *easy* next to this. Duck glanced sharply up.
Fakir! She sputtered, mouth full, flapping. It is probably good for the both of them that Duck doesn't need to actually use her beak to communicate with him, Fakir thinks absently, as he is suddenly reminded of the girl that tried so hard and tried so hard and whom he'd embarrassed in front of prima ballerina Paulamoni by dancing to his ability instead of hers. It shames him, now, that he was so petty.
Early the next morning, Fakir tries to write of the chirrpy girl he'd met one day at school, who was loud and annoying and heartfelt and captured his attention like nothing else.
He finds himself mobbed at the beginning of lunchtime by the newest academy intakes, young and starry-eyed and an alarming number of them red-headed. They sing-songed to him requests for his attention in what they must think is sultry tones but what in reality sounds more like a metal chair scraping backwards on a concrete floor. He tries to get away, but they claw at him and beg for his attention, and he finds himself at the end of lunchtime somehow up a tree.
He feels flustered and embarrassed, but the girls can't reach him there despite their yapping, and he decides to stay there because what with his luck he'd have to assist with the beginner classes. (What he doesn't want to admit to himself is the urge to brood over his writing yet again.)
Duck finds him in the early evening and quacks at him irritably.
Fakir, you're being silly.
Fakir, prone on a long wide branch, twists his head towards the ground. "How did you find me?"
Pique and Lilie. And they're waiting for you to break the girls' hearts with news of your secret passionate affair with the mysterious Princess Rue, she quacks amusedly.
Fakir grimaces. While he liked that Duck's friends carried on including Duck in their circle, he finds them...odd. Not much of their communication amongst themselves changed, really, Duck was a good listener, Lilie liked to talk, and Pique liked to be a voice of reason. They met at fountains or at parks or at the cafes where the servers liked to give Duck leftover bread and pastries. Indeed, perhaps the only thing that changed was that they didn't go to school together anymore and that Lilie keeps attempting to set Duck up with handsome mallards instead of with handsome boys. (Fakir had to rescue her once from when they locked her in a closet with one, he hoped that he yelled enough for no future repeats.)
You should come down, it's getting late.
Fakir ignores her.
Fakir... Duck said warningly.
"What?" He pretends nonchalance.
She huffs, flapped up, and--
"OW!" Fakir flailed, catching his balance.
--starts yanking on his hair.
"FINE. I'm getting down."
They walk to his house slowly. Well, he walks, Duck's in his arms. The evening was pleasant, the glow of the street lamps crisp in the air and the vague music of a town settling down to dinner and sleep. Winter hovers like an unwelcome suitor, and Fakir is worried.
"Duck," he begins, "when the snows come, when the water gets too cold, why don't you---there's room enough for---" Fakir stumbles.
Both literally and metaphorically; he almost drops her on the cobblestones. Fakir yells at himself mentally and trudges on, his small cottage and it's neighboring pond nearing.
Duck makes a questioning 'qua?'
"There's more than enough room in the cottage if you---if you don't feel like migrating."
Duck's eyes widen and she makes sharp denials about leaving Kinkan Town because he promised to stay by her, and it would be rude of her because he can't fly. She echoes against the trees and the water and even the crickets seem to creak in amusement.
Fakir snorts, "You'd probably get us lost anyways." He is about to set her on the pier when she pecks his hand. So he drops her directly into the lake instead and moves away quickly before she can splash him.
"Goodnight," he says at his door.
"Quack," she answers.
The people he writes of are not yet fully real, so for the most part his fairytales never come true. (Yet, he hopes.)
More specifically, it took five months to figure out that he not only loved Duck but was *in* love with Duck, then six more months to work up the nerve to discuss his emotional situation with her, and two solid days of stammering (and random changes of topic and rather alot of confused quacking on Duck's part because Fakir was being weird, and she huffs then peers at his sandwich to make sure he didn't eat any funny vegetables).
However, Fakir is perhaps just a wee bit more stubborn than the root of a mountain so he gets over himself as much as he could and blurts out his feelings and had a prize like none other when Duck blushed straight through her feathers and got all flustered and flappy and unbalanced the both of them right into the lake. The dampness was more a bother to Fakir than to Duck so it took Duck considerably less long to admit that, well, she kinda *like* liked him too. A lot. Which made Fakir feel like he could dance on the water.
It was thus in Kinkan Town that a boy dated a duck, with picnics and operas and just spending time together, which not only was it not much different from how they acted before but also not so odd in the scheme of things considering that most of the town was in a frenzy of preparing for a winter season and a holiday that hadn't appeared since Drosselmeyer's death. Discussing the weather actually became a truly vital conversation to have, as opposed to the topic of love between a boy and a duck, which, it's none of their business if the lad chooses to go the way of shepherds and Duck makes *such* a darling little babysitter/lifeguard for the toddlers in the park.
That being said, it also wasn't like the citizens of Kinkan Town didn't wonder at the sheer *logistics* of their relationship. Most people just winced, briefly, and made no comment out of politeness.
Autor is not most people.
He decides to give Fakir's Christmas present early; the gift being a lesson on extended metaphors. He raps smartly on Fakir's cottage door, taps impatiently, then knocks again. There was a shuffling noise and then the door opened.
"Autor?" Fakir's face screwed up into a yawn that was not allowed to get out.
"Fakir. I think we should discuss metaphors."
"...at one in the morning?"
"Would you perfer that we discuss the birds and the bees during lunch?"
"What?"
"Granted, the metaphor works exceptionally well in this case." Autor smirked, "That would mean you're the bee."
Fakir escaped Autor as fast as he could (which was not nearly fast enough, as he'd got shown *diagrams*), he caught up with Duck at the pond who was being given a severe quacking to by a matronly mallard. She was blushing madly as well.
"Duck."
She looked over and seemed relieved to find him there, as she made quick apologies and an even quicker exit.
And then they talked, Duck in his lap while he was curled into the chair in front of the fireplace, though it was less talking than it was mumbling and blushing. At the end of it, they both fell to silence, because they both know that there's a simple solution in Fakir's hands. The power in Fakir's blood that can reshape reality, literally.
Fakir traces the scar on his hand, and worries.
It took them until spring dripped in and tempered the winter before Duck convinced Fakir that she trusts him with a pen in hand and before Fakir himself felt fully prepared to write again.
In hindsight, he'd probably should've given himself an extra month or two to practice.
...and she rose on her new legs, or was it old legs newly returned?
Fakir writes, blushing madly as Duck's skin glows in the firelight. She is *happy* and he is *relieved*, even as he is kicking himself for not writing her with clothing, even as he is trying to keep his eyes on the manuscript but sneaking glances peripherally. He is glad to have had this work, even as he worries at *how* it works; he still questions whether it was right to use his abilities this way.
But she smiles and the question loses meaning in the reality of her prescence. The swan-like creature approches him and says
"Honk." Fakir.
Fakir whips his head up.
A blue-eyed swan blinks back at him, then looks down at herself.
They exchange aghast expressions.
"Um," Fakir mutters.
"Honk," Duck agrees. She tries to waddle towards him but she is, if anything, more ungainly and ungraceful as a swan than she ever was as a human.
She is, wretchedly perhaps, more graceful as a duck than in any other form. Fakir's forehead furrows like a clenched fist; he still hasn't worked out the give and take of storytelling yet. His stories, he was chagrined to realize, haven't yet learned how to dance. He was even more chagrined to realize that he needed to learn this dance from Duck, who dances her own story so truthfully and so faithfully that to dance anything else...she stumbles.
And Fakir stumbles too. This time, it is even his fault, and he bows his head and starts to write them back into rhythm.
"Fakir," she says, gently, confusedly. "Thank you, but," and here her legs wobbled, uncertain on dry land.
'I'm sorry,' he thinks, but he already sees in her eyes the forgiveness. He kisses the top of her head, ignoring the feathery tickles on his nose and the wet tickles in the backs of his eyes. She shimmers in front of his eyes, like mist and like sea foam, and he picks up her to return her to her home.
A couple hours later, they watch the sun rise. Her in the water, him on the pier.
Fakir sets down his pen, beckons to Duck, and sets action to word.
Fakir tries writing again the next day. He tries writing of their dance at the bottom of the Lake of Despair, and how he wishes he could dance it again.
(Their forms painting shadows on the lake bed, her eyes like stars, and their arms looping into each other like infinity. She was so beautiful.)
He, later that day in front of their excited choreographer, finds himself learning an new dance, oddly old, disquietingly familiar, with a probationary member of their company for a partner. She was beautiful and was colored fair to his dark, hair shimmering like a precious metal. She danced like a masterpiece; which is to say she had perfect form and felt like a statue in his arms. He felt like his hands were nailed to cold stone and like his feet slid along pre-ordained grooves on the floor.
She had eyes like glass beads, sewn on.
Fakir went straight to the pond afterwards and looked and looked and looked at Duck until he felt clean again. She paddled towards the pier and asked him what was wrong, in her way. He told her that his writing failed again, and she said that was okay and good things aren't easy and ooo is that bread for me?
It was. Fakir broke bits off for her and bemoaned about how ballet was so *easy* next to this. Duck glanced sharply up.
Fakir! She sputtered, mouth full, flapping. It is probably good for the both of them that Duck doesn't need to actually use her beak to communicate with him, Fakir thinks absently, as he is suddenly reminded of the girl that tried so hard and tried so hard and whom he'd embarrassed in front of prima ballerina Paulamoni by dancing to his ability instead of hers. It shames him, now, that he was so petty.
Early the next morning, Fakir tries to write of the chirrpy girl he'd met one day at school, who was loud and annoying and heartfelt and captured his attention like nothing else.
(She flew across courtyards like wind skipping across the stones, changeable like weather, young like spring, determined like stone. He doesn't know how he'd missed noticing her, but he supposed that he had his circumstances like she had hers.
And the fact that they bickered like cats and dogs.)
He finds himself mobbed at the beginning of lunchtime by the newest academy intakes, young and starry-eyed and an alarming number of them red-headed. They sing-songed to him requests for his attention in what they must think is sultry tones but what in reality sounds more like a metal chair scraping backwards on a concrete floor. He tries to get away, but they claw at him and beg for his attention, and he finds himself at the end of lunchtime somehow up a tree.
He feels flustered and embarrassed, but the girls can't reach him there despite their yapping, and he decides to stay there because what with his luck he'd have to assist with the beginner classes. (What he doesn't want to admit to himself is the urge to brood over his writing yet again.)
Duck finds him in the early evening and quacks at him irritably.
Fakir, you're being silly.
Fakir, prone on a long wide branch, twists his head towards the ground. "How did you find me?"
Pique and Lilie. And they're waiting for you to break the girls' hearts with news of your secret passionate affair with the mysterious Princess Rue, she quacks amusedly.
Fakir grimaces. While he liked that Duck's friends carried on including Duck in their circle, he finds them...odd. Not much of their communication amongst themselves changed, really, Duck was a good listener, Lilie liked to talk, and Pique liked to be a voice of reason. They met at fountains or at parks or at the cafes where the servers liked to give Duck leftover bread and pastries. Indeed, perhaps the only thing that changed was that they didn't go to school together anymore and that Lilie keeps attempting to set Duck up with handsome mallards instead of with handsome boys. (Fakir had to rescue her once from when they locked her in a closet with one, he hoped that he yelled enough for no future repeats.)
You should come down, it's getting late.
Fakir ignores her.
Fakir... Duck said warningly.
"What?" He pretends nonchalance.
She huffs, flapped up, and--
"OW!" Fakir flailed, catching his balance.
--starts yanking on his hair.
"FINE. I'm getting down."
They walk to his house slowly. Well, he walks, Duck's in his arms. The evening was pleasant, the glow of the street lamps crisp in the air and the vague music of a town settling down to dinner and sleep. Winter hovers like an unwelcome suitor, and Fakir is worried.
"Duck," he begins, "when the snows come, when the water gets too cold, why don't you---there's room enough for---" Fakir stumbles.
Both literally and metaphorically; he almost drops her on the cobblestones. Fakir yells at himself mentally and trudges on, his small cottage and it's neighboring pond nearing.
Duck makes a questioning 'qua?'
"There's more than enough room in the cottage if you---if you don't feel like migrating."
Duck's eyes widen and she makes sharp denials about leaving Kinkan Town because he promised to stay by her, and it would be rude of her because he can't fly. She echoes against the trees and the water and even the crickets seem to creak in amusement.
Fakir snorts, "You'd probably get us lost anyways." He is about to set her on the pier when she pecks his hand. So he drops her directly into the lake instead and moves away quickly before she can splash him.
"Goodnight," he says at his door.
"Quack," she answers.
The people he writes of are not yet fully real, so for the most part his fairytales never come true. (Yet, he hopes.)
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