Loosely Lawful | 8

Fishy angel that she was, Kaliko cleaned up the chalk and vomit and miscellaneous leaves and branches with a neat little flourish and an enchanting smile. She adjusted Benvolius so he was sitting against one of the twin beds in the tiny room and brushed the sweat from Kyle's temples, and as she left them to coax Avon back into human form, both boys stared after her with hearts in their eyes. Their shoulders relaxed until they ended up leaning against each other, and their faces melted into loose, soppy, infatuation. Sera wanted to gag. She did gag, actually, but mostly on the remnant taste of grossness left in her mouth, and not because of how pretty and nice and sweet Kaliko was.

Eventually, Avon-bird morphed back into Just-Avon. They were particularly avian still, with red hair that fluffed out like down feathers and a large, beakish nose that took up a little too much space on their face. But at least Avon could talk again. Too bad the first thing that came out of their mouth was a complaint.

“What the hell, Sera? What did you think you were doing back there?” They waved their arms about, spindly fingers accenting the words with sharp jabs and points. “I thought we agreed. We can poke and prod at each other back in Gaville all we want, but we don’t get involved when it comes to work!”

Sera harrumphed. She didn’t owe them an explanation.

But then Kaliko raised one bold, scaly eyebrow, and Kyle pursed his lips and made a horrid, pouty face, and Sera had no choice but to give in. At least Benvolius wouldn’t lecture her. He was too busy probing his butt and ribs for any bruising.

“Fine,” Sera said. “I had a vision from Librata, and Timberheight was the closest place matching the location she showed me. So Kyle suggested we join you, and you join us, and also? Turns out that my vision is related to your stupid monster job.”

Kyle raised a hand tentatively. “We also need Kali to help read magic words.”

“You couldn’t have waited for us?” Avon shouted. “Caught us at a moment when we weren’t running for our lives? If it weren’t for you three, we could have escaped much faster. Who even is this?” They gestured at Benvolius, and the poor kid shrank behind Kyle.

“That’s Benvolius,” Sera replied, crossing her arms. “He’s under a magical contract, also somehow related to the whole situation.” She turned to Kaliko, who was pushing her glasses onto her nose, and continued. “I was hoping in addition to the monster and vision, you could help me read the spell on him.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you didn’t wait.”

Sera threw up her hands. “Well, pardon me for not knowing when the monster would show up! I had hoped to find you before it did! And then we could have all sat down and had a nice picnic instead of yelling at each other.”

“Oh, fuck off, Sera,” Avon said, already starting to peel off their clothes to slip into bed.

“You fuck off!” Sera shouted back.

Avon lifted a bedsheet and scowled. “This is our room? That we paid for? If anyone is going to”-

“Okay, hotheads,” Kyle said, standing up to put himself between Sera and Avon. He raised his hands, palms forward, placating, and offered them both a fetching smile. “Let’s just take a nice little trip to chill town, huh? We’re all pretty wired, and we’ll have a nicer talk when we’ve had a break.”

Why did Kyle have to talk like an imbecilic douche and be right at the same time? She sulked off towards the door and mumbled something close to her assent, and Avon grumbled about needing food, and much to Sera’s dismay, they both cooled almost instantly. When she stopped to notice, she realized her eyelids felt like lead. Her stomach was a roiling, bottomless pit. She was sweaty, and the padding under her armor stank like a skunk, and she wasn’t in the headspace to really do anything but sleep for nine hours and then replenish all the meals she’d lost to motion sicknes.

“Kali,” Kyle said softly, wrapping an arm around Sera’s shoulders, “can you two take Benny here for the night? This one’s armor is basically a whole extra person.” He knocked a loose fist against one of Sera’s pauldrons and then winked in Benvolius’s direction.

Kaliko’s smile was a glittering spray of light on water–totally blinding. “Oh, certainly. I’ll examine the magic on him, too.” She turned the full force of her beaming, tri-color face on Benvolius, and he bloomed red all the way down to his shirt collar.

Sera had the sinking feeling that by the end of this trip, Kali and Kyle would pull Benvolius into whatever horrible arrangement they had between them, and she would be left with awful, asshole Avon once more. She mourned her future as Kyle ushered her out of the hostel room and into a narrow, wooden hallway. Was it too much to ask, she thought, as Kyle negotiated downstairs for a room, to have one person she could rely on when her teammate was busy… getting busy?

Then again, Kyle usually made sure Sera was safe and taken care of before making booty calls, so she couldn’t complain too much. She followed him dutifully to their room after he came back up the stairs, the combined bulk of them testing the limits of what the hostel’s floor could handle. It creaked as they passed Avon and Kali’s room and groaned as they crowded in front of their door.

“Home sweet home,” Kyle said quietly, as he unlocked the door and led Sera inside. The room was a perfect mirror of Avon and Kali’s, with the same drab sheets over the same twin bed frames and same lumpy mattresses.

Sera didn’t really care. She moved to a corner near one of the beds and immediately began stripping off her armor, intermittently using her magic to blow the smell out the rickety window opposite the door. Kyle sat across from her, hands laced between his knees. His size made the bed look tiny, even just sitting on it.

“Do you and Avon really have a no-bothering-each-other agreement?” Kyle asked, after a long moment.

Sera, half asleep already, blinked at him and yawned through the first half of her response. “Nothing formal. I suppose maybe it was implied.”

“Maybe we should have gotten one of those magic message thingies to warn them.”

“And pay out the ass for ten seconds of time?” Sera let her pauldrons and breast plate fall to the floor with a clatter, then bent to work on her cuisses. “No thank you.” Her clumsy, tired fingers struggled with the buckles at the back of her thighs, and Sera considered giving up and just sleeping in her leg armor.

“Bro, you could totally warn them in ten seconds,” Kyle retorted, standing to join Sera in the corner. He knelt behind her and began unbuckling her–cuisses first, and then her greaves, and then the tiny fasteners on the sabatons covering her feet.

Sera held her arms out for Kyle to dump everything on her and scowled. “No I couldn’t. Those two like to ask follow-up questions.”

But instead of leaving Sera to put away her own armor, Kyle crowded her out of the corner and began setting all the pieces aside, neatly and methodically. “Oh, I see, brah. So the real problem is you’d just get super mad and want to keep extending the message. What’s your deal with Avon anyway? You guys were like that even before I met you.”

Feeling a little useless, Sera crossed her arms and paced between the beds. “We just don’t get along. It’s nothing.”

“Come on. There’s gotta be something.”

Sera watched as Kyle carefully adjusted the set of straps and padding that held up her pauldrons. He’d never done this for her before. She wasn’t even sure how he knew how to put away armor, since he never wore any. “I really don’t know,” she replied eventually.

Kyle finished with the armor a moment later, dusting off his hands and wiping them on his pants. He gave Sera a look and a shrug before taking her by the shoulders and nudging her towards the bed.

Right. Sleep. That thing she needed. She wrapped herself up in the thin blankets covering the mattress and flopped onto the bed, sticky and cold now that she had her armor off. The floor creaked as Kyle settled in opposite her, feet hanging off the end of his bed, and Sera had a passing thought that maybe she did know why she and Avon didn’t get on. But it was late, and she’d had a long day, and before her brain could follow up, she was out.