SMACKDOWN (Dom): In Small Packages, PG
Feb 3, 2010 22:01:33 GMT 10
Lady Olive of Masbolle likes this
Post by rainstormamaya on Feb 3, 2010 22:01:33 GMT 10
Title: In Small Packages
Rating: PG
Length: 2,290 words
Competitor: Dom
Round/Fight: 1/A
Summary: As far as Dom is concerned, the best things come in small packages (Kel and the growing, noisy, rowdyheathens children being the obvious exception.) Features teenaged sons who won’t practise their Yamani, small daughters who haven’t brushed their hair for weeks, and why Dom should only ever have allowed his son supervised contact with Uncle Lerant.
Follows on from Remember? and is also... fairly fluffy. I think I may be destroying my angsty-realist cred...
********
Dom glared at his eldest son, who was, at present, a sulky, hazel-eyed, beanpole presentation of the many, many ways a Masbolle-Mindelan marriage could go wrong. “Bear-“
“My name is Baird-“
“You’ll always be Bear to me. It’s something about the memories of changing every clout you ever soiled. Look, I perfectly understand the impulse to defend-”
“Mama! Kesi!”
The shout electrified both Dom and Bear, and as one they leapt for the window, peering out to see the arrivals; Kel fresh from another few months as training master, and Bear’s thirteen-year-old twin Kesi released from the palace for the summer. Sure enough, there they were, with Bear and Kesi’s smallest sister Lynn running out to greet them, splashing through muddy puddles in the courtyard and making her already stained lavender dress filthy.
Dom couldn’t help smiling as he saw Kesi practically bounce off her long-suffering horse, scoop her seven-year-old sister up and proclaim her to be an unmitigated monster- and yes, I missed you too, Lynn, all right, stop pulling my hair! His eyes strayed to his wife, who was smiling fondly at the pair, and who then knelt and held her arms out for the little girl to run into them, pressing her face into Lynn’s irredeemably tangled hair and kissing the top of her head.
Dom felt a contented smile spread across his face. Twenty years ago, he’d have laughed long and loud if you’d told him he’d be married to Kel with four children, and then have dragged you to a healer to have your head checked out; except that a tiny, tiny part of him would have been thinking, actually, well, maybe...
It had always been easy to imagine Kel as a mother, to be fair, an indulgent but firm mother to a pack of clueless teenagers, but still- a mother, and when Dom had finally been allowed into the room to see his wife and their newborn twins it had almost been a shock how natural and easy and obviously right she looked holding them. As for the ‘married’ part of the equation, he’d worked out that he didn’t exactly have objections to that about six months into their relationship when he started to fantasise about waking up next to her every morning without having to worry about what the conservatives would say, being allowed to knock men down for insulting her without anyone thinking it in the least odd, and being able to share a whole lifetime with her, however long that happened to be. He had confided much of this to Lerant after several pints of ale too many, and Lerant had listened impatiently, sobered him up by stuffing his head into an icy water-butt and spent much of the next four years huffing in irritation and glaring angrily as, time after time, Dom shied away from asking Kel to marry him (although to be fair, the man had been quite nice to him in his stiff, awkward way, after the injury and during Dom’s bad-tempered recuperation.)
On reflection, Bear bore a considerable resemblance to his Uncle Lerant in the matter of ability to radiate a solid sheet of indignation around him for a good couple of feet and sheer bloody stubbornness. Perhaps encouraging them to spend time together hadn’t been such a good idea... He’d been thinking about godsfather-godson bonding, and Kel had warned him that it was going to blow up in his face like so much blaze-balm, and she had been right. Then again, she usually was.
That drew his attention back to his son, who was now looking at him warily, but with a certain hope that he might be allowed to go downstairs and talk to his mother and twin – both Kel and Dom were aware of how painful the split had been for Kesi and Bear, despite their determination to stick to their separate goals. Dom looked at the boy, really looked at him, and noticed rather abruptly that not only had Bear grown another two inches, the neutral set of his mouth and jaw and the hope in his hazel eyes made him look for one startling moment exactly like his mother.
Dom sighed. “This conversation is not even slightly over, and we still need to discuss the state of your studies in Yamani, which are what your uncle Neal would call parlous. Bear, Merric has a better Yamani accent than you do.”
Bear muttered something about hating Yamani.
“You’re learning it so you can talk to your cousins.”
To the mutterings about hating Yamani were added grumbles about not specially wanting to talk to cousins who were so much older than him and probably wouldn’t be even a bit interested in him.
“If they aren’t, and they might not be, you said it yourself,” Dom said brutally, “they at least will have the good manners not to make it obvious, and they will talk to you. Possibly in Yamani. Now, we are going to go downstairs, but we are going to talk about this, yes?”
Bear nodded sullenly.
“Good,” Dom said. “That’s agreed.” He paused, and grinned. “Race you!”
Bear’s head jerked up, a light of mischief and laughter lighting in his eyes, and father and son charged down the stairs, jostling and shoving each other the whole way, and laughing, Bear quickly pulling ahead of his father, whose weak leg didn’t do him any favours.
They appeared at the bottom out of breath and still laughing, only to find that Kel at least had progressed from the courtyard to the hall and was standing with that perfectly calm, mild expression that Dom knew so well, looking over some papers. She heard the advent of her husband and son, and glanced up, smiling, before tucking the papers away and coming to hug her son, who awkwardly returned the embrace with typical teenaged embarrassment and then stepped away. “Mama, where’s Kesi?” he asked.
“In the stables,” Kel said. “Not even a proper greeting for your old mother?”
Bear flushed. “Hello Mama I hope the pages weren’t too bad and you had a nice time in Corus and excuse me I really really really need to see Kesi,” he said in one breath, and sprinted out and off in the direction of the stables, colliding with – by the noise – his brother Reynard on the way.
Kel chuckled softly, shook her head, and stepped forward into her husband’s arms.
“They’re heathens,” Dom murmured, kissing her softly. “I’m so sorry, but they. Are. Heathens. Our children are-“
“Heathens,” Kel completed, leaning into his embrace and closing her eyes. “They scrub up perfectly well in public; I shouldn’t worry about it.”
He held her close, and inhaled the scent of her hair, now entirely grey; much to Kel’s displeasure, it had started turning silver before she was even thirty, and by the time she was thirty-five it was entirely grey. Neal ascribed this to a trait inherited from Kel’s mother Ilane, Dom ascribed this to too much time spent dealing with Neal, who hadn’t got any less theatrical or hysterical with age and marriage to Yuki, but both agreed that it suited her whatever her personal reservations on the subject. “You smell like lemon,” he observed in mild surprise.
Kel nodded. “Kesi got the top marks in her year in the little exams; Padraig even described her as ‘exemplary’-“
“Mithros!”
“-I know, that conservative liking anything as closely related to me as a daughter is a bit of a stretch, but he seems to have managed it... Anyway, I thought I’d treat her, so we went to a nice inn on the way back, and they had this lemon soap... She really did do very well.” Kel tipped her head up to kiss him. Bear and Kesi darted into the hall, stopped in their tracks and chorused ‘ewwwww!’, and both Kel and Dom smiled, Kel curling her hands into the fabric of his tunic and deliberately deepening the kiss.
“Yuck, parents!” Kesi cried, her voice sharp with a Corus accent that would have worn totally away by the time she returned to the palace, and Bear made retching noises.
“You don’t have to watch,” Dom said reasonably, during a pause for breath, and put an arm about his wife’s waist. “Lady Knight, I think this occasion calls for a change of venue.”
“Sergeant, I absolutely agree,” Kel said solemnly. “Just let me-“
She picked up a parcel which had been resting on the floor, and Kesi nudged her twin. “Wouldn’t you like to know what that’s got in it!”
Dom saw, out of the corner of his eye, Bear’s eyebrows shoot up and the boy mouth ‘presents?’ at Kesi, who nodded smugly. He grinned because he knew that Kel would have seen it too, and laughed outright when Bear stepped forward said:
“Uh, Mama, if you’d like me and Kesi to... take care of that... while you and Da, er- you know- um...”
“Not a chance, Bear,” Kel said benevolently, wearing her most serene expression. “If you’ll excuse us, Master Baird, Page Kesanne...”
“We’re just off to er, you know, um,” Dom said, straight-faced. Bear pulled a face at him, and Kesi grimaced.
“Da, neither of us needed to know that...”
“Tough,” Dom said cheerfully, and followed his wife up the stairs to their bedroom, rubbing at his leg, which was aching a little from racing Bear down the stairs.
Kel put down the parcel on the desk in their room, and sighed, straightening up and stretching. “Lady Alanna once told me that, never mind all the healings, your body adds up all the breaks and bruises and presents you with the bill one day... Has your leg been all right? You said in your last letter it was bothering you.”
Dom ignored her question, moved to stand behind her and kissed the back of her neck, rubbing at the knotted muscles of her shoulders and back. “Is Neal any help?”
“Yes, but his help comes with lectures... Ohhh, that’s better,” Kel said, with a moan of blissful relief reserved for hot baths after long hours of riding in the rain, a soft bed after an endless day, and Dom spending a lot of time and concentration on getting the stiffness and tension out of her muscles.
“Always glad to be of service,” Dom informed her with an intentionally dirty tone to his words, and got a twitch of the lips and a light slap from her. “Is there anything for me in there?”
“Yes,” Kel said, and started to pick at the string on the parcel. Dom removed her belt-knife from its sheath and handed it to her. “Thank you. Yes, there is, here...”
The string fell away, revealing a lot more individual parcels. Kel picked out a relatively small, perhaps hand-sized one, and handed it to him, turning to see his reaction. “Open it,” she prompted, and he shot her a grin.
“As if I wasn’t going to.” He untied the string on this one, and unwrapped the paper carefully. For a moment, he just stared at the contents, and then he said, “Oh, Kel,” and reached out with one arm and crushed her to him.
“I heard they were being made for ten-year veterans,” she said, her voice muffled by his tunic, her arms just as tightly around him. “And I knew you missed the Own so much when we were first married and I thought you’d like something to say you were there...”
“Have I mentioned lately how much I love you?” he asked her. “How much I love your mad, mad ability to avoid doing yourself any bit of good whatsoever and find all the time in the world for everyone else’s whims and wishes? Your way of reading my mind? Of knowing exactly what I want before I even know and giving it to me?”
Kel’s hand found the place on his leg where a sword had ripped through the muscle, nearly fifteen years earlier, and had invalided him out of the Own, the flesh healing well- but not well enough. She glanced into his eyes, and he knew that she was remembering that battle: the raiders clustering around Kel, trying to bring her down, and Dom, putting himself in the way, parrying the first blow and the second but not the third...
“I still feel guilty-“ she said, as close to blurting as Kel ever got.
Dom shook his head violently. “That swordstroke could have killed you. The realm has always needed you more than it needs me, and I have always needed you more than I have the Own.”
“There was a time when you were in the Own before you met me,” Kel pointed out.
Dom shrugged, and slid the gift onto his wrist and admired it. “I needed you. I just didn’t know it.” It was a wide silver cuff, the outside reading simply THE KING’S OWN, with the symbol of a sword through a crown in dark blue lacquer on either side of the words. Inside, Dom had seen the words engraved Domitan of Masbolle and served in honour, 452 H.E.-466 H.E., and, Mithros’ shield, he wouldn’t think it could make him so happy just to have some acknowledgement that he, too, had been a soldier. Kel had known that, had divined it somehow from the brief moments of bitterness for his weaker leg, for the way Kesi and Bear occasionally treated him like he might break, and took special care that he never had to move anywhere at anything approaching a decent speed. He had no idea how Kel had worked out his motives, but she had, and he blessed her for it.
He hugged her tight again. “I love you. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” Kel said, “but I like hearing it again.”
So he saw to it that she did.
Rating: PG
Length: 2,290 words
Competitor: Dom
Round/Fight: 1/A
Summary: As far as Dom is concerned, the best things come in small packages (Kel and the growing, noisy, rowdy
Follows on from Remember? and is also... fairly fluffy. I think I may be destroying my angsty-realist cred...
********
Dom glared at his eldest son, who was, at present, a sulky, hazel-eyed, beanpole presentation of the many, many ways a Masbolle-Mindelan marriage could go wrong. “Bear-“
“My name is Baird-“
“You’ll always be Bear to me. It’s something about the memories of changing every clout you ever soiled. Look, I perfectly understand the impulse to defend-”
“Mama! Kesi!”
The shout electrified both Dom and Bear, and as one they leapt for the window, peering out to see the arrivals; Kel fresh from another few months as training master, and Bear’s thirteen-year-old twin Kesi released from the palace for the summer. Sure enough, there they were, with Bear and Kesi’s smallest sister Lynn running out to greet them, splashing through muddy puddles in the courtyard and making her already stained lavender dress filthy.
Dom couldn’t help smiling as he saw Kesi practically bounce off her long-suffering horse, scoop her seven-year-old sister up and proclaim her to be an unmitigated monster- and yes, I missed you too, Lynn, all right, stop pulling my hair! His eyes strayed to his wife, who was smiling fondly at the pair, and who then knelt and held her arms out for the little girl to run into them, pressing her face into Lynn’s irredeemably tangled hair and kissing the top of her head.
Dom felt a contented smile spread across his face. Twenty years ago, he’d have laughed long and loud if you’d told him he’d be married to Kel with four children, and then have dragged you to a healer to have your head checked out; except that a tiny, tiny part of him would have been thinking, actually, well, maybe...
It had always been easy to imagine Kel as a mother, to be fair, an indulgent but firm mother to a pack of clueless teenagers, but still- a mother, and when Dom had finally been allowed into the room to see his wife and their newborn twins it had almost been a shock how natural and easy and obviously right she looked holding them. As for the ‘married’ part of the equation, he’d worked out that he didn’t exactly have objections to that about six months into their relationship when he started to fantasise about waking up next to her every morning without having to worry about what the conservatives would say, being allowed to knock men down for insulting her without anyone thinking it in the least odd, and being able to share a whole lifetime with her, however long that happened to be. He had confided much of this to Lerant after several pints of ale too many, and Lerant had listened impatiently, sobered him up by stuffing his head into an icy water-butt and spent much of the next four years huffing in irritation and glaring angrily as, time after time, Dom shied away from asking Kel to marry him (although to be fair, the man had been quite nice to him in his stiff, awkward way, after the injury and during Dom’s bad-tempered recuperation.)
On reflection, Bear bore a considerable resemblance to his Uncle Lerant in the matter of ability to radiate a solid sheet of indignation around him for a good couple of feet and sheer bloody stubbornness. Perhaps encouraging them to spend time together hadn’t been such a good idea... He’d been thinking about godsfather-godson bonding, and Kel had warned him that it was going to blow up in his face like so much blaze-balm, and she had been right. Then again, she usually was.
That drew his attention back to his son, who was now looking at him warily, but with a certain hope that he might be allowed to go downstairs and talk to his mother and twin – both Kel and Dom were aware of how painful the split had been for Kesi and Bear, despite their determination to stick to their separate goals. Dom looked at the boy, really looked at him, and noticed rather abruptly that not only had Bear grown another two inches, the neutral set of his mouth and jaw and the hope in his hazel eyes made him look for one startling moment exactly like his mother.
Dom sighed. “This conversation is not even slightly over, and we still need to discuss the state of your studies in Yamani, which are what your uncle Neal would call parlous. Bear, Merric has a better Yamani accent than you do.”
Bear muttered something about hating Yamani.
“You’re learning it so you can talk to your cousins.”
To the mutterings about hating Yamani were added grumbles about not specially wanting to talk to cousins who were so much older than him and probably wouldn’t be even a bit interested in him.
“If they aren’t, and they might not be, you said it yourself,” Dom said brutally, “they at least will have the good manners not to make it obvious, and they will talk to you. Possibly in Yamani. Now, we are going to go downstairs, but we are going to talk about this, yes?”
Bear nodded sullenly.
“Good,” Dom said. “That’s agreed.” He paused, and grinned. “Race you!”
Bear’s head jerked up, a light of mischief and laughter lighting in his eyes, and father and son charged down the stairs, jostling and shoving each other the whole way, and laughing, Bear quickly pulling ahead of his father, whose weak leg didn’t do him any favours.
They appeared at the bottom out of breath and still laughing, only to find that Kel at least had progressed from the courtyard to the hall and was standing with that perfectly calm, mild expression that Dom knew so well, looking over some papers. She heard the advent of her husband and son, and glanced up, smiling, before tucking the papers away and coming to hug her son, who awkwardly returned the embrace with typical teenaged embarrassment and then stepped away. “Mama, where’s Kesi?” he asked.
“In the stables,” Kel said. “Not even a proper greeting for your old mother?”
Bear flushed. “Hello Mama I hope the pages weren’t too bad and you had a nice time in Corus and excuse me I really really really need to see Kesi,” he said in one breath, and sprinted out and off in the direction of the stables, colliding with – by the noise – his brother Reynard on the way.
Kel chuckled softly, shook her head, and stepped forward into her husband’s arms.
“They’re heathens,” Dom murmured, kissing her softly. “I’m so sorry, but they. Are. Heathens. Our children are-“
“Heathens,” Kel completed, leaning into his embrace and closing her eyes. “They scrub up perfectly well in public; I shouldn’t worry about it.”
He held her close, and inhaled the scent of her hair, now entirely grey; much to Kel’s displeasure, it had started turning silver before she was even thirty, and by the time she was thirty-five it was entirely grey. Neal ascribed this to a trait inherited from Kel’s mother Ilane, Dom ascribed this to too much time spent dealing with Neal, who hadn’t got any less theatrical or hysterical with age and marriage to Yuki, but both agreed that it suited her whatever her personal reservations on the subject. “You smell like lemon,” he observed in mild surprise.
Kel nodded. “Kesi got the top marks in her year in the little exams; Padraig even described her as ‘exemplary’-“
“Mithros!”
“-I know, that conservative liking anything as closely related to me as a daughter is a bit of a stretch, but he seems to have managed it... Anyway, I thought I’d treat her, so we went to a nice inn on the way back, and they had this lemon soap... She really did do very well.” Kel tipped her head up to kiss him. Bear and Kesi darted into the hall, stopped in their tracks and chorused ‘ewwwww!’, and both Kel and Dom smiled, Kel curling her hands into the fabric of his tunic and deliberately deepening the kiss.
“Yuck, parents!” Kesi cried, her voice sharp with a Corus accent that would have worn totally away by the time she returned to the palace, and Bear made retching noises.
“You don’t have to watch,” Dom said reasonably, during a pause for breath, and put an arm about his wife’s waist. “Lady Knight, I think this occasion calls for a change of venue.”
“Sergeant, I absolutely agree,” Kel said solemnly. “Just let me-“
She picked up a parcel which had been resting on the floor, and Kesi nudged her twin. “Wouldn’t you like to know what that’s got in it!”
Dom saw, out of the corner of his eye, Bear’s eyebrows shoot up and the boy mouth ‘presents?’ at Kesi, who nodded smugly. He grinned because he knew that Kel would have seen it too, and laughed outright when Bear stepped forward said:
“Uh, Mama, if you’d like me and Kesi to... take care of that... while you and Da, er- you know- um...”
“Not a chance, Bear,” Kel said benevolently, wearing her most serene expression. “If you’ll excuse us, Master Baird, Page Kesanne...”
“We’re just off to er, you know, um,” Dom said, straight-faced. Bear pulled a face at him, and Kesi grimaced.
“Da, neither of us needed to know that...”
“Tough,” Dom said cheerfully, and followed his wife up the stairs to their bedroom, rubbing at his leg, which was aching a little from racing Bear down the stairs.
Kel put down the parcel on the desk in their room, and sighed, straightening up and stretching. “Lady Alanna once told me that, never mind all the healings, your body adds up all the breaks and bruises and presents you with the bill one day... Has your leg been all right? You said in your last letter it was bothering you.”
Dom ignored her question, moved to stand behind her and kissed the back of her neck, rubbing at the knotted muscles of her shoulders and back. “Is Neal any help?”
“Yes, but his help comes with lectures... Ohhh, that’s better,” Kel said, with a moan of blissful relief reserved for hot baths after long hours of riding in the rain, a soft bed after an endless day, and Dom spending a lot of time and concentration on getting the stiffness and tension out of her muscles.
“Always glad to be of service,” Dom informed her with an intentionally dirty tone to his words, and got a twitch of the lips and a light slap from her. “Is there anything for me in there?”
“Yes,” Kel said, and started to pick at the string on the parcel. Dom removed her belt-knife from its sheath and handed it to her. “Thank you. Yes, there is, here...”
The string fell away, revealing a lot more individual parcels. Kel picked out a relatively small, perhaps hand-sized one, and handed it to him, turning to see his reaction. “Open it,” she prompted, and he shot her a grin.
“As if I wasn’t going to.” He untied the string on this one, and unwrapped the paper carefully. For a moment, he just stared at the contents, and then he said, “Oh, Kel,” and reached out with one arm and crushed her to him.
“I heard they were being made for ten-year veterans,” she said, her voice muffled by his tunic, her arms just as tightly around him. “And I knew you missed the Own so much when we were first married and I thought you’d like something to say you were there...”
“Have I mentioned lately how much I love you?” he asked her. “How much I love your mad, mad ability to avoid doing yourself any bit of good whatsoever and find all the time in the world for everyone else’s whims and wishes? Your way of reading my mind? Of knowing exactly what I want before I even know and giving it to me?”
Kel’s hand found the place on his leg where a sword had ripped through the muscle, nearly fifteen years earlier, and had invalided him out of the Own, the flesh healing well- but not well enough. She glanced into his eyes, and he knew that she was remembering that battle: the raiders clustering around Kel, trying to bring her down, and Dom, putting himself in the way, parrying the first blow and the second but not the third...
“I still feel guilty-“ she said, as close to blurting as Kel ever got.
Dom shook his head violently. “That swordstroke could have killed you. The realm has always needed you more than it needs me, and I have always needed you more than I have the Own.”
“There was a time when you were in the Own before you met me,” Kel pointed out.
Dom shrugged, and slid the gift onto his wrist and admired it. “I needed you. I just didn’t know it.” It was a wide silver cuff, the outside reading simply THE KING’S OWN, with the symbol of a sword through a crown in dark blue lacquer on either side of the words. Inside, Dom had seen the words engraved Domitan of Masbolle and served in honour, 452 H.E.-466 H.E., and, Mithros’ shield, he wouldn’t think it could make him so happy just to have some acknowledgement that he, too, had been a soldier. Kel had known that, had divined it somehow from the brief moments of bitterness for his weaker leg, for the way Kesi and Bear occasionally treated him like he might break, and took special care that he never had to move anywhere at anything approaching a decent speed. He had no idea how Kel had worked out his motives, but she had, and he blessed her for it.
He hugged her tight again. “I love you. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” Kel said, “but I like hearing it again.”
So he saw to it that she did.