Better Late Than Never

[morethanmyth]

The yetis and elves had been extremely welcoming when they arrived back at the Pole. As soon as they shook themselves out of their shock at how battered they'd looked, they'd immediately brought out the blankets, spare clothes, first aid kits, food and drinks. Cocoa was pressed into people's hands whether they wanted it or not.

"Blughbloghughblug?"

"Out of nowhere. In broad daylight, no less," Katherine said to one of the yetis, holding her half-finished cup of hot cocoa in her hands. "It goes without saying that this is very, very bad."

"Ooghughaugh. Blughooghablorgblurgh?"

"Oh, well, that may be because they're still tethered to their worlds to a degree." She looked to the others. "He said someone named Wonder Woman, a Mr. Stark, and some undead fellow that had stayed behind at the Pole disappeared while you were meeting with me. I suppose that supports my hypothesis about the trans-dimensional tethering."

It had been a little while now since they'd returned and there was still no sign of Jack and Bunny. It was obviously bothering Katherine. In between her idle chatter with the yetis, who seemed to regard with her great fondness, she was pacing back and forth through the area that had been made into a "common area" while they'd been away. It was comfortable, full of plush red couches and cushions and tables for them to sit at to eat. Board games in many varieties had been stacked around.

The yetis were on standby, ready to get anything they needed, or show those who hadn't seen the Pole yet around.

"They should be back by now. I don't know why they're not back by now. Maybe the lindworms gave them trouble. Perhaps they had to take shelter in the Warren."

She chugged down her cocoa like someone else might nervously down a shot of whisky and then went for a refill.

[ooc: This is just for a few minutes of post-fight mingling and then the return of Jack and Bunny, then it'll be free-threading after this.]

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[spellitonce]

The crystal ball around Zac had evaporated the moment they touched down. Nico wiped her cheeks, which only made more streaks of her make-up -- she'd found herself inexplicably crying after that burst of light from the abandoned amusement park.

The spellform of Karolina hovered at her elbow, unmoving and blank now that there wasn't anything to fight. It made Nico's heart clench.

"I wish you were really here," she muttered. The spellform didn't even twitch, and Nico dismissed it like a soap bubble. She accepted the blanket and the cocoa and a plate of cookies from the Yeti without fuss.

[morethanmyth]

Katherine held out an embroidered handkerchief. Oddly, instead of her initials, the initials N.S.N. were what was embroidered on it.

Her hand was trembling just slightly, but she seemed to be trying to hide it.

[spellitonce]

Nico hesitated, but took the handkerchief.

"Thanks," she said, subdued. "I'll wash it and get it back to you."

She wasn't going to say anything about the way Katherine's hand was shaking. Instead, she stuffed another couple of cookies in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed them down with another swig of cocoa.

"Do we...what do we do while we wait? For them to get back?"

[morethanmyth]

"We wait, we hope, and we - we try desperately to not think about how badly we need them to come back. There's not much else we can do. If they're using Bunny's tunnels to return, we have no way of searching for them."

They hoped because if they didn't come back, who was left? Katherine dealt in information. She studied musty old books in dangerous places, like hidden cities, long abandoned, she gathered information from dangerous beings in dangerous places, she even spied on the enemy at times.

It was all dangerous, potentially deadly, and she was terrified every moment she did it. She'd learned a very long time ago, from very brave friend, that it was okay to be terrified while doing brave things - that was what made them brave.

But that friend was gone now, and bravery wasn't the only thing necessary to win a war. If it was down to them now, just one scholar and a group of people ripped unceremoniously from their worlds, new to their powers - with no Guardians to guide them - they didn't stand a chance.

"Do you play checkers?" Katherine said, sitting down across from Nico and looking at the board games stacked on the table next to her. The goose fluttered up next to Katherine and curled up under her one arm, more like a cat than a bird.

[spellitonce]

"Not well," Nico answered in response to the question about checkers. "But yeah, I play."

She devoured another cookie. "I could cast a spell," she said. Whatever spiritual mojo she had now was good with healing, but it wasn't like she couldn't break the skin again. "I could teleport them here, without grabbing anything else along with them either, so it wouldn't compromise this place as a base."

[madeforthis]

Once the bubble popped, Zac kind of just...fell into a pile/puddle and oozed out of the sleigh slowly. It took him about a minute to get himself back together, and once he did, he shook his head a bit before turning toward Nico.

"...thanks for the, uh. Container. Sorry if I caused any undue stress in the process," Zac says in a quiet tone - he'd jerked around a fair bit at first before he finally settled down.

[spellitonce]

"It's magic, not telekinesis," Nico said around a mouthful of cookie. "I could have brought you along if you'd been bouncing around like Flubber. But you're welcome."

She finished her cookie and sighed. "I guess it's introduction time. I'm Nico, and I trust most adults as far as I could throw them without my magic staff. Hi."

[madeforthis]

"Ahh, well - figured I should say so anyway. Can never tell for sure with people's abilities," Zac answers with a light shrug.

His expression falls a bit at the trust remark at first, but he puts forth a small grin. "Well, I'm Zac, and I'm already not like most adults in a lot of aspects, hopefully that continues to be the case. Nice to meet you, though I wish it was better circumstances."

[spellitonce]

"Don't take it personally, it's a twice-burned-not-going-there-again kind of thing," Nico explained with a shrug of her own. "So long as you don't take it into your head that you know better than me, we shouldn't have a problem."

The right corner of her mouth quirked upward. "The circumstances really suck."

[lifelinked]

"You're all right?" Mami felt the need to ask. She smoothed down her skirt and smiled---hey, she'd seen weirder. And he was an ally.

[madeforthis]

Zac gives Mami a thumbs up and a lopsided grin. "Yeah, I'm good. Bouncing back is pretty easy when you're like me," he answers. "Never been a fan of small, enclosed spaces, though."

[lifelinked]

"You can spread just about anywhere now, can't you?" Mami wonders. "Found a nice place to settle?"

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard's having a panic attack.

He doesn't know that that's what's happening, but he does know that with the way he feels right now, he can't be around a group of people casually decompressing from the fight and drinking cocoa. His vision is blurry, dizzy, his chest is tight, he feels like he can't drag breath any further in than the back of his mouth. So as soon as Katherine finishes translating for the yeti, Howard gets up to discreetly leave - and gets as far as behind a chair before he decides that he'd better sit down before he falls over.

He sits behind the chair, hoping no one's noticed him, breathing into his hands and trying not to pass out.

They could go back at any moment. It's happening already. Any second now he could open his eyes and be back in the FAYZ, feeling hunger gnawing away from inside his very bones again, back to looting corpses and brewing moonshine in a bathtub to get him and Orc enough 'food' - a generous term for whatever mayonaise packets, cat food, roots and fish skins they can take off the market - to get to the next day. Back to breaking open cars to finding dead bodies, to burying children, to the smell of smoke and shit and vomit and the inability to chase away the dark, because all the candles have been used, all the flashlights have been confiscated.

He knows he has to go back and find Orc, but he can't will himself to do anything more than dread, and the conundrum leaves him wishing his brain would just turn into dead sludge rather than trying to split in two directions.

Opening his eyes and seeing the board games and the nice floor of the North Pole doesn't help him.

[spellitonce]

The noisy footsteps began moving toward his hiding place -- not stomping, but definitely someone who was deliberately making noise, someone trying not to be sneaky. Nico gave the chair a wide berth, coming to a stop once she's probably in Howard's visual range. Probably, because she's not looking at him. She knew he was freaking out, no one wobbled off to hide behind a chair to hide because they felt okay, but she has no idea how to deal with it. She and her friends hadn't set out to become super heroes, but they'd had super-villain attack drills along with earthquake- and fire-drills. And, you know, if she went back, she wasn't going back to someplace horrifically awful.

She crouches down, still not looking at him, and shoves a plate of cookies in his direction. It's the only thing she can think of.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard hears Nico's footsteps and glances to see her shoes - he recognizes her by the boots. At this moment, he just wants the chair to swallow him whole. He kept his head totally cool during the actual fight, but now he's floundering in the aftermath - it's embarrassing. And scary. He knows Jack told him he's more resilient as a guardian, but it doesn't offer much comfort when he feels like his chest's caving in.

After a moment, he reaches over and pulls the cookies closer. His voice is weak and wispy. "Thanks, My Chemical Badass."

[spellitonce]

"Still not answering to that," she answered quietly, letting a little humor leak into her voice. "But you're welcome. Good job with the sleigh, by the way."

Nico still wasn't looking at him. Because he was hiding, so he obviously didn't want to deal with people. Not a weird reaction. But the Yeti were handing out food, and if she had a thing with stress and food, she'd eat the contents of Santa's wardrobe if he didn't.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"You just did." He tries to smirk and it seems more like a twitch at the corner of his mouth. He takes a cookie with one hand - his fingers are shaking. "You think so?"

He never really thought of putting things together as being hugely impressive, not like magic or anything. "Thanks for having our backs."

[lifelinked]

"Shouldn't we watch for them?" Mami worried aloud. She'd taken the offers of healing and food, recovering her energy as best as she could, but this was no time to be playing games. If the two elder Guardians really should have returned a while ago, they were likely to be severely injured when they returned.

If they returned, she thought with a sick twist to her stomach.

She swiped a blanket and took to any window she could find. Any place to look. Anywhere to listen. A telescope? A door? She'd do it. From here, watching and waiting, she could be better equipped to help.

And she could think as well. Mami thought of the worlds beyond the stars. Of the young magical girls in training who were waiting for her. Of the citizens in so much danger. So many other heroines thought only of themselves, of their own benefit.

She never could. She carried far too many sins to be able to afford avoiding a chance at penance. And this world, these children? They were her next chance.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard, too, is looking around the room for anything he can use to distract himself - which is how he stumbles on the telescope first. He doesn't point it outside the window so much as fidget with it, turning the little ridged edge of the scope around to tighten and loosen the perspective as he angles it at his feet.

His hands are still shaking, and as Mami comes close he drops it, then kicks it to the side as if that were totally intentional.

[lifelinked]

Mami's eyes light up, just slightly---a telescope! She looks up at Howard's hand, then at him, and she seems curious.

"Do you kick everything you find?"

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"Just ninety percent of it," he says, folding his hands into his armpits and leaning against the wall.

[mywarrenmyrules]

Jack and Bunny returned with no more warning than the floor opening up and a shout for help.

Bunny had to lean on Jack, clinging to him for help getting out of the hole. He'd powered across the world, around lindworm blockades to get them back, and it was as if the last of his strength had finally checked out at safety's threshhold. He barely had the presence of mind to close the tunnel behind them - not so much because he was winded, but because the pain was making it hard to think.

A huge, black thing, half like a tick, half like a bulging, oozing tumor, dug tooth after tooth into his flank as it grew on his blood - and something of him less material than blood.

Dimly, he was aware that the new myths were nearby, and that if he voiced the pain he was in, it would only scare them worse.

"Fire," he choked out, too agonized to spare the breath to shout. "Somebody - "

As he called for help, the parasite erupted a long, spindly leg tipped with a jagged, barbed sting. Bunny caught sight of the sting whipping out to strike, and he pushed Jack away harshly, rather than let the thing gnawing him to death strike. The sting, robbed of Jack, bit into Bunny's shoulder instead, the shoulder he landed on as he fell to the ground without Jack's support. The pop as he landed was definitely the sound of a dislocation.

It was hard to see beneath his thick fur, but things were spreading underneath his skin from the many-toothed parasite's mouth, popping his skin from the muscles beneath them, bursting his veins. But when he looked up again to search for help, one of his bright green eyes was suddenly red with blood, and a warm red trickle dripped from one of his ears.

The noises coming from him were no longer words - just the strangled sounds of someone accustomed to enduring pain, but beset with an agony nobody - not even an immortal myth - could survive for long.

[letskicksomeice]

Jack was injured as well, though not as badly. The cloth of his hoodie was marred with jagged cuts and it was soaked with blood that had seeped from them - as well as some that might have been Bunny's. One sleeve looked like it had been ripped off entirely, and where the ice coated his skin, there were gouges and cracks stained with red, frozen over, where their enemies had managed to scratch through the protective ice over his skin and cut the skin underneath. His face was just as much of a scratched up mess.

Jack did not have the self control Bunny had, he couldn't contain his fear over seeing something so horrible, and they could hear his terror and anguish as he screamed:

"KATHERINE!"

He was practically hysterical.

"I think it's a type of fearling, what do we do?!"

[morethanmyth]

Katherine's eyes bulged wide.

"My God."

She raced over, jumping right over one of the couches as she did it, waving over the yetis, who bustled around like their furry butts were on fire, getting medical supplies out of - seemingly - nowhere.

They didn't have much, given that the Guardians all healed so quickly, but it was good to have things for the more serious injuries to hold them over until they'd healed enough to be okay. They'd learned early on - the hard way - that they should be bettered prepared.

"Do as Bunny said and get a torch!" she called to one of the yetis nearest the fireplace. "Quickly!"

[animalhats]

Molly was already worried, since Bunny and Jack had taken so long to get back. Oh, she was actually pretty good at not showing it, because back home, if she was worried and nervous, everyone else would be trying to make her feel better and just reiterating to her how worried and nervous they were, so she tends to feign indifference or distraction or whatever.

But the moment she heard the sounds of Bunny's rabbit hole opening and he and Jack emerging, she was on her feet and straining to see if they were okay. It didn't take more than a couple seconds to verify that no, they were not okay. Bunny's being eaten by something, Jack's panicking, and Katherine's shouting for fire... and Molly does the only thing she can think to do in such a situation.

"Nico!" she shouts at the top of her lungs, turning to spot her friend and sounding pretty near terrified. "Do a fire spell!"