Chapter Text
Carmen came back to consciousness slowly, and she eased into a full state of awareness with a low groan as she reconnected the stabbing pain in her shoulder and side with her injuries from before. There was a softness beneath her body and head that could only be a mattress and pillow—it seemed that at some point Zack and Ivy had put her to bed.
A quick search of her senses revealed Kyp curled at her feet, tucked up underneath a blanket she would almost guarantee had not been there when he had first settled himself atop the comforter.
She reached for the worst of her wounds and slipped her hand under the shirt she wore to test the neat wrap of gauze protecting the equally-pristine line of stitched skin. “Still holding,” she murmured. Wincing, she sat up, black locks tumbling about her shoulders. In the starlit gloom of the modest bedroom she currently occupied, she could see the outline of shapes and furniture, but little more. It seemed one of the detectives had sacrificed their bedroom for her.
Looking down revealed she was wearing a much-loved pair of UC Berkley sweats and an ACME t-shirt, and she spared a wry smile for the irony of that combination—her past, it seemed, was back to haunt her regardless of any attempts of avoidance on her end.
As her vision cleared, more of the room revealed itself to her, caught up in the silver glimmer of starlight as the earth turned and tipped the heavens ever-higher.
It was scattered with bookshelves and trinkets, an odd assortment of weaponry and reference material with a touch of the odd volume of literature. Squinting at the walls revealed maps of every shape and size, modern and antique, as well as a few framed photographs of a red-headed girl, a blonde-headed baby, and a pair of grinning adults.
Carmen’s eyes continued their sweep, alighting last on a chair shoved into the far corner. It had been pushed over by the window and away from the bed and modest dresser, and in the chair, curled and contorted, was—
“Oh Ivy,” Carmen sighed, tilting her head as much as the screaming ache in her neck would allow. She pinched her lips together in determination and mustered every reserve of strength left in her muscles to drag herself upright and out of bed. Gingerly, she picked her away across the small bedroom to stand beside the younger woman where she was curled up in the over-large armchair, her daemon sleeping restlessly on the floor beside her.
Careful not to brush Lugh’s thick fur with her feet as she stepped to Ivy’s side, Carmen reached out a trembling hand and passed it across Ivy’s fiery locks, careful to leave only the most fleeting of touches. “What am I going to do with you?” she questioned. Kyp gave an answering sigh from where he was still sprawled on what had to be Ivy’s small bed, his eyes closed to mere slits as he surveyed the room.
“We’re in it deep, Carmen.” The words were true, but unnecessary. Both woman and daemon knew life would not—indeed, could not—fall back into the same pattern as before. Not now, not after Carmen had been found out risking life and limb to ensure the safety of the ACME detectives.
VILE would not know—that part of her life would remain constant, unchanged. Her own organization cared little for personal complications, so long as the work kept coming. And Hyde—the infamously-unfeeling, callous Jacquelyn Hyde no doubt assumed that Carmen simply wanted the information for her own nefarious schemes. No villain would ever suspect Carmen of selecting such an extreme ethical route and returning the information to its rightful purveyors.
But—those games of cat-and-mouse both she and the detectives so cherished…they could hardly continue as they had, and she knew that well.
“It is for the best,” Kyprioth hummed, his eyes now fully open and fixed firmly on his other half. He gave her a wide, feline grin as she glared—he knew how much she hated him finishing her unvoiced thoughts. “We have been heading down this path for quite some time now; you know that as well as I do.”
Lugh chose that moment to speak up, evidently not as lost to slumber as they had first assumed.The sudden barking tenor of Ivy’s jackal daemon cut through the silence of the room with a suddenness that made even Carmen shift in surprise. “She looks up to you immensely, you know,” he told them, eyes sharp as they shone up at the other two. He rose to his feet, leaning down on his forelegs in a long stretch before popping fully upright to trot around to Carmen’s side.
“When you left ACME all those years ago, you shook her world to its very foundation. She’s always seen the world in black and white, and when you went rogue you shattered something for her—she spent her whole childhood aspiring to be just like you.”
A pinched look of guilt flitted briefly across Carmen’s face before she carefully smoothed it away. “I had always wondered,” she murmured, gaze returning to the sleeping detective.
“And then you came back as her main adversary, and gave her purpose, and a challenge,” Lugh continued, raising one canine eyebrow as he opened his mouth in a wide grin, “and she was…content. She always wanted to desperately to catch you, Carmen, but quite honestly I don’t know what we’d have done if she actually had.”
Now Kyprioth laughed, the lynx sliding from the bed to stalk over to the other three. He regarded Lugh solemnly, eyes glowing pale amber in the moonlight, and then blinked and ducked his head, ears flickering back and forth. “We’ve always suspected,” he drawled, “and we’ve always tried to make it as engaging a game as we could.”
His ears twitched again, and then he carefully nudged the jackal’s side.
Carmen’s eyes widened. Never had her daemon even come close to initiating contact with another. The sensation was all the more disconcerting for it—as though someone had reached directly into her chest, found the few, figurative heartstrings connected to her wayward and often shielded emotions, and simply tugged.
She gasped, the sound tugged out of her against her will, hand reaching unconsciously for her chest. It was a tsunami of fresh sensations, every ounce of affection and regard she had tried for so long to keep from their every interaction now seeping from its overflowing container to wash over her in a great, uncontrollable wave.
There was that first distant, fledgling flutter of respect that had initially crept through, waltzing across her carefully-constructed barriers to take up residence in one little corner of her hardened heart. The two young siblings—too young to truly know and appreciate the subtlety of the game she played, she had thought at the time—had proven relentless, quick-witted, and—much to her great dismay—utterly charismatic and downright likable. They reminded her of herself, split into two separate pieces and paired perfectly to be the best versions of themselves.
It was the version of herself that she had never seen fully realized.
Then that little mustard-seed of affection, the one barely-visible and barely-there, that little grain of respectful regard had shifted and settled had taken root, and grown, and before she had truly been actively aware of it Carmen had fallen and fallen hard for these two plucky no-longer children. She built her capers around their interests, built her heists around her desire to see them grow and succeed. Where theft had once been a mere hobby, a game played between herself and the world at large, over the last few years it had become something more.
Like every A.C.M.E. agent of her generation—present or past—she knew of their parents, had been acquainted with them back in the day. Their loss had been a sharp spike through her heart, as had the thought of their two then-young children left alone to the mercies of the system. That A.C.M.E. had miraculously come up with a spur-of-the-moment youth-mentorship program had been a small, well-planned mercy.
That had, ironically, been her first less-than-legal act after leaving ACME—the second had naturally been much more dramatic, and involved several original Monets and an extremely irate curator. But, it was that first chord that rang most true, one gleaming string of notes in what had proven to be an ongoing symphony of breaking her own rules.
And here she stood, in too deep yet again, and this time so far submerged she could not even see the sky over her head.
“Breathe, Carmen,” Kyprioth murmured, nudging Lugh again before leaping to the arm of Ivy’s chair and then to Carmen’s arms. The too-heavy weight of the lynx was a grounding comfort, and he leaned up to affectionally butt his head against her chin. Carmen sighed, took a deep, measured breath, and then allowed the contained air to escape. “We made our choices, and we knew what we were getting into from the start. We did,” he reiterated, feeling her about to object, “regardless of whether or not we…misjudged the intensity.”
Leaning around the curve of her neck, the lynx peered down at the still-sleeping Ivy. “We care about these kids, Carmen, and they care about us. You’ve known that for a long time. Remember Maelstrom? Lee Jordan? All the little cases in between? We couldn’t have stood to see Zack and Ivy hurt in any of those—and now? Today, Carmen, today changed the game; it’s still there, but it is not ever going to be the same.”
Lugh barked in agreement, bending down on his forelegs to stretch, eyes closing in satisfaction as his back popped. “We’ve known it for a while as well,” he hummed, standing back up to his full height to regard Carmen and her daemon thoughtfully. “This one just refuses to admit it sometimes.”
The ongoing conversation was evidently enough to finally pull Ivy from the dregs of her slumber. She sighed, stirred, fists clenching beneath her cheeks as she twisted on her uncomfortable makeshift-bed. “Whazzgoinon?” she mumbled fuzzily, shaking back her short mane of hair and rubbing her eyes. “Lugh?”
The jackal was back at her side in a moment, arching an eyebrow toward Carmen and Kyprioth in silent warning to remain quiet. “I’m here, Ivy,” he rumbled, resting his head in her lap as she shifted to sit fully upright. “I’m here, and so are Carmen and Kyp.”
“Kyp?” Ivy was awake enough to cock an eyebrow and give her daemon a wry glance. “Are we on nickname basis now with Carmen and her daemon?”
The lynx answered her question by leaping smoothly from Carmen’s arms to land on the floor beside the jackal, reaching up with one paw to swat at his wagging tail.
Ivy’s eyes shot wide open like she had been electrocuted.
“Whoa—what, what—“ Hand shaking, she drew it up to her chest, curled it about her heart and hunched over on herself. “Shit, Carmen, what the hell?”
Lips pressed together as her own heart twisted within its bony cage, Carmen offered the closet approximation she could to a careless smile. “I think we are on ‘nickname basis,’” she quipped, finally giving into temptation and brushing one hand across Ivy’s crow’s-nest hair.
The room was all but silent, the nighttime gloom only punctuated by the sharp glare of the starlight peeking through Ivy’s thin blinds.
Ivy sat as long as she could before she suddenly stood, pitched forward without warning, and buried her face in Carmen’s good shoulder. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she whispered, The temperature in the room seemed to drop another ten degrees as the floor fell away from beneath her feet. She swayed, all of the adrenaline from earlier depleted after her nap and now that Carmen was patched and stable. She felt like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
“I don’t—“ Ivy stopped to sniff and hiccough, face beet red now that she knew she could not hide her tears. “I don’t do this,” she whispered in a furious, silent wail. “I don’t do girly tears and all this crap.” Her face scrunched up as she tried to furtively force away the moisture that had now pooled in her eyes.
At their feet, Lugh gave an unhappy whine and Kyp butted his head against the canine’s chest.
“I know, Ivy, I know,” Carmen soothed. She drew the younger woman over to the edge of the bed and sat her down, holding her uninjured arm out wide so that Ivy could shuffle in beside her.
“I don’t do…this, either,” Ivy mumbled defensively as she rested her cheek against Carmen’s shoulder. The worn shirt was soft and familiar against her skin, and she took a deep breath in, smelling her own laundry detergent, a hint of sweat and tangy blood, and a lighter, more exotic scent that was so Carmen that Ivy had to smile despite herself. “Emotions, that is, and this touchy-feely bullshit. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve hugged someone—mostly Zack, since—“
“Your parents died?” Carmen asked archly.
Kyprioth stretched across her bare feet, a warm, furry barrier against the chill of the night air. She snorted and wiggled her toes, chuckling as the lynx gave an irritated hrmmm. “I don’t know if you have noticed, Ivy,” she began softly, careful not to scare the girl away, “but the life of a master thief hardly lends itself to much human affection or contact either.” She squeezed Ivy’s shoulder with her right hand. “I don’t do ‘this’ much myself.”
Lugh leapt on the bed to lean against Ivy’s other side, and Carmen could feel the static crackle between his fur and her fingers, mere centimeters apart.
“You aren’t supposed to get hurt,” Ivy finally blurted, her treacherous mouth cutting straight to the heart of the issue. “Not you. You’re…I don’t know, your supposed to be invincible! Not mortal like the rest of us! You shouldn’t be able to get shot, or, I don’t know, knifed in the back—“
Her back flexed beneath Carmen’s supporting hand as she tensed, gaze turning inward as her expression crumpled and her emotions took control. She gave a quiet whimper and then tucked her head beneath Carmen’s chin, the shirt she had loaned the other woman turning damp with tears.
A life of plotting and thieving and coordinating an organization of emotionally-immature villains did not entail itself to comforting a weeping youngster who reminded her so very much of herself at that age—proud, wickedly intelligent, fiercely determined, and far too stubborn for her own good. Carmen scrambled for internal composure, at a loss as she tried and failed to simply absorb the younger woman’s pain through osmosis. “Ivy…” She traced pattern’s across the her iron-oxide hair, fingers gentle as they slid to flatten against the base of her head and hold her closer.
“While I respect the faith you seem to have in me,” she finally said, tipping her eyes toward the stars peeping through the slanted blinds, “I am, unfortunately, only human. I do not have divine intelligence, my judgments are not always wise or my thinking true.*” Her lips twisted, the starlight turning her eyes a cold, icy blue. “I am not bulletproof.” Wincing, she curled her left arm around as well, ignoring the way the motion tugged at her stitches, and brought it around to embrace Ivy properly. “But oh, child, I know it aches to hear that, as your world starts to crumble.”
The mattress sank slightly as Kyprioth bounded up to join them, sliding around Carmen to place his front paws on her upper back so he could peer down at Ivy over her shoulders. “We are not gods, Ivy, however high you might have raised us.” He snorted, amused. “And however much Carmen might aspire to it.”
She spared an irritated look for her daemon. “Well, when one becomes aware of such expectations, one does try to meet them as long as possible,” she countered, aware of how petulant she sounded even as she uttered the words.
Ivy, damn her, giggled at that. “You two sound like when Lugh lectures me on doing something stupid.” She drew back from Carmen, sparing an apologetic grimace at the wet t-shirt. “Sorry about that,” she said ruefully.
“Never apologize for your emotions, Ivy,” Carmen chided, placing a finger beneath her chin and tipping it up so that Ivy was forced to meet her twinkling blue gaze. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.*” She smiled, teeth flashing white in the starlight. “And what a heart,” she said proudly.
Ducking her head, Ivy blushed hotly at the attention. “Can we go outside?” she blurted suddenly. “I just…fresh air would be nice,” she finished lamely, aware of how silly she must sound to the always-composed Carmen.
“That would be wonderful,” Carmen agreed. “I’ve always found the nighttime air…refreshing. It helps—“
“—to clear your head?” Ivy asked with a raised brow, already standing and hunting for her boots. She had long suspected she and Carmen were quite similar on that regard and was abjectly delighted to have her hypotheses proven true. Eyes flitting down to the rather large damp spot on Carmen’s loaner shirt, she blushed and reached for a warm, baggy sweatshirt. “You may want this,” she told her, ducking her head in mortified acknowledgment of her earlier moment of weakness.
“A.C.M.E. again,” Carmen observed, snorting as she slid on the warm covering. “I smell a plot, Ivy.”
Now it was Ivy’s turn to snicker. “Hardly, Carmen, we both know you never would.”
Carmen almost opened her mouth to respond, almost confessed to Ivy and Lugh her deepest, darkest secret—that if Ivy and Zack had ever asked, had ever truly asked—Carmen would have dropped everything in a heartbeat to do whatever it took to see their needs realized.
She almost told them, but she did not. Instead, she offered a funny half-smile and gestured broadly with one hand for Ivy to lead the way. “After you, detective,” she declared, and she and Kyp trailed silently and thoughtfully down the hallway after the red-head and her jackal daemon, his tail waving as he cut his eyes back to wink at their trailing forms.
“I think—“ Carmen began, watching them as they slid out the front door, Ivy leaving it cracked for Carmen and Kyprioth to follow.
“—that we are perhaps more transparent than we thought?” Kyp finished wryly, stopping to arch his back against a doorframe. “I have always said that when it comes to Zack and Ivy.”
Flicking her fingers at him, Carmen all but shoved him out the door. “Oh, shush,” she muttered, and closed it firmly behind them as they stepped out onto the front porch.
Ivy was already settled on the top step, palms splayed back behind her as she leaned back to look up at the stars. “Things are going to be different now, aren’t they?” she fidgeted, shuffling her weight between her arms before she sat up to rest her weight on her elbows, eyes turned down to her knees and hands twisting idly between them. “You can’t exactly waltz back to V.I.L.E. and just continue on as before, and…even if you do, I don’t think Zack and I will be able to just…forget this.”
Carmen sighed, heavier than she typically would have allowed the detective to hear, and settled beside her on the edge of the porch, a hair’s-breadth of space dividing them.
It should have been awkward, but it was not.
“Nor would I expect you to forget,” the thief answered Ivy’s second comment first, steeling her fingers beneath her chin as she rested her elbows on her thighs. She felt unusually exposed in the pair of Ivy’s comfortable clothes, the casual wardrobe a far cry from her usual crimson armor.
Perched on the railing, amber eyes tipped up toward the star-spattered sky, Kyp offered a low sigh to match Carmen’s, then turned to reflect the star’s luminous gleam upon agent and thief as he settled his stare upon them.
“And,” Carmen continued, her eyes flicking up to meet those of her daemon, “as to the first—we will have to proceed as though nothing has changed. The world is too dangerous to follow any other path. If V.I.L.E.—or, more likely and much more dangerously—any of the other, more lethal criminal organizations out there even suspected that there was any semblance of shared affection or respect between you and Zack and myself…”
Restlessly, she rose to her feet, Kyp mirroring her movements. As she paced along the narrow porch, he traced a path along the cedar-stained rail, paws silent against the wood.
“I will continue to plot, and execute my heists, and leave you clues—and you and Zack must continue to respond. You must follow the clues, and commit to the chase and follow each piece as carefully and determinedly as before.”
Ivy ran her hands through her coppery hair, her face a mask of conflict. “But how can we?” she exclaimed, green eyes bright, “when we don’t actually want to catch you?”
Lugh nosed her side. “Ivy, be realistic,” he said, one tooth flashing in a canine smirk, “We haven’t actually wanted to catch Carmen for ages now.”
Carmen arched a single dark eyebrow. “Oh?” Her own amused grin and slitted eyes told detective and jackal that she had already been well aware of this fact and had simply chosen not to pull it forward into the light.
“Bah.” Ivy leapt to her feet and then to the bottom of the stairs, using the handrails to swing herself down to the soft dirt of the front yard. Frustrated, she spun into an artfully-executed roundhouse kick, foot smacking cleanly into a small pine tree whose bark already bore the imprint of her boot many times over. “It shouldn’t have to be like this,” she complained, well aware of how petulant she sounded. “To pretend not to care, to pretend we want to see you behind bars the rest of your life—what we should want, mind you—“ She gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Lugh’s right, Carmen, we haven’t wanted that for ages now. The game is too much fun, the case too entertaining, the respect…far too mutual.”
Arms crossed, Carmen leaned back against the pillar, head tipped up to the stars. “It’s always been a game, Ivy. Now, we just play a bit differently.” Her lips curved into a barely-discernible smile, cheekbones sharp against the ethereal glow of the sky. Standing there on Ivy and Zack’s front porch, wearing old sweats and with her hair loose and hat god-knows-where, Carmen almost could have been one of Ivy’s few-and-far-between friends staying the night after one-too-many drinks and a long day of sleuthing.
Sharp between them, however, and as cutting and divisive as the blade of a knife was the acute knowledge that instead she was Carmen Sandiego—former A.C.M.E. detective-at-large, rogue thief and irrefutable genius, and wanted in nearly every developed country in the world.
“I’m not good at pretending, Carmen,” Ivy said starkly. “Ask Zack—I always ruined our games of ‘make-believe’ when we were kids, and I absolutely bombed every creative writing assignment ever given to me.”
Carmen laughed outright at that, and Kyprioth reached a paw down to bat at Lugh’s tail with a muted and amused mrrrow. “You do not have to pretend, Ivy,” Carmen said. “‘We are what we pretend to be*,’” she quoted, tilting her head. “You’ve already been pretending, just in the opposite direction. Now, we simply reverse the game.”
“‘Perhaps—I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and the world falling about my ears*,’” Ivy returned, her face bright despite the somber tint of her words.
Delighted, Carmen clapped her hands together. “Gone with the Wind? Hardly your style, Ivy, but I must say I am impressed.”
“They say the secret to humor is surprise, Carmen,” Ivy snickered, stepping back up the stairs to lean back across the column opposite Carmen. “And by ‘they’, I mean Aristotle.”
“You have been busy; I always thought Zack to be more of the reader amongst you two.” Blue eyes dancing, Carmen shook her head. “Clearly I have been mistaken of late.”
“Oh, no,” Lugh chimed in, nosing Ivy’s hand until she slid it to scratch behind his ears in just the right manner “She’s only been working through the classics for real the last year or so. We read them in school, but retaining them? That has been a much more recent development—almost as though she had someone she wanted to impress.”
Ivy buried her face in her hands, blushing furiously. “Shut up, Lugh,” she muttered. “It doesn’t matter.”
Eyes hidden, she didn’t see the conspiratorial look her daemon shared with Carmen, so when a warm hand settled on her shoulder she could not help jerking upright in utter startlement.
“It does matter,” Carmen insisted warmly, “and you should never be ashamed of your feelings.” She tipped her head back, shrugging her own shoulders. “It is not as though I have not designed heists for the simple reason of getting your and Zack’s attention when I was bored.”
Kyp poorly disguised his laugh as a cough. “Once or twice,” he muttered, dodging Carmen’s sock-clad foot as it reached for him. “A week,” he added, laughing outright.
Their banter was interrupted as the front door slid open and Zack’s head popped out. “Are you guys having a slumber party on the porch without me?” he pouted. “That’s no fun!” He swung the door open in full and all but spilled outside, Frances following at a more dignified pace. Zack had to maneuver carefully, for his hands appeared to be full with what was evidently the entire contents of their pantry.
Ivy eyed his armload. “Did you or did you not eat what amounted to almost an entire pizza a few hours ago?” she asked pointedly, rolling her eyes to the sky as she slid to relieve him of some of his burden. “Potato chips, a liter of ginger ale, pretzels, sandwiches—Zack, really?”
“I’m a growing young man, Ives!” he protested innocently. “And besides, if Carmen is anything like you are when you’re on a case, I bet she hasn’t eaten in ages!”
As if on cue, Carmen’s stomach gave a treacherous rumble. “I…could use something to eat," she admitted with a twitch of her lips. So saying, she plucked the sandwiches from Zack's grasp, darting in and away before he even knew she had moved.
“Hey—how did you do that?” Zack yelped in protest, gaping in mournful dismay at the empty air where his turkey-and-swiss sandwiches had been.
“Did you really just ask Carmen Sandiego how she managed to steal your sandwiches?” Ivy asked in dry disbelief.
Zack snickered. “Point.” He waved a handful of chips in the air for emphasis before shoving them indecorously into his mouth. “But you have to admit,” he continued, voice muffled as he chewed, “the sleight of hand was impressive, even if she is Carmen.”
Carmen grinned. “Thank you, Zack,” she said primly, knocking back two sandwiches in short order. “For the food, and the compliment.” Her eyes grew regretful, Kyprioth sitting up and flexing his paws in restless agitation. “I’ll probably need to be going soon,” she announced. “If I stay away too long, the other members of V.I.L.E. tend to get in over their heads and cause more headaches than I really need right now.” Arms wrapping around her torso, she leaned back against the house's facade and offered them a wry smile. “I’m sure you know how that goes.”
Ivy was already nodding. She had expected as much; Carmen had never been one to stay settled for too long, or long enough. “You’ll stay in touch, though, won’t you?” she asked pointedly, lips twitching. Though she did not acknowledge their earlier conversation, the reality of it shone brightly in her jewel-green eyes, and she could see the answering awareness glittering in Carmen's own gaze. The truth did not have to be verbally acknowledged to remain genuine.
“What? You can’t just go in the middle of the night, Carmen!” Zack protested. “You just—you’re injured, and—“ He ran out of words, mouth still moving but no sound coming forth as he struggled to form a valid argument in favor of the world’s most famous thief continuing her stay at their supposedly-secret house.
Their three daemons settled side-by-side at the top of the stairs, watching the exchange with amusement.
Carmen snorted. “And I truly should not have come here in the first place at all,” she added gently. “It was reckless, and utterly selfish on my part, but…I am glad I did nonetheless.” Honest affection shone on her face before she spun and ducked back through the still-cracked front door, leaving it open behind her. "Excuse me a moment," she called back to them, voice fading as she moved deeper into the house.
“I believe she’s searching for some more neutral clothing,” Kyprioth murmured, his eyes glittering in amusement. “I don’t think even the most inept of V.I.L.E.’s idiots could fail to notice Carmen showing up in old sweats emblazoned with an A.C.M.E. logo."
Snickering, Ivy nodded her agreement. “I’ll give her that. D’you think she needs help finding her things, though? Zack stitched up her coat, but the shirt was done for, although she’s welcome to any of mine—“
Before she could finish Carmen re-emerged, trademark coat wrapped around her, and her hat and much-abused heels each clutched in one hand. “It’s all settled, Ivy,” she announced, “and thank you for the clothing.” She winked. “I kept the t-shirt, I hope you don’t mind.”
Ivy beamed.
“And,” Carmen continued, turning to look at both of the detectives, “believe me when I say that will most certainly stay in touch, detectives, be it in...shall we say...uconventional ways." Winking again, she set her hat atop her head and shook out her hair, dropping her shoes to the porch and sliding her feet into them with a slight wince. "I may upgrade my wardrobe to running shoes," she remarked mournfully--just to make them laugh--as she felt the pinch and pull of her many blisters and bruises.
Kyprioth leapt down to the dirt from the top stair, ears pricked and alert. "Ready, Carmen?" he rumbled, eyes luminous in the starlight.
"As ready as I'll ever be, I suppose," she murmured, so that only he could hear her. "Times are changing, Kyp--but for the better, I believe."
The large feline swung back to face the two detectives and their daemons. "Until next time, Zack and Ivy," he declared. "Lugh, Frances." They exchanged a series of nods, an entire silent conversation passing between the three daemons as their humans watched in bemusement.
"And, remember," Carmen told them, looking back up at the two youths on the porch, "You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart, detectives, is that no matter what, if you need me, I’ll always be with you*.” She smiled broadly at their wide eyes and tipped her hat in regard, and then strode out into the darkness of the night, her daemon pacing at her side.
"Ready for the next chapter, Kyp?" she asked, stretching her shoulders with a pop and a wince as the movement tugged at her stitches.
"Oh Carmen," he replied, "I have always been ready." His ears twitched, flickering back toward the house. "And now," he murmured, "so are you, and so are they."
In the distance, they could hear Zack begin to giggle in their wake, his laugh growing and soon joined by Ivy's as he no doubt shared the dubious source of her parting quote. It had been the only way she could have been satisfied with their parting--smiles instead of sadness, and the promise of more to come. Satisfied, she stalked off into the night, Kyprioth a shadow at her side.