Chapter Text
When Diaval started having the prolonged periods of absentminded silence, accompanied by staring somewhere in the distance, Maleficent started to suspect something might be off with him. But she didn't pry, just decided to keep a closer eye on the raven.
Weeks passed, and his strange behavior continued.
When she started to get the feeling he couldn't leave her side fast enough when all the jobs for the day were done, it felt like the times when the beastie was very small. Then, too, he was spending all his free time around the child, and Maleficent remembered the jealousy she still barely admitted to herself, and she was adamantly certain she would never admit to him. Oh, how it would get to his head, if he found out! Unimaginable.
But this time it couldn't be the girl, because these days Maleficent was skulking around the cottage as much as him, and she would know if he was spending his free time, as little as he had, with the child.
But when one day she was the one to remind him off-handedly that the beastie was about to celebrate her fourteenth birthday in only several days, his eyes widened in sheer panic, and his hackles rose as if threatened, and Maleficent knew he had forgotten Aurora's birthday, which was unheard of in thirteen and a half years. Every year, the "pretty bird" would show up on the child's birthday, bringing carefully selected assortment of flowers, nuts, shiny river stones and occasional rodent clean-picked skeleton (not a tiniest bone was disturbed. Only the best for the little beast).
Now, Maleficent watched him pace the clearing and cussing at himself. He rarely cussed, but when he did, he had a very enlightening repertoire. She'd never known that particular body part to be mentioned in a same sentence with the act of reproduction. But it lasted for quite some time, and his odd behavior was making her anxious, and her patience was growing short.
"Turn me back", he flailed his hands in mortification. "I have so little time - I cannot just pick any old flower that - perhaps in one of my caches I have -..."
"I have to ask", Maleficent cut him off, thoroughly fed up, "what has gotten into you lately?"
"What?" he snapped out with uncharacteristic lack of patience. He run a desperate hand through his black hair, feathers sticking out in all impossible angles. He usually kept it well groomed, equally prideful in his shiny plumage as both bird and man, but now he made no attempt to smoothen it. "Mistress, into a bird, please! I'm in a hurry, can't you see?"
He pinned her with that raw, wide-eyed look that touched her soul every time with reminder of innocence, and goodness, and warmth, and pretty much all the things she would never have again in her miserable existence. Just like every time, her soul responded with desperate need to reach out, to open, to touch his soul back. And just like every time, her mind bolted, and she responded with a sneer: "Do I need to remind you who does the other one's bidding between us two, Diaval?"
"Mistress, my apologies, but I really need to - "
"Silence!" She rose her voice, letting some of her anxiety show as rage. Green flickered on her fingertips. "You are going to tell me what is going on in that bird brain of yours, or you will spend the child's birthday trapped under a rock as a slug!"
That silenced him. But she didn't like how the look in his eyes changed. The open, unguarded window to his soul curtained, and she was looking not into the soft, kind eyes of her
(not friend, not friend)
servant, but into the unfathomable expression of a bird. It was as if he was stepping away from her backwards into some foggy unknown place, and she was left there, standing stupidly into his empty shell. She thought of sand, slipping silently out of the fingers that clenched too tight.
Neither spoke for several long, disturbing moments. He was still as a stone.
"You have been acting strange for quite some time", she forced herself to speak quietly. She attempted to sound calm and collected, but even to her own ears, her voice sounded icy and threatening. His empty stare inexplicably horrified her, and she was furious at herself because of that. "I need to know what is going on with you. I cannot have you out of your wits. I need to know if I can count on you."
"Nothing of any singnificance to you is going on, mistress", he whispered.
His eyes clouded even more, and feeling him slipping away further from her, her hand lashed out like a serpent and caught his chin, yanking his head upwards, her talons almost breaking the skin.
"I cannot stand liars", she hissed, barely audible. "Can I still trust you, Diaval? Think well. It would be very unwise to make me doubt your loyalty."
If only he showed any trace of fear. If only he flinched, recoiled, yelled, cried, shove her hand away.
But he just continued to stare at her with those hollow eyes that were almost unrecognizeable withouth their usual, seemingly inexhaustible warmth. If any emotion flickered there, it was a trace of contempt, and she felt chilled to the bone.
"I am always loyal", he said quietly.
"Then talk."
"Why can't you just take my word and trust me when I say that nothing of any importance is going on? Have I ever, in all these years, been anything other than devoted to you? Have I not earned at least a little bit of your trust? Have I ever given you a reason to doubt me?"
"Not until now."
She was still pincering his chin, although a little bit less forcefully. He took a moment before speaking again.
"All this time, all my life given to you, all my care and devotion all of everything that I am - and yet, the first thing that comes to your mind at the first sign that I am not myself is that I might betray you."
She let go of his face, because in those bottomless eyes there was suddenly something stirring alive and it was grief, and it was bitter disappointment, and she pulled back as if scorched.
She found herself speechless.
She felt like she was holding a very delicate cup of finest crystal in her rough, taloned hands, and the cursed thing was cracking all around, and if she did as much as breathe, it would come apart in a painful mess of sharp splinters.
"Give me back my feathers", he breathed, eyes dark and wounded and cold and horrible.
My wings, she knew he really meant.
Without a word, she changed him and he flew up, above the treetops and away from her, uncharacteristically soundless until he made some distance, and only then she heard a hoarse, hollow "cr-oooar", over and over again, very different from his usual cawing call, and she wondered if it meant weeping in raven.
The pent-up fear suddenly reached the point of breaking. She became acutely aware of the numerous fairy folk around her, hiding in the trees and the grass, suddenly being awfully still and unnoticeable as possible. Not a fly could be heard, let alone a pixie.
With a forceful strike of her staff to the ground and a blood-curdling roar from her throat, the green magic exploded around her, sending everything alive around her blown away as if hit by a hurricane. Half a mile away, Balthasar needed to root himself firmly to the ground, or else he would stumble. All kinds of small creatures yelled in fear and pain as they were forcefully scatteted away along with the debris, leaves and dust.
When the dust settled along with her racketed nerves, Maleficent sat herself on the ground, in the eye of her destruction perimeter, and spent some time breathing heavily and healing anything that she had just destroyed.
After that ordeal was done, she rose to her feet, leaning heavily on her staff. She hadn't felt that unsteady, pain-ridden and disoriented since she'd lost her first pair of wings.
Her jaw clenched in determination, she searched within herself a network of magical bonds that connected her to Diaval. It could't tell her his precise whereabouts, but it did give her a pull in his general direction.
She walked for hours. The Moorfolk scattered away wherever she would tread.