Chapter Text
Edgin Darvis didn't believe in happily ever after.
He didn't believe in happily ever after anymore.
Now, he would have liked to be able to say that he never believed in it. It would have been nice to claim that he'd been one of those children who put their parents on the spot by saying that it's impossible for a man in a red suit to get into the chimneys of the planet in the same night. Yes, one of those children who dismisses their parents with a consoling pat and a 'you did your best, it'll go better with your next child', or something like that.
But the truth was that Ed had once been a dreamer. One of those people with big eyes always set on the future, and a big heart full of poetry, and a brain full of whimsical stories and fairy tales to tell in the evening in front of the burning fireplace, a steaming mug in hand.
Ed had been just the kind of person who could keep you there paralyzed in front of that fireplace with only the power of the words that dripped like honey from his lips: ancient ballads that he solemnly declared to have read in a rare book found by chance, fairy tales that he enjoyed making up himself, jokes like none had ever been heard, words of all sorts and stories of all kinds.
Like all the best storytellers, Ed knew that stories were always intertwined with dreams. After all, a dream and a good fantasy story were somewhat the same thing. And since Ed was very good at storytelling, he was also very good at dreaming.
There were two dreams that he carried with him into adulthood. The first was to build himself a fairytale-like family. The second was to become a famous musician and to support himself, and support his fairytale-like family, by doing what he loved most.
For a while he had believed that he had succeeded in accomplishing both of those dreams, the poor fool!
Then Zia had died. Zia had died, and there was also a small detail that would forever carve an indelible rift inside him. Zia had died just when Ed was on tour, so Zia had died because of him.
Because if someone had been there with her, if Ed had been there with her as a decent husband should have been, maybe emergency services would have been alerted in time. Maybe Zia would still have been alive. But no, Zia had died and everything had ended.
After that there had also been the difficult years, of course. All those gray, difficult years of raising Kira when Ed had remained only half of what he'd always been. To those had to be added the handful of months Ed had spent in jail with Holga because of that hit gone bad and Forge's whistleblowing. Yeah, that'd done enough to finish pulverizing whatever illusions Edgin had ever had.
He had gotten back on his feet, sure. He'd cleaned up his life. He'd become a music teacher. His job at this time of year consisted more or less of making sure the snot-nosed kids in his choir didn't completely suck during the Christmas concert. Other than that, Ed worked hard every day so that Kira could have a father worthy of such a name.
Kira herself, bless her, made things quite easy for him. Ed was lucky enough to have somehow produced a damn good little girl. The thing about Santa and giving Edgin a consoling pat on the shoulder? It had happened the very week in which this story takes place, although not in the same way. It had gone something like this: imagine a pretty little girl barely seven years old, tall for her age, her fantastic curls tied in two pigtails and pinned in place by two red ribbons.
Her arms crossed over her chest, her little face serious and judgmental, that day, yes, that very fateful day Kira said:
"All my friends believe in Santa Claus."
She said it as if Ed had to take direct responsibility for that happening. In a way, Ed really should have.
"That's because their parents told them a colossal lie," Ed said.
The man he had once been would have told her that beautiful lie bundled with magic and wrapping paper and glitter. Heck, the man he had once been would have dressed up as Santa Claus and sipped the invisible tea his little girl served him while eating her adorable, shapeless, yucky cookies. But then, what would happen when Kira found out the truth of that whole global conspiracy about the kind old pot-bellied man delivering presents and enslaving elves?
It wouldn't have taken her brilliant little brain long to figure things out, and afterwards Kira would have felt heartbroken and devastated and mocked, and on her wedding day she would have turned around at the altar and thrown the flowers in Ed's face and told him that he'd given her irreparable trauma with the Santa lie, and that because of Ed she could never really trust anyone ever again, and the wedding would have been off, and Kira would have hated him for eternity.
The thing about spending a few months in jail had been hard enough to swallow, and Ed wasn't so sure he hadn't already left her with permanent trauma.
So, to avoid being disowned even by his little girl, Edgin vowed to raise Kira in the most transparent way possible. He had banished forever the tale-telling thief that he had been (as for the dreamer, that guy was dead along with Zia). No more lies, not even a few little half-truths. And since every made-up story was, in its own way, a lie, Ed had also banished all the stories. In the Darvis home there was not a shadow of a storybook. The past had been put away in dust-filled boxes, sealed in Ed's heart and never reopened.They were beating there, he was sure, and they would never stop. But it was a burden that belonged to Ed alone, that he had procured for himself and that no one else would ever have to carry.
No stories, no dreams, and no disappointments. So far it had worked well. Until that moment. Because his daughter had her arms crossed over her chest and her hair tied up in two pigtails with two red ribbons, and no one usually did her hair like that, not Ed nor Holga. Holga shuddered at the mere sight of a ribbon. As for Ed, anything with even a remotely romantic aspect was rejected by his consciousness. He was sure the same principle applied to Kira as well, so why did it seem to him that he was looking at a little revolutionary on the war footing?
"It's not about the unicorn thing, right?" said Ed.
For a moment Kira betrayed her discomfort by shifting her weight from one foot to the other, but she recovered quickly enough. A few months earlier, after an ill-fated sleepover at a friend's house during which they had wolfed down cartoons filled with magical, glittery animals, Kira had gone through a phase of fixation with unicorns. She had gotten over it soon enough, feeling a little ashamed when Ed had explained to her that unicorns didn't exist. But Kira was a Darvis, and she was stubborn, and Ed was under the impression that she was going to be a rebellious teen, so she hadn't abandoned her love altogether and had simply shifted that passion to ponies and horses in general.
"Let's do this," she said. "I won't go around telling my friends' moms that you tell me Santa doesn't exist-"
"Kira!"
"If I can still have my own horse."
Ed grunted. If he admitted that he was considering summer riding classes, he was sure Kira wouldn't have slept for excitement. In any case, he wasn't sure they could afford them unless he and Holga went back to their old ways, which was not an option. So, in order not to disappoint Kira, he had no choice but to not make any promises at all.
"I've already explained it to you, Dad can't sell his kidney, honey." Ed grabbed the woolen hat he had handmade himself for Kira the previous Christmas and lowered it down onto her little head. He slipped her arms into her coat and bundled himself up in the coils of an old scarf. "Now come on, we have to go buy some things for next week's dinner."
On Christmas there was no celebration in the Darvis household, but Ed was not not so heartless and so, in order not to make Kira feel left out, he organized a small get-together every year with Holga, Simon and Doric.
"Can I gallop to the store, Dad?"
Ed rolled his eyes, but smiled. "Let me see how you can gallop. Hop hop!"
Down the stairs they lingered for a moment in front of Holga's apartment door.
Then Kira latched on to the doorbell and Ed stormed the door with his fists, and finally they grabbed each other's hand and ran down the stairs laughing like a couple of idiots.
"Idiots!" confirmed Holga's voice.
Since it'd been snowing for two days and the streets were covered with ice, they decided to take the bus to go shopping. The bus windows were half fogged up and the city was already almost plunged into darkness and lit up with red and yellow lights. The driver had put on a reproduction of cheesy Christmas tunes, but people were in the mood, and many had begun to hum along amid giggles. As he occasionally did during moments of great joy, Ed felt a little lost.
"Can we sing?" asked Kira, her voice thin.
Ed smiled sadly. He did not sing anymore. Kira knew it.
When Kira's hand in the mitten squeezed his hand in the mitten, Ed felt a little better. And it was then, of course, that things went catastrophically wrong.
It happened in an instant, but it seemed to Ed that the scene flashed before his eyes in slow motion. The bus slid on the icy road. For an absurd moment it seemed to perform an awkward dance step, and out of shock Ed's brain produced the image of all the passengers accompanying the swinging of the vehicle as one, as if they were all dancing together to off-key carols.
His hand squeezed Kira's, and Ed thought, "Oh no, not again. I can't lose her too, and she can't lose me too," and then someone shouted and the bus slid and slid, and finally Kira shouted, "Daddy!"
The bus stopped with a deafening screech, just like that, all of a sudden. In the general silence, Edgin raised his head.
"Oh my God!" stammered the driver, "did I run him over? Did I run him over? Did I-"
Edgin sprang to his feet, pulled up next to the driver and looked outside. Crouched on the snow dirtied by the bus' tire squeal was someone. He had his arms stretched forward, his palms pressed against the front of the bus. He kept his head lowered, and his figure was covered by something that looked like... a cloak? Ed saw the glint of a streetlight reflected off something that seemed to be right under the cloak.
Ed felt his waist being grabbed. Kira had reached for him. She'd tiptoed over to take a peek at the man, too.
"Holy cow, Dad," she huffed (Ed had allowed her to say holy cow.) "It's a knight."
The man lifted his face, and under the gentle snow his steady eyes shone like the--the fucking armor he really wore under his cloak. The knight stood like that for a moment, staring at Ed and Kira. And then he jumped and disappeared from Ed's field of vision, and a moment later a thud rang out right above their heads.
"Everybody get down!" shouted a booming voice that--yup, it really had to be the man's voice.
"Is this a joke?" said Ed.
"Horrid metal beast, I order you to immediately release these good people you have swallowed and are holding captive in your stomach!"
"Yes, okay, it's a joke, it's--shit! Kira, stay down!"
At that moment the ceiling of the bus was pierced, and a blade came down from above without any mercy. Everyone screamed and someone fainted. Ed had crouched clutching Kira in his arms when the sword was retracted revealing a slice of dark sky studded with snowflakes. The noble and earnest and immaculate and utterly impossible face of a man appeared peering down at all of them poor fools below.
The bus emitted a prostrate puff of steam and the doors opened automatically, as if it too had surrendered to the absurdity of the thing.
"You are now free, gentlemen and kind ladies," said the one Ed flatly refused to call a knight. "Please hurry out of the dark bowels of this mysterious creature."
Ed loaded Kira into his arms and got off before everyone else--and yes, there really was a man on top of the bus, it had not been a hallucination.
Kira kicked her feet. "Daddy, Dad, turn me around! I want to see the knight!"
Ed turned around. Maybe if he squinted hard, he would wake up. But Kira's laughter trilled in his ears.
"Oh, please tell me he has a horse!"
The man leaped down and fell back into the snow in front of them in a graceful hop.
Ed opened his mouth. He closed it again. "Did you... stop the bus?" he said.
"No need to thank me."
"You also broke the bus!" said Kira, delighted.
The man wrinkled his eyebrows. "No need to thank me."
Ed was beginning to get irritated. The man's serious, blank expression didn't help calm his nerves. "Okay, is this some kind of publicity stunt? Is it--wait, are you sent by some church? Are you some kind of representative of some cult, or maybe you're part of a historical reenactment and you maaaaybe believe in it a little too much?" he shot off in one breath.
The guy looked like he understood only half the words coming out of Ed's mouth. Well, at least he wasn't the only confused one there. "I am part of the cult of holy Tyr," he then said with gravity.
Ed grunted and lowered Kira to the ground. Around them, people began to recover from their shock and call for help.
"Look, I don't care who the hell you are or what your intentions are, we're leaving right now, and... why the hell am I talking to you?"
Ed had already turned around, dragging Kira with him, when he felt his shoulders being grabbed.
The man's face was now marked by an obvious wrinkle in the middle of his forehead. Ed noticed that right there at the top was printed a bizarre tattoo. Oh, good. They really were dealing with a cultist.
"Good man, a word, please."
"No, not even half."
The grip on Ed's shoulders, however, was too strong, and had something desperate about it. "I appeal to your good heart, which I am sure you possess since I see it shining in your eyes. I also see it reflected in the way you protect your little dame. Good man, I beg you, show me the way to Faerun."
"I--what?"
"I'm afraid I'm lost." A sincere trace of confusion and helplessness lit up his big dark eyes. It was illegal for a grown man to be endowed with such innocent eyes; it bordered on the ridiculous. "Can you tell me how to get back to Faerun?"
"Is that the name of a place?"
Authority and virtue slipped away from the man's expression, giving way to sheer bewilderment. "Everything here is nonsensical," he muttered in shock.
Ed took advantage of his moment of distraction to wrench himself free. The man, caught off guard, slid forward on the snow and fell face first to the ground.
Where he remained, motionless.
"Dad," said Kira, dumbfounded, "you knocked out the knight!"