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“I still can’t believe we went through with that nonsense,” Kremy hums over a steaming pot of something. “You think it’s legally bindin’?”
“What, a stupid sham wedding from Lost Shmegas? No way, man,” Gideon chuckles, finding himself incapable of looking at his gator friend as he speaks. He laughs a little harder, a thought tapping him on the shoulder, “You didn’t even ask my Pa for his blessin’. It’s totally invalid.”
Kremy snorts, then groans dramatically. “Oh gods, whatever shall we do?” he loudly bemoans, wordlessly holding his ladle up to the genasi’s mouth. Gideon takes a sip of the scalding hot liquid, moving it around with his tongue for a moment as he lets the spices and herbs seep into his taste buds. He gives a quick nod, and Kremy hums pleasantly. “First I forget to invite my mother to the weddin’, then we got married at a church not recognized by the Baron, an’ now my father-in-law disapproves of me!”
Gideon rolls his eyes with a smile, “I didn’t say he’d disapprove, just that you didn’t ask him.”
Kremy gives him a strange look. He’s still got a small wrinkle at the corner of his mouth, he’s still in a good mood, but something in his expression goes deeper. Something in his eyes.
The moment is short, as Kremy quickly turns to remove the pot from the flame it's over, pouring half its contents into a smaller container to cool. He then separates that portion out further, ladleing two servings across one bowl–clearly for Gideon alone.
He hands the genasi his bowl, and sits beside him as the man eats. “You really think he’d like me?”
Gideon wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Well… I can’t say he’d like you.” Kremy’s mouth twitches, and Gideon continues, “but… He’d give you his recipes, I think. Which is good enough for me!”
Kremy’s eyes flinch. It’s a microexpression, something that’s gone in an instant, and yet Gideon still catches it. A fleeting moment where a million things happen in silence, a million little emotions all exploding in a cacophony of color and meaning with no evidence to show for it except a slip in a mask, a strong breeze on a windy day that almost pushes him over, before he’s caught by an equally strong parallel stream, left in a dizzying swirl of overcorrection.
Or maybe nothing happened, and Kremy just flinched. Whatever this stew was, it was good.
“Could you–” Kremy begins, something dancing on the tip of his tongue as his brow furrows. The words are right on the cusp of forming, an idea already fully born in his mind, simply searching for a vessel to carry it into the world. He tries again, “If you even…”
Gideon waits. He’s gotten good at that, waiting for things. He doesn’t like it, but he’s good at it. He waits for orders, waits for change, waits for his fists to connect with skin and waits for the night to pass into day. He waits for Kremy.
The lizardfolk looks at him, something distant in his eye, something foreign. He looks away with a sigh, staring straight ahead into the fire–or the forest beyond the fire. Or at nothing at all. “Tell me about him, Gid.”
It’s Gideon’s turn to breathe deeply. The air fills his lungs slowly, expanding his torso, building him up, feeding the flame at his core and letting him think. He hasn’t thought much about his father, not with all the forgetting he’s done. He had to forget to survive, had to block out every identical day of every identical month for 10 identical years.
After a certain point, he started forgetting the non-identical days too. First the harvesting left him, then the animal feeding, then the bed making, then the laundry, then the pathways of his hometown, until eventually even the color of his favorite toy escaped him.
He remembers thinking about it. He can recite all of it off the top of his head, can tell someone what happened to him like he’s reading it off the back of a book, but for some reason he can’t remember it. “He had brown eyes and brown hair,” he tells Kremy, but he doesn’t remember it.
Kremy’s tail flicks, which he doesn’t see so much as he hears when it rustles against the fallen leaves behind them. “I could guess that much,” he mutters, crossing his heels. “... Tell me what liquor he liked.”
Whiskey. “Whiskey,” Gideon responds automatically, feeding himself another spoonful of whatever. “He liked it with his steak the most. A hearty meal with a hearty drink, or somethin’ like that.”
“How many times do I gotta tell you not to talk with your mouth full?” Kremy chides, barely whacking his leg with his tail.
“There, you sound just like him!” Gideon laughs. “Maybe you know him better than I do.”
“Of course I do!” Kremy blatantly lies, puffing his chest up and flourishing his hand out at nothing, “your father had a laugh as loud as a fuckin’ waterfall! You could hear it all the way from Agwe–and he was meaner than a goose!”
Gideon guffaws, “No he didn’t, you fuckin’ lizard–he laughed like he was chokin’ on it!” The words fall from his mouth before he even thinks of them, quick to jump to his father’s protection–even if he knows his friend is joking. “Plus, he might’ve acted tough, but Pa was soft as shit!”
Kremy quirks a brow, “Oh really? Cuz the Christopher Coal I knew–”
“His name was Nathaniel!” Gideon scoffs good-naturedly. It’s still a bookmark for him, just a footnote in a journal stored at the back of his mind, but recalling it so quickly has him giddy. If he just cracks it open a little further, slots his fingers between the pages, maybe he can smell the ink. Maybe he’ll be back in that little shack in Yona. “And I know he was soft, cuz he only ever yelled at me once!”
“Now when was that?” Kremy asks, appalled, as if he has some sort of misguided view of the man.
“When I was nine,” Gideon says confidently, and suddenly he’s skimming to that chapter, running his thumb along the side of the page as he searches for that specific instance, that sentence that starts the story, and all too quickly he’s gripping the bottom of his oversized shirt, beady tears falling from his small, round face, barely turning to steam on his oddly cool skin. He’s nine years old, and his Pa might just look more horrified than Gideon feels. He’s just yelled at his son, his only kin, the smallest extension of himself that exists in the world.
Gideon doesn’t even recall what Pa yelled at him. The words are smeared, erased and rewritten a hundred different ways in a hundred different pens, tear-soaked and torn. The expression is what remains, the visuals, the sounds, the smells. Something was burning. Pa looks at him with so much fear, so much sadness, so much care. They’re both breathing heavily, both living, both boys. Pa gets on one knee in front of him, now the same height as his strangely large child. He thinks, then pulls Gideon into a hug.
Such a strange cocktail of emotions that’d created for Gideon. His father was the reason he’d started tearing up, and now his father was the reason he’d started calming down. The words blur again, but Pa is telling him something, something important, something he needs to remember. Something about being a kid, being stupid, being a mess, being sorry, something about…
“He had a lot of love in him,” Gideon says into his stew. He can’t tell if he’s disappointed or not.
Kremy sits beside him. The night isn’t quiet–there are crickets chirping, lizards skittering, somewhere a stream is running through the trees, and yet all Gideon can focus on is Kremy’s breathing. The easy rise and fall of his chest, the soft noise of air entering and exiting his snout. He has his mask on, the one he always does, but Gideon’s recently started seeing beneath it.
He sees how Kremy’s tail curls curiously, sees how his hands itch to drum against his legs, sees how he keeps glancing at the bowl in Gideon’s hands. The genasi takes another bite of his dinner. It’s delicious, as expected.
“Tell me more about his face,” Kremy says. Gideon opens his mouth to reply, but a finger stops him. “Don’t tell me what I already know.”
Don’t just describe yourself, is the unsaid command, don’t tell me he was your father, tell me he was a man.
“... He had these… huge fuckin’ forehead wrinkles,” Gideon settles on, and Kremy blinks, before coughing out a chuckle. “Big ass crow’s feet too, he looked twenty years older than he really was.”
“Probably from livin’ with the goddamn sun himself for however long,” Kremy hums, and Gideon smiles.
“He had a mustache too–a long one. It was like lookin’ at the top half of a box on his face, all you could see was his chin. I think it even went back up into his sideburns–”
“Your daddy had sideburns?” Kremy asks incredulously, and Gideon cackles.
“He did! He had those fuckin’ sideburns–an’ his friends always made fun of him whenever they came around! Nate, they’d say,” Gideon does an awful squeaky voice in his attempt to sound like an even older, even more southern man, “Nate, how’d your little candlegirl not burn them things off? And Pa, he’d always cross his arms,” Gideon crosses his arms, furrows his brows and narrows his eyes, “an’ he’d go, why d’you think they call ‘em sideburns?”
He turns to Kremy for his reaction, and the gator’s smiling so… sweetly. Like he finally checked the last thing off of his grocery list, like he’s looking at his coinpurse after a huge scam, like he’s… something. “It’s like I’m right there with him.”
Gideon swallows thickly, running a hand along the base of his neck. “Well… that’s what I think they said, anyway.”
“Gid, I’ve seen you sketch out a steam engine from memory on a tavern napkin,” Kremy explains, taking his mostly empty bowl, almost like he planned for there to be extra somehow. He brings the spoon to his mouth, and Gideon knows it’s the perfect temperature because he remembers just how Kremy likes it. “I think they really did say that.”
And, just maybe, they did.