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"Coming through!" Douxie pushed the cart laden with casks and bottles into the decorated great room of Camelot. Behind him, two more wheeled carts, similarly laden, followed, tethered together by blue magic.
"I say," Galahad said, "what's all this? More drinks?"
"For those of us who have more refined tastes than your onion swill," Douxie retorted. With a flick of his hand, the three carts positioned themselves together and labels flew through the air to affix to the drinks. The assorted glasses, mugs, and cauldrons on the carts' lower shelves barely rattled.
"Dragon nip brandy?" Charlemagne asked, examining one of the placards affixed to a rather large cask. Dragon-sized, in fact. "Where on Earth did you find dragon nip? I haven't had that in ages!"
"Ah-ah-ah," Douxie replied, wagging a finger. "A wizard never reveals his secrets."
"It's that island in the Outer Hebrides, isn't it?" Archie murmured into Douxie's ear. In response, Douxie just scratched his familiar's head.
"Mead! I haven't had this since college," said Barbara Lake, pouring herself a glass. She took a deep savoring inhale, then a sip. Her blue eyes lit up. "Oh, this is fantastic! Walt, you should try some."
"I'm not sure it will taste the same to me, my dear, but I'll certainly give it a try." So saying, the changeling poured himself a smaller glass. Douxie watched as Strickler mouthed the beverage, then swallowed. "Most palatable," he allowed, before his arm curled around his wife's waist.
"Yes!" Douxie fist-punched the air. It had him taken a lot of experimentation to make a drink that would appeal to both species, and poison neither.
Jim, Claire, and Toby were also examining the drinks table. "Mom, can I...?" asked Jim.
She hesitated, then sighed and nodded. "It's a special occasion, so yes. But go light on that stuff," she warned. "You're all still underage."
"Nana," Toby called out to his grandmother, "can I try some mead?"
"Of course you can, dear," she replied. "You save the world, you can have a few drinks. Oh," she said, turning back to Varvatos, "did I ever tell you what we got up to, the first few days after Armistice was declared? Those were wild times, we were all so relieved."
"I say, Master Hisirdoux," Blinky commented, drawing a drink for himself from a cask labeled in Trollish. The substance in his cup looked like nothing so much as tar, but he inhaled greedily, savoring the fragrance like it was finest ambrosia, "you are a man of many talents."
"Brewing, Hisirdoux?" Merlin asked as he approached, Morgana by his side. "That's a bit low of a profession, isn't it?"
"Well, as the one of the three of us who spent the last nine hundred years awake," Douxie replied, "I think I'm allowed to have picked up a few hobbies here and there."
"Really?" Morgana took a sip of the drink she had acquired. "You must tell me about them sometime, Douxie. They could be useful."
"There's not that much difference between alcohol and alchemy," Douxie agreed. "There's a surprising amount of magic hidden in a lot of professions."
"Not the weaving," Archie protested. "Please, don't set up the looms again!"
"Come on, Arch. You only got your tail caught that once."
"Once was quite enough!"
Morgana chuckled, her laughter sparkling like the bubbles in the mead, and drifted away into the party.
Douxie felt deep satisfaction as he looked around the full room.
In this timeline, the one where Team Trollhunters had been able to make things go right, so many had lived who had died before. Three generations of Akiridion royalty now mingled at the New Year's party with humans, trolls, dragons, changelings, and wizards. Even a few gnomes ran around Camelot's halls, always managing to be underfoot. Nari's vines and flowers had greened the flying castle and decorated the great hall; her gardens and Douxie's honeybees were the source of a lot of the food and drink on display tonight. Skrael had turned one of the outdoor courtyards into an ice skating rink before indulging in Toby's newest bounty-haul of human junk food.
(Bellroc was... well, they'd been invited. Hadn't shown yet, though, and odds were even whether or not they would.)
Jim, of course, had taken over Camelot's kitchens, turning out tonight's feast for all species without the blink of an eye.
(His dishes, like Douxie's drinks, were all strictly labeled with their intended species. The Akiridions (and Durian) all ate happily across the buffet.)
Claire was sipping at her mead, delighted at getting away with something forbidden. "How can you be so good at making alcohol, Douxie, when you're not even supposed to be old enough to drink it?"
Strickler harrumphed. "The concept of a legal drinking age is a modern concept, Miss Nunez, and doesn't apply through most of history."
"Besides which, America's drinking age is a bit higher than most," Douxie agreed.
"Wait, they let you drink younger in England?" Toby gaped.
"They do, but I'm not English, I'm Welsh," Douxie pointed out.
"There's a difference?"
Strickler clenched a fist. "The American education system has failed you, Mr. Domzalski."
"I am not English," Douxie repeated, not for the first time in his long life, and probably not for the last either. "But that's not a lesson for tonight."
"Hmm. So, RenFaire tryouts?" Claire asked, changing the subject. She'd already convinced Jim and Toby, and was still lobbying for Douxie to join them in applying to work at the Renaissance Faire that summer. So far he'd held off on committing. He'd had some good friends in Elizabeth's reign, and he wasn't sure he'd enjoy seeing people re-enactment them. Claire, though, had been insisting that the Faire was more fantasy than history, and Douxie was wavering. It had been a while since he'd trod the boards....
"Haha!" Galahad burst out loudly from across the room. "Lancelot taught you well, young Steven, but he didn't teach you everything. To the training grounds!"
"Right now? Seriously?" Steve whined.
"No time like the present. Come on, now."
Steve reluctantly handed off the blue-skinned baby he was holding to his mother-in-law, and followed the older knight.
"Steven is... unusually fertile," Queen Coranda commented to her husband, watching after her daughter's consort even as she cuddled three of her seven grandchildren. One was stuffing a hank of her glowing hair in its mouth. "Do you think all humans are?"
Toby giggled. "It's those child-bearing hips," he stage-whispered to those near him.
Barbara snorted into her drink.
"Wouldn't that be child-bearing lips?" Archie replied, sotto voce.
Strickler managed to conceal his laugh behind his hand even as Toby and Archie high-fived one another.
"I am going to watch Steve's training," Aja announced. "Do you want to come with me, little Taja?" she cooed to the baby she held. "Yes, you do! You want to see your Papa fighting, yes you do!"
"Now this, I've gotta see," Mary said, following Aja like a lady-in-waiting.
"It is worth a watch," Eli told Darci.
"Sure, I'm in."
"The bout could be interesting," Draal murmured to Nomura. "Want to go?"
She set her plate to the side. "Please. I'm always down for watching that loud-mouthed mortal get his butt whipped." Taking Draal's arm, she left the room.
NotEnrique cackled. "Wanna place bets on how long it takes for the geezer to take him down?"
"Five minutes," Angor Rot murmured.
"Naw, I think you're overestimating him. I give it three."
"You're on, brat."
"Oh, splendid!" bellowed Charlemagne. "I do love watching a good joust."
Most of the guests followed after the knights, leaving the great room a great deal emptier.
"About time for you to have that conversation with them, lad," Merlin said to Douxie.
"But, master--"
"Don't 'but, master' me," Merlin rejoined with a small smile. "You said you'd do it before the end of the year, and the year's almost up! Now get to it." And taking his own goblet with him, he wandered off.
"What conversation?" asked Claire.
Douxie sighed, scanning the room to see who was still present. Blinky and Aaarrrgghh, Barbara and Strickler, Krel and King Fialkov and three of the infant hybrid septuplets. Not people he particularly wanted to have this conversation in front of. "Excuse us," he said to all of them. "Come on. Let's go somewhere else for this."
Jim and Toby raised eyebrows and half-shrugged at each other. Claire followed with no such compunctions. Douxie led them the opposite direction from the training grounds, toward his rooms. When he'd moved back into Camelot, he and Merlin and Morgana had tried different rooming arrangements, shifting around the nearly-empty castle until they'd found what worked. The three of them had agreed that they'd needed individual workspaces for their own projects, far away enough that they weren't interfering with one another's work, but also close enough that lending a hand (or a nullification in the case of emergency) wasn't out of the question. And Merlin, of course, had refused to be dislodged from the quarters that had been his centuries before. But finding an arrangement that worked for their inevitable personality clashes had taken a while. Douxie was currently lodged in what had once been the south tower. Now, with the castle flying any which way it wanted, it wasn't actually the southernmost point all that often. And hell if he was moving again. Morgana could shift rooms next time.
The candles in the sitting room lit with a gesture as he entered. A quick tap of a spell on his vambrace sound-proofed the room, something both Merlin, Morgana, and Galahad, all with their antiquated medieval tastes, had insisted on for whenever Douxie got some serious rock going. Soon enough the four of them were settled in a circle of comfortable chairs, Archie draped across the back of Douxie's.
"Right, so. What's this about, Doux?" asked Jim.
Hisirdoux sighed and looked at his clasped hands, cataloging all of the tiny scars that no one ever seemed to notice. Immortality left you with lot of scars, on so many levels. He hated to do this to his friends, but they had to know.
"Go ahead, Douxie," Archie urged.
"I stopped aging when I was nineteen," he said quietly, "because that's when my magic really started becoming more than just parlor tricks. Merlin came to his full power a lot later in life, back in the sixth century. Morgana... well, she'll be twenty-five forever."
Toby nodded. "Yeah, we kind of already figured that out."
"What are you trying to tell us, Douxie?" pressed Claire.
He breathed out, made himself meet her eyes, made himself say the words. "How much magic do you think you channel, Claire?"
"Well--" Her eyes widened in realization. "Oh."
"And you, Jim? And you, Toby? How much power do you use through your amulets?"
"Wait, are you saying--" Toby demanded.
"But the amulets are different, aren't they?" asked Jim. "They're not us."
Hisirdoux Casperan, master wizard, shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Power is power. Though I do suspect you might have a drop of something other than human in your blood anyway, Toby," Douxie added. "Your grandmother's unnaturally youthful for someone nearing a hundred and twenty."
"Wait, what?"
Douxie shrugged.
"Are you saying," Claire wet her lips, "that we're immortal too?"
"I'm afraid so."
"That's...." Jim's gaze was distant and despairing, and Douxie could practically see him running through the long list of people he'd outlive, starting with his mother and spreading out from there.
"It's part of why magic users have always been so feared," Douxie tried to explain. "Those of us with hearts can't keep losing people and losing people and losing people, so we tend to stick to our own kind, form enclaves... and then mortals mistrust us both for being different and for keeping ourselves apart. In flying castles, for instance."
"Douxie...."
"Well," said Claire slowly, looking at Jim and Toby. Her voice cracked, and she swallowed. "At least we'll always have Blinky and Aaarrrgghh. And NotEnrique."
"And Draal, and Strickler, and Nomura," Toby added. His face was stricken - he looked like he wanted to cry.
Jim, though, looked haunted. "Why would Strickler marry my mom when he's only going to lose her?" he whispered.
"Forty or fifty years can hold a lot of happiness, Jim," Douxie told him gently. "Living and loving can make the pain of losing worth it."
"Speaking from experience there, eh, Douxie?" Toby asked, the jibe coming out seemingly by reflex.
"Sadly," said Archie, jumping down onto Douxie's lap, "no." He purred, though, as Douxie's fingers found that one spot between his shoulder blades that Archie claimed always itched, a side effect of not having wings in cat form. "Douxie rather tends to run away from romantic relationships."
"They've all wanted more than I can give!" Douxie protested.
"Mmm, yes. Maybe someday you'll change your mind on that."
"Not today," Douxie swore. Looking back at Jim, Claire, and Toby, though, he added, "It's not a death sentence. A long life's not so bad. You get to learn a lot of things, see a lot of places, meet a lot of fascinating people. It's just..." And he couldn't lie anymore as he looked at his feet. "It's just something you have to get used to."
The appalled silence that greeted him let him know he'd said more than he'd intended. Fuzzbuckets, he'd been trying not to make it about himself.
"We haven't always been alone," Archie said, "but we've also never really fit in anywhere for long. And with Merlin gone for most of it, I'm afraid it has been a bit of a lonely life at times."
"Don't say that, Arch," Douxie protested. "We've always had each other."
"Mmm, yes, but sometimes that's not enough, is it?"
"You promised you'd never talk about that," Douxie hissed.
"And I'm not talking about it, am I?" Archie licked the back of a paw and used it to groom himself, seemingly above reproach.
"A technicality," Douxie shot back.
A hand touched his shoulder. Surprised, Douxie looked up into blue eyes.
"You know," Jim Lake, Jr. said, smiling, "once upon a time, I'd never really wanted an older brother. Guess I just had to wait for the right one."
Claire's arms circled around him from behind. "You're a pretty awesome big brother, Teach. And a lot less of a pain than the other brother I'm going to spend eternity with."
"Hey," said Toby, "did you really think we were gonna let you down and leave you out, Douxie?" He held out his hand for a fistbump. "I never had a brother either. Well, besides Jimbo here."
Douxie stared at Toby's fist for a minute, then laughed softly, feeling something click into place inside him, filling something that had been empty for nearly his whole life. "Family, then?" he asked, fistbumping.
"Family," Claire agreed, squeezing.
"Well, now that that's taken care of--" A multi-hued roar of triumph came in through the window, making Archie pause. "--And now that Steve's been defeated again, shall we all go back to the party? I didn't get a chance yet to try some of those canapes you made, Jim."
"Greedy cat," Douxie said affectionately.
Archie sniffed. "We've nearly starved too many times for me to turn my nose up at a feast."
"Fair enough."
"So, Douxie, if I'm going to be pretty and seventeen forever," Toby started, "you're going to teach me to make that yummy, yummy mead, right?"
"Toby, there is absolutely no connection between those two statements," Claire told Toby, walking out the door behind him.
"Sure there is!"
Something held Douxie back a moment, though, as the other three went back to the great hall. "You sure about this, Jim? Forever's a long time."
"I've almost never been so sure of anything," Jim replied. "Do you really think I'd've invited just anyone to live in my mom's house?"
"Well, considering you've had multiple trolls living in your basement..." Douxie teased.
Jim chuckled. "Fair enough."
"Think I'll hold off on teaching Toby how to make mead until he's developed a bit of a tolerance to drinking it first, though," Douxie said, watching the shorter Trollhunter walk away.
"Yeaaaaah, probably a good idea."
They walked on in silence for a minute, before Douxie spoke again. "Jim, I know you're all planning to do college after graduation, but... this castle is too big for just three wizards and an old knight."
Jim gave him a sidelong glance. "You asking us to move back in again?"
"Well, again for the nine of us who remember it, but... yeah. I'm afraid to say I just don't trust my fellow wizards not to retreat into their ivory towers without other people around to remind them there's more to life than spellbooks. It's easy enough to portal anywhere from here, and it'd make this old heap echo a lot less."
"You're not very respectful, given this is Camelot and all."
"Remind me in a thousand years to see how respectful you are of Los Angeles."
Jim laughed, which had been Douxie's intent.
"Hey, Claire," Toby's voice came from ahead of them, "do you think you could portal the whole castle?"
"Maybe. Why?"
"We could follow midnight around the world. Just think of it, twenty-four hours of New Year's! It would be awesomesaaaaauce!"
Douxie had to laugh. "I don't care how soused you think you can get him," he called, "you're not going to be able to get Merlin to wear a hat that says 'Wizard' with three 'z's."
"Challenge accepted, my man!"
"And at some point," Douxie murmured, "Toby's going to find out just how bad an idea drunk wizards is."
Jim stopped walking for a second, then jogged to catch up. "Seriously?"
"Absolutely. I'll need to keep an eye on Claire, too, until she builds up her own tolerance."
"How high is your alcohol tolerance?"
"Pretty high, as a necessity. It also helps that I'm not new enough to alcohol that I forget to cushion it with food and water."
"Doing the big brother thing and looking out for us, huh?"
"Mm-hmm." Douxie stuffed his hands in his pockets. "Say, Jim."
"Yeah?"
Douxie smiled. "What do you want to do at the RenFaire?"
It took a minute, but then Jim's face lit up. "So it just takes getting formally adopted to convince you, huh?"
"Let's just call it the camel's straw."
Companionably, they rejoined the party.