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sga_flashfic-title- A Gathering of Angels
-author- Sophonisba (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saphanibaal)
-rating/warnings- This is a fusion with Otogi Story Tenshi no Shippo, a.k.a. Angel Tales, which means that a variety of unpleasant things happen to, among others, mostly defenseless animals. At least one atrocious not-quite-pun. Given the source, implied pre-anythingyoulike, but in itself, gen.
-spoilers- Not... exactly...
-characters- Sheppard, and... well... it's a surprise. ^_^
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor, obviously, is Tenshi no Shippo, which last I checked belonged to Wonderfarm and Tokyo Kids.
-word count- 5406
-summary- John Sheppard, as he would tell anyone, had the worst luck with pets in the entire universe.
A Gathering of Angels
John Sheppard, as he would tell anyone, had the worst luck with pets in the entire universe.
His first real live pet all to himself was a tropical fish he named Evan, having heard somewhere that it was a variation on "John." John's mother had muttered dark things about tropical fish even as she helped him find an aquarium and a means of keeping the water salt.
But Evan, contrary to her mutterings, did not die within a few days, and in fact survived for three months until they went to visit Grandma for the weekend and came back to find that the power had gone out, the salinifier had failed to work, and the fish had died of a surfeit of fresh water.
John was pretty upset at the time, although he did take a certain morbid pride in the whole affair when he told the kids in his class -- none of them had ever had a fish that drowned, after all.
Sometimes, in his dreams, Evan tells him "I'm afraid of the water."
*
Elizabeth had really been more his brothers' pet iguana than John's, named for Bess Tudor and Eliza Bennett and Liz Taylor (and not, despite Lissa's delusions, for their baby sister) because it was the only name they could all agree on; but after that disastrous road trip, she had been nearly freezing and John the one who'd taken her inside his shirt and held her close to keep her warm, eyes stinging with tears for Evan.
And he'd gotten Elizabeth warm, and spent time staring at her every day after they put her back in her cage -- usually she didn't do much of anything interesting while he was watching; John had this secret theory that she spent the time working out questions of such import as how to get rid of racism, how to restore the environment and still have room for people, and how to make the perfect tortilla tuna fish casserole, and that humanity was just too limited to comprehend her answers.
His suggestions that the cage was still perhaps too cold had gotten his brother Mark to put in a battery-powered hot rock. Elizabeth curled up on it day after day, but kept looking less and less happy.
When the family finally gave in to John's whining and took her to the vet, the vet had some things to say on idiots who kept the environment too cold and then introduced a rock that was far too hot, so that she clung for warmth to her own glede even as it burned her to the bone. Even the overnight stay could not help her; the vet returned her body to them, and they buried her next to Evan under the rhododendron "tree" in the back yard of the house they had that year.
John spent weeks after that inventing a design for a cage thermostat that the animal inside it could change the temperature on, even after his father put his foot down and decreed "No more reptiles."
*
When his father's 2IC's wife's dog had puppies, the Sheppard boys were allowed to pick one out. They had just, after long argument, settled on the name Diane when their father pointed out that the puppy in question was a boy; Matt pointed out that the letters of "Diane" could be rearranged to spell "Aiden," and so Aiden the puppy became.
Aiden was an extremely friendly and inquisitive dog, poking his nose into everything; John's father bought his bedroom door a new lock after the third time Aiden got into his closet, pulled his mess dress uniform down, and curled up on it to sleep. (Matt thought it must be the smell of something the dry cleaners used on it.) He bounced up on one or another of them so often that John wondered if they wouldn't have done better to name him Tigger. Every time they took him for a walk, he strained at the leash every inch of the way.
Aiden was running around in their little fenced yard when the Army captain came over to speak to their father (something about joint training exercises). Mark was the one who realized that Captain Idiot had left the gate unlatched right about the time Aiden bounced through it; the boys ran up and down the neighborhood looking for him for hours before John at last found him.
Aiden whined softly and looked up at him trustingly from the street.
John dropped to his knees, petted Aiden's head even as he shouted for his brothers, and did his best to focus on the soft head and liquid eyes rather than the blood or what some irresponsible person's car had done to the dog's hindquarters.
He was still petting when Matt and their father came back in the Sheppards' car, although Aiden was long past feeling anything.
John's brothers were the ones who learned every disparaging name his father's unit had for the Army and used them all. He just resolved never, never to join the Army, and never wavered from that (although he did feel a pang or two after he fell in love with Airwolf).
*
The next house they moved to was near a creek, and John found a frog in it.
He carried the frog home wrapped in his wet sock, made him at home in Evan's tank (which had been used to pack Mark's chemistry set and therefore hadn't been thrown out before the move) and named him Keras, because it sounded something like the sound of his croaks.
Keras lived in the tank for a week before his parents put their foot down and told him to take the frog back to the creek. John was walked back to the creek by two of his brothers and sadly put Keras down on the bank.
Then the neighbor's dog, bounding around off its leash, trotted up and ate him.
Mark grabbed the back of John's shirt to keep him from attacking the dog. The neighbor, who turned out to be a boy about Mark's age, laughed when he heard what the fuss was.
So did Mark.
John slammed an elbow into his brother's stomach, was shoved down onto the gravel in return, and then stalked off home.
Luke followed him into the house and challenged him to a game of Monopoly. John played fiercely, throwing the dice down with so much strength that they routinely had to crawl all over the living room floor to find them, and if he had to blow his nose rather a lot, all Luke did was fetch a roll of toilet paper for him.
*
At that school, John's class had a class parakeet. The children who did well -- the responsible ones -- were allowed to feed Mara, and give her water, and sometimes to open the door and let her flutter to a finger or a shoulder. She always went back in, apparently having learned the solidity of glass long before John transferred in.
John was not a particularly responsible kid -- except with other living things -- but, but, bird! And again, bird! He worked hard at assuming a responsible look. He made his eyes big and sad at the teacher. He was added to the rotation of Mara-looker-afters.
He was the one letting her perch on his finger when Mr. Davis from the class across the hall unexpectedly opened the classroom door. Mara squawked, fluttered this way and that way, and then flew out into the hall through the still-open door. John was not in the forefront of the small horde of children and teachers who chased after her -- he sort of thought maybe she'd like flying for longer; if he were a bird, he'd fly all day and only come down to eat and sleep and stuff -- although, pressed by a vague memory of parakeets being tropical, felt obliged to make sure she didn't get lost or anything.
Mr. Davis was almost on Mara when she freaked and flew out the window. There was a collective shocked noise.
"What happened?" John hadn't been able to see.
"She flew out, and a big gust of wind blew her sideways," his classmate Jamie told him.
"It went 'smack!' against the window round the bend," one of the older kids, who'd apparently been out on a bathroom pass, said gleefully. "Smack! Pow! Down, just like that."
"Is the bird dead?" one of the other kids asked. "I think she's dead."
She was. Mrs. Woo told John many times over the next week that it hadn't been his fault, and the week after that he thought he might even have started to believe her.
*
Then one of the other officers got posted overseas, and her daughters' rabbit was taken over by the Sheppards. Carson had dark fur that wasn't quite as soft as it looked and ears that stuck up jauntily.
He was also kind of boring, and more Luke and Lissa's pet, really. However, everyone made sure to keep his water and food dishes filled, and everyone tried to make someone else clean out his cage lining.
The day Carson had to go in to the vet for his checkup, though, Luke had practice and Lissa was over with a friend. Their father dropped him off with John and Mark and promised that Captain Abrams would pick them up in an hour.
An hour later, Carson having been given a clean bill of health, Abrams picked them up and drove them... not home.
"Where are we going?" Mark asked reasonably.
"Your father was talking to me," Abrams said, pulling into the hangar, "and we thought we could arrange a special treat for you."
The helicopter was dark and sleek and large and the most beautiful thing John had ever seen, except maybe for his mom, or the lady who played Lieutenant Uhura.
"Your father asked me to take you up in her today," Abrams said, and John had never loved the world more than that very moment.
After Abrams had swung himself in and begun the pre-flight checkup, John eagerly clambered up into her, shoving his way ahead of Mark.
And then they strapped in, and lifted off, and John would have spent every moment with either his nose pressed firmly to the window or his eyes taking in every inch of the control panel if Mark hadn't insisted on taking up at least half the room, if not more.
"Hey, Mark, shouldn't you have fastened Carson's cage down?" John said suddenly, hoping to get his larger brother to move.
"You brought the rabbit?" Abrams said, startled.
"You said someone else was going to use the car!" Mark said. "It's not as if the cage would have fit in the cupboard where we put our backpacks."
"...how's he doing?"
"He doesn't look too good," John said thoughtfully. He wriggled loose of his restraints and nearly fell onto the cage, opening it and taking Carson out. "His heart's going a mile a minute."
And then it... wasn't.
"Rabbits scare easily," Matt said over dinner that night. "The flight was probably too much for him, and his heart burst just like that."
"Blood and guts everywhere," Mary gloated, ignoring her older sister's wince.
"Of course there weren't," the culprit scoffed.
Mary's eyes grew wide. Her lip wobbled.
"But I bet if we'd gone higher the pressure would have been low enough for his heart to explode right out of his skin -- "
"With blood and guts everywhere!" Mary cheered.
Lissa shoved her chair back, stood up, and dashed from the table.
"Ask to be excused!" their father said firmly.
"I hate helicopters," Luke growled.
"It's not the helicopter's fault," John said bitterly. "It's Mark's. He ruined the helicopter."
*
A month after that, their cousin Ruth gave Luke and John each a hamster. John's was a dwarf hamster named Radek; according to Ruth, technically he was a Russian Dwarf Hamster, although not actually from a Russian breed. Unlike Luke (who'd promptly renamed his golden hamster Doc), John felt no need to change the name their cousin had given. They pressed both the former rabbit cage and the former aquarium/terrarium into service as hamster dwellings, and every other weekend they connected up an elaborate closed tunnel system between the two for the hamsters to explore and exercise in.
In between those times, John would sometimes take Radek out and watch him carefully as he explored the bedroom floor, or put him in his rolling ball and watch somewhat less carefully.
Unfortunately, somehow or another the hamsters managed to chew through a part of the tunnel system in a corner of the room, and promptly vanished through it while the boys were busy with their homework. Luke and John looked and called for days, but saw not so much as a hamster nose.
After they moved away, they heard that their old house's new tenants had found the emaciated corpses of the hamsters lost inside the walls. That night, John dreamed that their zombies came and ate him up, Radek murmuring "Feed me... feed me... I'm so hungry..." in what John at the time fondly believed to be a Slavic accent.
*
In their new home, John and his mother went to the animal shelter and got a cat. Her name was Norina, and even the girls were told to refill Norina's food and water whenever it ran low.
(John always wound up being the one to take care of the litter box, however. He thought that was extremely unfair.)
The entire family was fond of Norina, but it was John whose bed she slept on at night, John whom she came up on and poked her head in the way as he was attempting to assemble model planes, John for whom she purred most often.
When they went to go camping in the Adirondacks, John made sure that the woman from his mother's bridge club who had agreed to take Norina in for the duration knew everything he could think of about taking care of her. He worried that she wouldn't like their place, wished Mrs. Bevan could come feed and water her and change her litter at the Sheppards', but his father had told them that he would not be a party to handing out keys to military property.
The vacation was great fun even with the persistent mosquitoes, and John was nearly bouncing as he got out of the car.
Until he saw Mrs. Bevan.
He stiffened, cold washing out from his diaphragm.
"I'm sorry," Mrs. Bevan said, twisting the cuff of one sleeve with the other hand. "I'm so, so sorry."
"Pat? What happened?" Mrs. Sheppard asked, voice suddenly growing louder and higher.
"There was a fire," Mrs. Bevan said, staring out at nothing. "We lost... nearly everything, and I'm afraid we couldn't get your cat out, we could barely get ourselves out..."
Oh, no. No, no, no.
"We are not," his mother said later, "getting another pet. When you move out, you can do what you like."
*
In high school, John started volunteering at the local raptor rehabilitation center. (First he was mildly bemused by the fact that there was a raptor rehabilitation center in the area, and then he hadn't made the football team and he wasn't about to join the math club no matter how much he liked math and student jazz band only met twice a week, and so he started wandering around town poking his head in anywhere that looked vaguely interesting. The raptor center was interesting enough that he came back twice and then decided to volunteer -- after all, one, birds, and two, it would look good on his transcripts.)
The bird that John wound up having the most to do with was "Teyla," the red-tailed hawk with the broken left wing. He cleaned her cage. He fed her for the meal period coinciding with his volunteer time, usually with pre-cut chunks of meat such as chicken strips and beef tips, although once he bought a heart from the butcher's out of his allowance and carefully sawed it into shreds (which took up most of his volunteer period for that day -- hearts were tough).
He even, as Teyla's wing mended and the staff at the center got to know him better, was permitted to help exercise her, to spot her as she kept up the strength in her wings without straining the healing one too much.
When the time to release Teyla came, John invited himself along. He tested the fit of her tracking band, even though it had been carefully fitted and tested by the staff. He carried her out on his wrist, holding his arm steady under her great weight, and flung her up and out with his heart in his mouth.
And she took the boost and took off, wings catching the air, a little ragged perhaps but rapidly climbing. He watched her until the speck vanished from sight, and then blinked several times, the strain having overlubricated his eyes.
The next day, when he got home from band practice, a message was waiting for him from the rehabilitation center. Teyla had been mobbed by starlings and killed, perhaps ten miles away. They were retrieving the tracking device that evening.
John didn't go.
*
Ann, whom John was kind of sort of not really dating his senior year, had a great-uncle who kept a wolf and several dogs on his large (fenced, naturally) ranch. When Ann and her brothers had to go out there to help out on the ranch, Great-Uncle Lewis not being up to as much as he had been before, John finagled an invitation -- Ann and her brothers were just as happy to have one more pair of hands around, and John was just as happy to spend time impressing her (and, to a lesser extent, her younger brothers, who were gratifyingly in awe of one of the perpetrators of the Great Locker Room Affair.
Most of what they wound up doing that first day, to John's surprise, was cleaning out the gutters and patching the roof. The dogs wandered in and out, chary of these strangers; John smiled at them, held their eyes, and set about making friends.
The wolf, on the other hand, kept his distance, glaring distrustfully at them.
"What's his name?" John asked, while they were up on the roof.
"Ronon," Ann said.
"Ronan?"
"No, with an o," one of her brothers explained. "Uncle Lewis doesn't spell too good." He quickly looked down to make sure his great-uncle hadn't heard.
"He knows to stay away from us," Ann explained, "because Uncle Lewis is with us, but he wouldn't be safe to run into alone."
"Huh," said John.
The next day, when the dogs came up, he walked in Ronon's general direction and laid a piece of steak down at the point where the wolf began to audibly growl.
"Foolishness," Great-Uncle Lewis grumbled at him when John came back. "Wolves are one-man dogs. It's your own fault if you get yourself bitten, boy."
"So it will be," John agreed, smiling easily, and went to climb up the ladder after Ann.
The Ronon-taming project went on at irregular intervals for a month, and Ronon had decided to leave whenever John encroached on his space rather than stay and possibly attack, when Ann explained tearfully that her great-uncle had collapsed and was in the hospital.
John offered to come over and help feed Ronon and the dogs, and Ann's parents accepted gratefully; they and some of the rest of the family could take some of the friendlier dogs, but the rest really couldn't be moved safely.
Great-Uncle Lewis got worse and worse, but John's relationship with Ronon got better and better; he could get within five feet of the wolf before being left, and he could leave food and back up in order to let Ronon eat it.
Then, one day when he was throwing a frisbee around for some of the dogs (Ronon didn't deign to participate), a car came trundling up the drive and Mark and Mary got out.
"Hey, when'd you get back from Basic?" John called to Mark, and then, more urgently, "Stay there! I'll come over!"
Mary, on the other hand, was already through the gate and running up the grassy slope towards John.
And Ronon, snarling, charged.
"Freeze!" John screamed, helplessly, as Mark threw the car door open and reached into the back. "Play dead!" He desperately tried to intercept, legs pounding, as Mary's nerve broke and she ran back to the car.
But Ronon was gaining on her, uncaring of John's shouts, and Mary's sobs carried through the air as she ran, and Ronon was nearly upon her --
-- and then a shot cracked, and the wolf fell perhaps a foot short of Mary, flung onto his side by the bullet, and John raced to him and dropped to his knees beside Ronon as Mary at last fetched up against the fence and was being patted, maybe, by Mark.
"Did you have to go for the head shot?" John said, his voice sounding odd even in his own ears.
"I'm sorry," Mark said honestly. "He nearly hamstrung Mary," (who cried harder at this revelation,) "and there wasn't any time -- I know we shouldn't have anticipated ourselves -- but Mary's had a terrible time, we should see -- "
"Get out," John said.
"John -- "
"Get. Out."
Mark piled their sister into his car and got.
*
John was never quite sure whether Brigadier General Sheppard, proud father of two promising young officers, one not-so-promising enlisted man, and a youngest daughter eager to herself join the Marine Corps, would have disowned him for going to the Academy or not; after he spent his eighteenth birthday getting adopted by his cousin Conrad John Sheppard, "Uncle John" for short, the question rather became moot.
It did mean that none of his family except for Uncle John and Aunt Athena were speaking to him, but as he liked them rather better than the family he'd grown to that age with, he only regretted it once or twice a week, and not even that often once he was dealing with the Academy's workload and spending his spare time endeavoring not to become as stiff-rumped as most of his fellow cadets.
Then Uncle John was killed (stupid, so stupid, a hit-and-run, and none of them had seen the license plate because they were too busy being pushed out of the way by the resulting victim) and John, still unsteady from his unc-- his father's dying more-than-declaration, had to strive to remain on his feet and less than cast down through the funeral and the grieving resentment of many of his new father's comrades.
Luke at least paid the courtesy of attending, even if without his parents or elder brothers, and murmured that Lissa would have come had their parents let her go.
Aunt Athena, likewise, was a constant if not overly reassuring presence. At the reception afterwards, she informed John that as soon as he was living in some sort of apartment of his own, he would take over the responsibility of his uncle's pet turtle.
"Teer?" John said, bemused. "Why me? Weren't you the one endowed with his worldly goods?"
"I won't remember everything that needs to be done," his aunt said flatly. John was not ignorant enough to fail to realize that her somewhat wooden performance was in fact the best approximation Athena Sheppard could make of neurotypical social reactions, but it still remained a little disconcerting.
"Lissa will hunt up your internal temperature-controller and send it on," Luke promised.
"Uh, thanks," John said, nearly as awkwardly as his aunt and with far less excuse.
Once he was actually taking care of Teer, though, it proved simple enough. He got a somewhat cracked children's pool for her habitat, attached a light and some overhangs, painted his old terrarium black and turned it sideways for both a dark place for her to hide and a flat place to put food, and filled the rest of the bottom with leaves and two tupperware tubs -- one for drinking water, one for soaking.
Granted, she turned out to be a very finicky eater -- she wouldn't eat any meat, only boiled eggs, even when he tempted her with fresh live earthworms -- and hibernating her was a bit of bother, to the point where one winter he didn't because he couldn't find anywhere where the temperature would stay low enough. Even with his temperature monitors (and Teer proved quick to learn how to manage her own).
John never could quite warm up to her, though.
A year later, he hurried back the day of the earthquake, worried that perhaps the temperature regulators had broken; without the thermostat, the apartment would probably remain a little shy of eighty, but the real problem would be if the heater were stuck on or something.
Then he got in and saw the fallen bookcase, and realized that that wasn't the real problem at all.
He really should have gotten the old bathtub. And covered it with heavy glass or a grating. He knew he should have.
His commanding officer, who lived in family housing, offered a corner of his yard to bury Teer in. The Ramirrez children got into it, holding a little funeral and expecting John to give an eulogy. He tried, but spent most of the time staring at the hole, fumbling for something to say.
"I never can think of anything either," Captain Ramirrez told him afterwards.
*
John was pretty sure he was done with pets after Teer's demise.
Then one day he bumped into Lieutenant Mitchell -- whom he sort of knew and didn't have anything specific against -- heard the other's cry of "Shit!", and automatically caught the cardboard box with holes in it as the other man dropped it.
Something heavy moved inside.
"New pet?" John asked.
"It's not mine," Mitchell grumbled. "Sam's going overseas and expects me to take care of Rodney. Like I know anything about how to take care of snakes."
"I had an iguana once," Sheppard said. "My shower's got a door -- does yours? We could put him in there for the moment, if you don't have a habitat set up."
"Sam's got this old bathtub I hauled over," Mitchell said, "but I'm not quite sure how to keep him from getting out."
"Shower for now," John decided. "Which way?"
Rodney, when upended into the shower, proved to be a light brown ball python with golden blotches. John thought the design on his head looked a little familiar; as Rodney promptly curled up in a corner, balling himself around his head, there wasn't much time to judge.
"Is he all right?"
"They do that," John shrugged. "Means he's nervous. Give him time to get over it and he'll come out on his own."
After the fifth or sixth time he would up running in and out of Cameron Mitchell's quarters at all hours for some snake-related problem, though, they decided that it would be easier (not to mention less prone to cause gossip) if they moved Rodney into John's quarters.
"Besides," Cameron said, duct-taping a wire grill over John's shower, "Sam doesn't expect me to take care of the snake so much as to make sure he is taken care of. Which I think you'll do a better job of than me. You're sure you don't mind losing your shower?"
"There's a group one one floor down," John pointed out dryly. "I haven't forgotten what it was like to use one this soon."
Rodney, after initial hesitancy, proved amenable to being picked up and carried about in John's quarters. He would coil up an arm and then sniff at John's head, tasting his hair where it was growing out from its short crop in all directions at once. He would lie on top of John while John read An Infamous Army and Bleak House, often slipping under John's shirt, flicking his tail in possible agreement when John told him that the latter book was more entertaining and more tolerable when one accepted the premise that Esther didn't consciously realize she was desperately in love with Ada.
John was conscientious about changing Rodney's water daily, feeding him weekly with chopsticks (while wearing dishwashing gloves that still reeked of Lemon Pine-Sol) in order to keep him from mistaking John's fingers for lunch, making sure that the temperature of his hot pad was all right (although Rodney proved almost as quick as Teer at learning how to adjust his heat himself). Now and then, he switched out Rodney's climbing branch to give him variety in addition to his occasional trips into John's room. He put down Astroturf in the former shower and sacrificed two plastic bowls to the cause of secure bedroom nooks. When the humidity meter registered low levels, it was easy enough to run the shower for a brief period (usually while holding Rodney out of the way).
And then Rodney started going off his feed, and John couldn't figure out why. He'd never disdained pre-killed food; in fact, the mysterious Sam's notes had indicated that he would eat beef tips or chopped-up organ meats, both of which John had successfully fed him. The temperature was all right. The hot pad was safely under the Astroturf where it couldn't burn him. The humidity was fine. His water had been changed. John tried leaving him alone for longer periods of time, but he still wouldn't eat. And then he started losing weight.
The veterinarian John consulted was similarly baffled, and referred them on to someone else. The second veterinarian announced that Rodney was sick, which John had pretty well figured out for himself, thank you.
John eventually managed to tempt him to eat something, but he was still losing weight.
Three months into the new stage of eating-but-still-losing-weight, the mysterious Sam finally returned stateside and came to move Rodney to his new home. Sam turned out to be a not unattractive woman, and the horrified noise she made when she got a good look at Rodney spoke well for her. She carefully reached out for him, and he willingly climbed up her arm, poking his nose into the hollow at the base of her skull. John would have felt jealous -- that was his spot -- but he was too worried about Rodney's welfare.
He waved goodbye, stupid as it might seem, when Sam and Rodney drove off in her car, temporary terrarium firmly buckled in, Rodney tightly curled up in the blue plastic tub within it.
"Come on," Cam said. "A bunch of the guys are going out to a bar tonight. Get a pass; you look like you don't need to be alone."
Two months later, when Sam sent him a postcard to let him know that Rodney had at last succumbed to the illness which well predated the time when she had handed him over, John decided it once and for all. He was done with keeping animals.
*
"I told you, it's impossible," Ganos Lal, Ascended Ancient of the Danavi, Great Queen of the Island of Britain, Patron Deity of the Animal Plane, said. "He says he's done with keeping animals. Besides, it's not as if I haven't relaxed the rules already."
"And nexsst time, I'd prefer ssssomething with opposable thumbs," the ball python on her left hissed. "Besides, the Massster will undoubtedly get himself in trouble -- "
"More trouble," Teer commented, deadpan.
" -- and someone has to be there to fish him out of it."
"Language," Evan huffed. "Besides, he seems to be keeping plenty of humans already."
"They come when he says 'come' and go when he says 'go,'" Aiden agreed. "So he is keeping at least some animals, even if they mostly keep themselves."
Keras let his eyes go as large and round as he might, while Mara preened and did her best to look pathetic. Norina tapped Radek on the back firmly, and he obediently looked up through his lashes, nervous.
"It seems to me," Elizabeth began firmly, "that considering everything that's happened..."
Ganos rather hoped, eventually, that the humans would have at least as little luck outarguing Elizabeth as she had.
-author- Sophonisba (
saphanibaal)-rating/warnings- This is a fusion with Otogi Story Tenshi no Shippo, a.k.a. Angel Tales, which means that a variety of unpleasant things happen to, among others, mostly defenseless animals. At least one atrocious not-quite-pun. Given the source, implied pre-anythingyoulike, but in itself, gen.
-spoilers- Not... exactly...
-characters- Sheppard, and... well... it's a surprise. ^_^
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor, obviously, is Tenshi no Shippo, which last I checked belonged to Wonderfarm and Tokyo Kids.
-word count- 5406
-summary- John Sheppard, as he would tell anyone, had the worst luck with pets in the entire universe.
A Gathering of Angels
John Sheppard, as he would tell anyone, had the worst luck with pets in the entire universe.
His first real live pet all to himself was a tropical fish he named Evan, having heard somewhere that it was a variation on "John." John's mother had muttered dark things about tropical fish even as she helped him find an aquarium and a means of keeping the water salt.
But Evan, contrary to her mutterings, did not die within a few days, and in fact survived for three months until they went to visit Grandma for the weekend and came back to find that the power had gone out, the salinifier had failed to work, and the fish had died of a surfeit of fresh water.
John was pretty upset at the time, although he did take a certain morbid pride in the whole affair when he told the kids in his class -- none of them had ever had a fish that drowned, after all.
Sometimes, in his dreams, Evan tells him "I'm afraid of the water."
*
Elizabeth had really been more his brothers' pet iguana than John's, named for Bess Tudor and Eliza Bennett and Liz Taylor (and not, despite Lissa's delusions, for their baby sister) because it was the only name they could all agree on; but after that disastrous road trip, she had been nearly freezing and John the one who'd taken her inside his shirt and held her close to keep her warm, eyes stinging with tears for Evan.
And he'd gotten Elizabeth warm, and spent time staring at her every day after they put her back in her cage -- usually she didn't do much of anything interesting while he was watching; John had this secret theory that she spent the time working out questions of such import as how to get rid of racism, how to restore the environment and still have room for people, and how to make the perfect tortilla tuna fish casserole, and that humanity was just too limited to comprehend her answers.
His suggestions that the cage was still perhaps too cold had gotten his brother Mark to put in a battery-powered hot rock. Elizabeth curled up on it day after day, but kept looking less and less happy.
When the family finally gave in to John's whining and took her to the vet, the vet had some things to say on idiots who kept the environment too cold and then introduced a rock that was far too hot, so that she clung for warmth to her own glede even as it burned her to the bone. Even the overnight stay could not help her; the vet returned her body to them, and they buried her next to Evan under the rhododendron "tree" in the back yard of the house they had that year.
John spent weeks after that inventing a design for a cage thermostat that the animal inside it could change the temperature on, even after his father put his foot down and decreed "No more reptiles."
*
When his father's 2IC's wife's dog had puppies, the Sheppard boys were allowed to pick one out. They had just, after long argument, settled on the name Diane when their father pointed out that the puppy in question was a boy; Matt pointed out that the letters of "Diane" could be rearranged to spell "Aiden," and so Aiden the puppy became.
Aiden was an extremely friendly and inquisitive dog, poking his nose into everything; John's father bought his bedroom door a new lock after the third time Aiden got into his closet, pulled his mess dress uniform down, and curled up on it to sleep. (Matt thought it must be the smell of something the dry cleaners used on it.) He bounced up on one or another of them so often that John wondered if they wouldn't have done better to name him Tigger. Every time they took him for a walk, he strained at the leash every inch of the way.
Aiden was running around in their little fenced yard when the Army captain came over to speak to their father (something about joint training exercises). Mark was the one who realized that Captain Idiot had left the gate unlatched right about the time Aiden bounced through it; the boys ran up and down the neighborhood looking for him for hours before John at last found him.
Aiden whined softly and looked up at him trustingly from the street.
John dropped to his knees, petted Aiden's head even as he shouted for his brothers, and did his best to focus on the soft head and liquid eyes rather than the blood or what some irresponsible person's car had done to the dog's hindquarters.
He was still petting when Matt and their father came back in the Sheppards' car, although Aiden was long past feeling anything.
John's brothers were the ones who learned every disparaging name his father's unit had for the Army and used them all. He just resolved never, never to join the Army, and never wavered from that (although he did feel a pang or two after he fell in love with Airwolf).
*
The next house they moved to was near a creek, and John found a frog in it.
He carried the frog home wrapped in his wet sock, made him at home in Evan's tank (which had been used to pack Mark's chemistry set and therefore hadn't been thrown out before the move) and named him Keras, because it sounded something like the sound of his croaks.
Keras lived in the tank for a week before his parents put their foot down and told him to take the frog back to the creek. John was walked back to the creek by two of his brothers and sadly put Keras down on the bank.
Then the neighbor's dog, bounding around off its leash, trotted up and ate him.
Mark grabbed the back of John's shirt to keep him from attacking the dog. The neighbor, who turned out to be a boy about Mark's age, laughed when he heard what the fuss was.
So did Mark.
John slammed an elbow into his brother's stomach, was shoved down onto the gravel in return, and then stalked off home.
Luke followed him into the house and challenged him to a game of Monopoly. John played fiercely, throwing the dice down with so much strength that they routinely had to crawl all over the living room floor to find them, and if he had to blow his nose rather a lot, all Luke did was fetch a roll of toilet paper for him.
*
At that school, John's class had a class parakeet. The children who did well -- the responsible ones -- were allowed to feed Mara, and give her water, and sometimes to open the door and let her flutter to a finger or a shoulder. She always went back in, apparently having learned the solidity of glass long before John transferred in.
John was not a particularly responsible kid -- except with other living things -- but, but, bird! And again, bird! He worked hard at assuming a responsible look. He made his eyes big and sad at the teacher. He was added to the rotation of Mara-looker-afters.
He was the one letting her perch on his finger when Mr. Davis from the class across the hall unexpectedly opened the classroom door. Mara squawked, fluttered this way and that way, and then flew out into the hall through the still-open door. John was not in the forefront of the small horde of children and teachers who chased after her -- he sort of thought maybe she'd like flying for longer; if he were a bird, he'd fly all day and only come down to eat and sleep and stuff -- although, pressed by a vague memory of parakeets being tropical, felt obliged to make sure she didn't get lost or anything.
Mr. Davis was almost on Mara when she freaked and flew out the window. There was a collective shocked noise.
"What happened?" John hadn't been able to see.
"She flew out, and a big gust of wind blew her sideways," his classmate Jamie told him.
"It went 'smack!' against the window round the bend," one of the older kids, who'd apparently been out on a bathroom pass, said gleefully. "Smack! Pow! Down, just like that."
"Is the bird dead?" one of the other kids asked. "I think she's dead."
She was. Mrs. Woo told John many times over the next week that it hadn't been his fault, and the week after that he thought he might even have started to believe her.
*
Then one of the other officers got posted overseas, and her daughters' rabbit was taken over by the Sheppards. Carson had dark fur that wasn't quite as soft as it looked and ears that stuck up jauntily.
He was also kind of boring, and more Luke and Lissa's pet, really. However, everyone made sure to keep his water and food dishes filled, and everyone tried to make someone else clean out his cage lining.
The day Carson had to go in to the vet for his checkup, though, Luke had practice and Lissa was over with a friend. Their father dropped him off with John and Mark and promised that Captain Abrams would pick them up in an hour.
An hour later, Carson having been given a clean bill of health, Abrams picked them up and drove them... not home.
"Where are we going?" Mark asked reasonably.
"Your father was talking to me," Abrams said, pulling into the hangar, "and we thought we could arrange a special treat for you."
The helicopter was dark and sleek and large and the most beautiful thing John had ever seen, except maybe for his mom, or the lady who played Lieutenant Uhura.
"Your father asked me to take you up in her today," Abrams said, and John had never loved the world more than that very moment.
After Abrams had swung himself in and begun the pre-flight checkup, John eagerly clambered up into her, shoving his way ahead of Mark.
And then they strapped in, and lifted off, and John would have spent every moment with either his nose pressed firmly to the window or his eyes taking in every inch of the control panel if Mark hadn't insisted on taking up at least half the room, if not more.
"Hey, Mark, shouldn't you have fastened Carson's cage down?" John said suddenly, hoping to get his larger brother to move.
"You brought the rabbit?" Abrams said, startled.
"You said someone else was going to use the car!" Mark said. "It's not as if the cage would have fit in the cupboard where we put our backpacks."
"...how's he doing?"
"He doesn't look too good," John said thoughtfully. He wriggled loose of his restraints and nearly fell onto the cage, opening it and taking Carson out. "His heart's going a mile a minute."
And then it... wasn't.
"Rabbits scare easily," Matt said over dinner that night. "The flight was probably too much for him, and his heart burst just like that."
"Blood and guts everywhere," Mary gloated, ignoring her older sister's wince.
"Of course there weren't," the culprit scoffed.
Mary's eyes grew wide. Her lip wobbled.
"But I bet if we'd gone higher the pressure would have been low enough for his heart to explode right out of his skin -- "
"With blood and guts everywhere!" Mary cheered.
Lissa shoved her chair back, stood up, and dashed from the table.
"Ask to be excused!" their father said firmly.
"I hate helicopters," Luke growled.
"It's not the helicopter's fault," John said bitterly. "It's Mark's. He ruined the helicopter."
*
A month after that, their cousin Ruth gave Luke and John each a hamster. John's was a dwarf hamster named Radek; according to Ruth, technically he was a Russian Dwarf Hamster, although not actually from a Russian breed. Unlike Luke (who'd promptly renamed his golden hamster Doc), John felt no need to change the name their cousin had given. They pressed both the former rabbit cage and the former aquarium/terrarium into service as hamster dwellings, and every other weekend they connected up an elaborate closed tunnel system between the two for the hamsters to explore and exercise in.
In between those times, John would sometimes take Radek out and watch him carefully as he explored the bedroom floor, or put him in his rolling ball and watch somewhat less carefully.
Unfortunately, somehow or another the hamsters managed to chew through a part of the tunnel system in a corner of the room, and promptly vanished through it while the boys were busy with their homework. Luke and John looked and called for days, but saw not so much as a hamster nose.
After they moved away, they heard that their old house's new tenants had found the emaciated corpses of the hamsters lost inside the walls. That night, John dreamed that their zombies came and ate him up, Radek murmuring "Feed me... feed me... I'm so hungry..." in what John at the time fondly believed to be a Slavic accent.
*
In their new home, John and his mother went to the animal shelter and got a cat. Her name was Norina, and even the girls were told to refill Norina's food and water whenever it ran low.
(John always wound up being the one to take care of the litter box, however. He thought that was extremely unfair.)
The entire family was fond of Norina, but it was John whose bed she slept on at night, John whom she came up on and poked her head in the way as he was attempting to assemble model planes, John for whom she purred most often.
When they went to go camping in the Adirondacks, John made sure that the woman from his mother's bridge club who had agreed to take Norina in for the duration knew everything he could think of about taking care of her. He worried that she wouldn't like their place, wished Mrs. Bevan could come feed and water her and change her litter at the Sheppards', but his father had told them that he would not be a party to handing out keys to military property.
The vacation was great fun even with the persistent mosquitoes, and John was nearly bouncing as he got out of the car.
Until he saw Mrs. Bevan.
He stiffened, cold washing out from his diaphragm.
"I'm sorry," Mrs. Bevan said, twisting the cuff of one sleeve with the other hand. "I'm so, so sorry."
"Pat? What happened?" Mrs. Sheppard asked, voice suddenly growing louder and higher.
"There was a fire," Mrs. Bevan said, staring out at nothing. "We lost... nearly everything, and I'm afraid we couldn't get your cat out, we could barely get ourselves out..."
Oh, no. No, no, no.
"We are not," his mother said later, "getting another pet. When you move out, you can do what you like."
*
In high school, John started volunteering at the local raptor rehabilitation center. (First he was mildly bemused by the fact that there was a raptor rehabilitation center in the area, and then he hadn't made the football team and he wasn't about to join the math club no matter how much he liked math and student jazz band only met twice a week, and so he started wandering around town poking his head in anywhere that looked vaguely interesting. The raptor center was interesting enough that he came back twice and then decided to volunteer -- after all, one, birds, and two, it would look good on his transcripts.)
The bird that John wound up having the most to do with was "Teyla," the red-tailed hawk with the broken left wing. He cleaned her cage. He fed her for the meal period coinciding with his volunteer time, usually with pre-cut chunks of meat such as chicken strips and beef tips, although once he bought a heart from the butcher's out of his allowance and carefully sawed it into shreds (which took up most of his volunteer period for that day -- hearts were tough).
He even, as Teyla's wing mended and the staff at the center got to know him better, was permitted to help exercise her, to spot her as she kept up the strength in her wings without straining the healing one too much.
When the time to release Teyla came, John invited himself along. He tested the fit of her tracking band, even though it had been carefully fitted and tested by the staff. He carried her out on his wrist, holding his arm steady under her great weight, and flung her up and out with his heart in his mouth.
And she took the boost and took off, wings catching the air, a little ragged perhaps but rapidly climbing. He watched her until the speck vanished from sight, and then blinked several times, the strain having overlubricated his eyes.
The next day, when he got home from band practice, a message was waiting for him from the rehabilitation center. Teyla had been mobbed by starlings and killed, perhaps ten miles away. They were retrieving the tracking device that evening.
John didn't go.
*
Ann, whom John was kind of sort of not really dating his senior year, had a great-uncle who kept a wolf and several dogs on his large (fenced, naturally) ranch. When Ann and her brothers had to go out there to help out on the ranch, Great-Uncle Lewis not being up to as much as he had been before, John finagled an invitation -- Ann and her brothers were just as happy to have one more pair of hands around, and John was just as happy to spend time impressing her (and, to a lesser extent, her younger brothers, who were gratifyingly in awe of one of the perpetrators of the Great Locker Room Affair.
Most of what they wound up doing that first day, to John's surprise, was cleaning out the gutters and patching the roof. The dogs wandered in and out, chary of these strangers; John smiled at them, held their eyes, and set about making friends.
The wolf, on the other hand, kept his distance, glaring distrustfully at them.
"What's his name?" John asked, while they were up on the roof.
"Ronon," Ann said.
"Ronan?"
"No, with an o," one of her brothers explained. "Uncle Lewis doesn't spell too good." He quickly looked down to make sure his great-uncle hadn't heard.
"He knows to stay away from us," Ann explained, "because Uncle Lewis is with us, but he wouldn't be safe to run into alone."
"Huh," said John.
The next day, when the dogs came up, he walked in Ronon's general direction and laid a piece of steak down at the point where the wolf began to audibly growl.
"Foolishness," Great-Uncle Lewis grumbled at him when John came back. "Wolves are one-man dogs. It's your own fault if you get yourself bitten, boy."
"So it will be," John agreed, smiling easily, and went to climb up the ladder after Ann.
The Ronon-taming project went on at irregular intervals for a month, and Ronon had decided to leave whenever John encroached on his space rather than stay and possibly attack, when Ann explained tearfully that her great-uncle had collapsed and was in the hospital.
John offered to come over and help feed Ronon and the dogs, and Ann's parents accepted gratefully; they and some of the rest of the family could take some of the friendlier dogs, but the rest really couldn't be moved safely.
Great-Uncle Lewis got worse and worse, but John's relationship with Ronon got better and better; he could get within five feet of the wolf before being left, and he could leave food and back up in order to let Ronon eat it.
Then, one day when he was throwing a frisbee around for some of the dogs (Ronon didn't deign to participate), a car came trundling up the drive and Mark and Mary got out.
"Hey, when'd you get back from Basic?" John called to Mark, and then, more urgently, "Stay there! I'll come over!"
Mary, on the other hand, was already through the gate and running up the grassy slope towards John.
And Ronon, snarling, charged.
"Freeze!" John screamed, helplessly, as Mark threw the car door open and reached into the back. "Play dead!" He desperately tried to intercept, legs pounding, as Mary's nerve broke and she ran back to the car.
But Ronon was gaining on her, uncaring of John's shouts, and Mary's sobs carried through the air as she ran, and Ronon was nearly upon her --
-- and then a shot cracked, and the wolf fell perhaps a foot short of Mary, flung onto his side by the bullet, and John raced to him and dropped to his knees beside Ronon as Mary at last fetched up against the fence and was being patted, maybe, by Mark.
"Did you have to go for the head shot?" John said, his voice sounding odd even in his own ears.
"I'm sorry," Mark said honestly. "He nearly hamstrung Mary," (who cried harder at this revelation,) "and there wasn't any time -- I know we shouldn't have anticipated ourselves -- but Mary's had a terrible time, we should see -- "
"Get out," John said.
"John -- "
"Get. Out."
Mark piled their sister into his car and got.
*
John was never quite sure whether Brigadier General Sheppard, proud father of two promising young officers, one not-so-promising enlisted man, and a youngest daughter eager to herself join the Marine Corps, would have disowned him for going to the Academy or not; after he spent his eighteenth birthday getting adopted by his cousin Conrad John Sheppard, "Uncle John" for short, the question rather became moot.
It did mean that none of his family except for Uncle John and Aunt Athena were speaking to him, but as he liked them rather better than the family he'd grown to that age with, he only regretted it once or twice a week, and not even that often once he was dealing with the Academy's workload and spending his spare time endeavoring not to become as stiff-rumped as most of his fellow cadets.
Then Uncle John was killed (stupid, so stupid, a hit-and-run, and none of them had seen the license plate because they were too busy being pushed out of the way by the resulting victim) and John, still unsteady from his unc-- his father's dying more-than-declaration, had to strive to remain on his feet and less than cast down through the funeral and the grieving resentment of many of his new father's comrades.
Luke at least paid the courtesy of attending, even if without his parents or elder brothers, and murmured that Lissa would have come had their parents let her go.
Aunt Athena, likewise, was a constant if not overly reassuring presence. At the reception afterwards, she informed John that as soon as he was living in some sort of apartment of his own, he would take over the responsibility of his uncle's pet turtle.
"Teer?" John said, bemused. "Why me? Weren't you the one endowed with his worldly goods?"
"I won't remember everything that needs to be done," his aunt said flatly. John was not ignorant enough to fail to realize that her somewhat wooden performance was in fact the best approximation Athena Sheppard could make of neurotypical social reactions, but it still remained a little disconcerting.
"Lissa will hunt up your internal temperature-controller and send it on," Luke promised.
"Uh, thanks," John said, nearly as awkwardly as his aunt and with far less excuse.
Once he was actually taking care of Teer, though, it proved simple enough. He got a somewhat cracked children's pool for her habitat, attached a light and some overhangs, painted his old terrarium black and turned it sideways for both a dark place for her to hide and a flat place to put food, and filled the rest of the bottom with leaves and two tupperware tubs -- one for drinking water, one for soaking.
Granted, she turned out to be a very finicky eater -- she wouldn't eat any meat, only boiled eggs, even when he tempted her with fresh live earthworms -- and hibernating her was a bit of bother, to the point where one winter he didn't because he couldn't find anywhere where the temperature would stay low enough. Even with his temperature monitors (and Teer proved quick to learn how to manage her own).
John never could quite warm up to her, though.
A year later, he hurried back the day of the earthquake, worried that perhaps the temperature regulators had broken; without the thermostat, the apartment would probably remain a little shy of eighty, but the real problem would be if the heater were stuck on or something.
Then he got in and saw the fallen bookcase, and realized that that wasn't the real problem at all.
He really should have gotten the old bathtub. And covered it with heavy glass or a grating. He knew he should have.
His commanding officer, who lived in family housing, offered a corner of his yard to bury Teer in. The Ramirrez children got into it, holding a little funeral and expecting John to give an eulogy. He tried, but spent most of the time staring at the hole, fumbling for something to say.
"I never can think of anything either," Captain Ramirrez told him afterwards.
*
John was pretty sure he was done with pets after Teer's demise.
Then one day he bumped into Lieutenant Mitchell -- whom he sort of knew and didn't have anything specific against -- heard the other's cry of "Shit!", and automatically caught the cardboard box with holes in it as the other man dropped it.
Something heavy moved inside.
"New pet?" John asked.
"It's not mine," Mitchell grumbled. "Sam's going overseas and expects me to take care of Rodney. Like I know anything about how to take care of snakes."
"I had an iguana once," Sheppard said. "My shower's got a door -- does yours? We could put him in there for the moment, if you don't have a habitat set up."
"Sam's got this old bathtub I hauled over," Mitchell said, "but I'm not quite sure how to keep him from getting out."
"Shower for now," John decided. "Which way?"
Rodney, when upended into the shower, proved to be a light brown ball python with golden blotches. John thought the design on his head looked a little familiar; as Rodney promptly curled up in a corner, balling himself around his head, there wasn't much time to judge.
"Is he all right?"
"They do that," John shrugged. "Means he's nervous. Give him time to get over it and he'll come out on his own."
After the fifth or sixth time he would up running in and out of Cameron Mitchell's quarters at all hours for some snake-related problem, though, they decided that it would be easier (not to mention less prone to cause gossip) if they moved Rodney into John's quarters.
"Besides," Cameron said, duct-taping a wire grill over John's shower, "Sam doesn't expect me to take care of the snake so much as to make sure he is taken care of. Which I think you'll do a better job of than me. You're sure you don't mind losing your shower?"
"There's a group one one floor down," John pointed out dryly. "I haven't forgotten what it was like to use one this soon."
Rodney, after initial hesitancy, proved amenable to being picked up and carried about in John's quarters. He would coil up an arm and then sniff at John's head, tasting his hair where it was growing out from its short crop in all directions at once. He would lie on top of John while John read An Infamous Army and Bleak House, often slipping under John's shirt, flicking his tail in possible agreement when John told him that the latter book was more entertaining and more tolerable when one accepted the premise that Esther didn't consciously realize she was desperately in love with Ada.
John was conscientious about changing Rodney's water daily, feeding him weekly with chopsticks (while wearing dishwashing gloves that still reeked of Lemon Pine-Sol) in order to keep him from mistaking John's fingers for lunch, making sure that the temperature of his hot pad was all right (although Rodney proved almost as quick as Teer at learning how to adjust his heat himself). Now and then, he switched out Rodney's climbing branch to give him variety in addition to his occasional trips into John's room. He put down Astroturf in the former shower and sacrificed two plastic bowls to the cause of secure bedroom nooks. When the humidity meter registered low levels, it was easy enough to run the shower for a brief period (usually while holding Rodney out of the way).
And then Rodney started going off his feed, and John couldn't figure out why. He'd never disdained pre-killed food; in fact, the mysterious Sam's notes had indicated that he would eat beef tips or chopped-up organ meats, both of which John had successfully fed him. The temperature was all right. The hot pad was safely under the Astroturf where it couldn't burn him. The humidity was fine. His water had been changed. John tried leaving him alone for longer periods of time, but he still wouldn't eat. And then he started losing weight.
The veterinarian John consulted was similarly baffled, and referred them on to someone else. The second veterinarian announced that Rodney was sick, which John had pretty well figured out for himself, thank you.
John eventually managed to tempt him to eat something, but he was still losing weight.
Three months into the new stage of eating-but-still-losing-weight, the mysterious Sam finally returned stateside and came to move Rodney to his new home. Sam turned out to be a not unattractive woman, and the horrified noise she made when she got a good look at Rodney spoke well for her. She carefully reached out for him, and he willingly climbed up her arm, poking his nose into the hollow at the base of her skull. John would have felt jealous -- that was his spot -- but he was too worried about Rodney's welfare.
He waved goodbye, stupid as it might seem, when Sam and Rodney drove off in her car, temporary terrarium firmly buckled in, Rodney tightly curled up in the blue plastic tub within it.
"Come on," Cam said. "A bunch of the guys are going out to a bar tonight. Get a pass; you look like you don't need to be alone."
Two months later, when Sam sent him a postcard to let him know that Rodney had at last succumbed to the illness which well predated the time when she had handed him over, John decided it once and for all. He was done with keeping animals.
*
"I told you, it's impossible," Ganos Lal, Ascended Ancient of the Danavi, Great Queen of the Island of Britain, Patron Deity of the Animal Plane, said. "He says he's done with keeping animals. Besides, it's not as if I haven't relaxed the rules already."
"And nexsst time, I'd prefer ssssomething with opposable thumbs," the ball python on her left hissed. "Besides, the Massster will undoubtedly get himself in trouble -- "
"More trouble," Teer commented, deadpan.
" -- and someone has to be there to fish him out of it."
"Language," Evan huffed. "Besides, he seems to be keeping plenty of humans already."
"They come when he says 'come' and go when he says 'go,'" Aiden agreed. "So he is keeping at least some animals, even if they mostly keep themselves."
Keras let his eyes go as large and round as he might, while Mara preened and did her best to look pathetic. Norina tapped Radek on the back firmly, and he obediently looked up through his lashes, nervous.
"It seems to me," Elizabeth began firmly, "that considering everything that's happened..."
Ganos rather hoped, eventually, that the humans would have at least as little luck outarguing Elizabeth as she had.
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