The Quiet Ever After

Croissant City - 4

Nina didn't have to search for very long to find Dave and Lindsay, since they'd just dropped Li'l Raca off on the back porch for a bit of dinner. She was guided to the two, who were out on their nightly walk around the other ring of the forest, by Boom, Fwip, and Clang. The three chipmunks had been working on their burrows around the house when they spotted Nina searching for Dave and Lindsay, who had probably been looking for her.

She spotted Ryan, first, as he headed out of the forest, and for a moment thought to ask if he'd seen Axel, but thought better of it. The further she stayed from him the better.

Dave and Lindsay appeared a bit anxious, no doubt about where Isaac had gone off to. They were back at their ramshackle home of bits and bobs from the forest. Bethany lay outside napping.

"Not even here?" Nina muttered. "Shoot. Okay. I'll check the forest and see if I can find Isaac."

The little fellow wasn't one to run off. He was hardly one to run at all. He never clambered into a garbage can and refused to go to anyone's house unless it was one reputable enough for Dave and Lindsay to go to regularly. To call him nervous would be to call him a raccoon: quite the obvious thing.

For him to have vanished fired off too many alarms. Nina used her magic to check for any familiar life forms, and such an outpouring of magic caught the attention of one Lord Carthinox.

The stoic fox appeared on a branch up above, his paws radiating a glowing aura as he clung to the wood.

"My liege," Nina said, but neither bowed to one another. Lord Carthinox recognized her status from the Starlit Plane and did not require such tidings from her. "I'm looking for Isaac, the little raccoon. His family is worried about him."

Lord Carthinox raised one of his paws and pointed deep into the woods. Faintly, Nina sensed the portal to the....

"He went with Axel?" Nina asked, and Lord Carthinox nodded slightly. "What on Earth would get him to do that?"

Naturally, the fox didn't answer. He kept his eyes locked on Nina. Had to be an accident. Maybe as Axel opened it, Isaac got sucked in.

Great. Now she had to try explaining this to a scared family of raccoons.

"Isaac's gone off with Axel to help prepare the food," she said when she returned, deciding to keep a worried tone as far away as possible. She handed them some berries from the forest she foraged. "They'll be back in a few days. Now, you're welcome to come stay downstairs, but I do have to go to work and I remember the last time you all stayed in the house by yourselves."

Dave shook his head. Lindsay glanced at him, then shrugged.

"Lindsay? You okay? Worried about Isaac?"

Lindsay nibbled on her food with confidence. Dave, though, remained stoutly quiet, which was quite unlike him. Normally he liked to be the one eating with bravado.

Isaac and Dave were close. Where one went the other often followed. Lindsay tended to strike out on her own unless it had to do with Li'l Raca. The fact that Dave probably couldn't even sniff out Isaac was worrisome. Nina couldn't imagine some of Isaac's anxiety in that regard. Isaac was about to be overloaded with brand new senses, not to mention the bombast of Itucz could be a bit much even for the experienced person.

When she'd gone after they initially discovered it she became terrified of the place. Only when the group hunkered down there to recover after everything with Faustus and Jericho did she become a bit more comfortable with it, but even that took some weeks' time.

"Axel will watch Isaac," Nina said. "And I'll watch you guys. Come on, you know we wouldn't let anything happen to any one of you."

It did little to lift Dave's spirits.

"Dave," Nina said and got the raccoon's attention. "Do you trust me?"

Nina's heart wavered a bit. She didn't worry for Axel or even Isaac. She did miss him. What had her heart caught up was seeing their friends concerned for one another's well-being. It was something she'd always grappled with: helping people understand they were safe. That everything was okay.

For a long time, she struggled with the concept because of the insecurity lying dormant in her mind that things were not okay, that they would get worse. This, of course, came from knowing the threats the Starlit Plane had in store for Earth, from Trivax to Titania. With all of them vanquished, and only tiny annoyances like Sarzo about, Nina could at last rest easy.

To Dave, and others like him, though, these massive, cosmic threats were hardly something that weighed on him so much as the day-to-day anxieties. Did Brittany worry about having a Phantom coming to the neighborhood? No, of course not, but she did worry about having Kirk and Ben tumbling out of a tree or running into the street without looking. None of them had any reason to fear for Geoff and then...

The quiet life lent itself to great deals of peace, Nina came to learn, as well as many trappings. Nothing came without anxiety, there was never a pure calm in the sea. It was learning to move with the waves, finding a way of building a boat alongside your community that was capable of weathering any storm, that set the mind at ease.

She'd asked others to put trust in her and she'd, admittedly, failed. Her first few years with Axel were nothing but constantly letting him down, in her eyes. He and his friends were always in overwhelming danger and she was the one who was supposed to know how to always get them out of it. When she'd return home from those fights, those near losses, she'd see the hesitant look in her parents' eyes that still haunted her.

Nina vowed never to let that gaze come upon her friends again.

So she steeled herself and smiled at Dave.

"Everything will be fine," she said.

He wrapped his tiny hand around one of her fingers. Nina leaned forward and wrapped him in a tiny embrace. His other hand fell behind her neck and patted her, letting her know that he understood. She nodded and leaned back.

"Okay, you two," Nina said. "Let's go before Li'l Raca decides the most fun thing to do tonight is try to climb up the balcony again."

She jogged back to the house, keeping pace enough for the two raccoons to follow. Li'l Raca, indeed, had attempted to climb up the beam keeping the balcony up because the stairs not many feet from them were that much more boring. Lindsay picked Li'l Raca up by the tuft on the back of his neck. Dave gave Nina a tiny wave, then followed his family back to the forest.

Nina waved back at them, watching them until they vanished into the forest's shadowy embrace.