Endling (Kaito x Gakupo)

Chapter 3

A small crowd gathered around Kaito, watching him and the fae as they arduously tried to communicate in the language of the Warm Isles.

'Ask him if he's really the last of his kind,' a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt proposed through his data assistant.

'Ask him if there are any dragons left!' a blonde girl begged, practically shoving her own device into Kaito's face. Her t-shirt had a particularly impressive-looking red dragon on the front.

Kaito winced internally, wishing he had waited for a moment when the two of them were alone. Attracting too much attention to himself could have unexpected consequences. But it was too late to do anything but move forward. Ignoring the onlookers, Kaito examined the list of pre-made phrases he had written the night before. However, before he decided on what to ask, Gakupo began to write a rather long sentence on the sand of his cage.

The crowd looked on expectantly, as Kaito tried to decipher its meaning. There were a few words that didn't show up in his lists and deducing the meaning from the context proved impossible. Still, he managed to determine Gakupo was trying to tell him something about the circumstances of his capture.

'Too difficult,' he typed back, after a while.

Gakupo sighed inaudibly in response, then erased the symbols and tried something simpler. After a quick search, the meaning of the individual words became clear, although Kaito felt something had to be wrong.

'Where is Titania?' the symbols on the sand seemed to say.

Titania, queen of all magical beings? She was killed in battle many years ago, wasn't she? And what did that have to do with Gakupo's capture? Kaito didn't want to disappoint his friend, but there was no other way around it, so he typed in his data assistant: 'Titania is dead.'

Gakupo shook his head energetically. 'Titania dies, Titania rises. All queens are Titania.'

Kaito scratched his head. Titania's embalmed body was in the City of Enlightenment on display as a trophy, he had seen it himself. Finally, he just shrugged.

Gakupo lashed the ground with his tail in irritation, disturbing the symbols on the sand.

'ASK HIM ABOUT THE DRAGONS!!' The girl with the red dragon t-shirt almost pressed her data assistant against Kaito's nose.

Kaito relented and searched for the appropriate words. Gakupo blinked at the resulting message and his eyes focused on the girl for the first time. After a moment, he nodded cautiously.

While the girl bounced around the room in joy, Kaito tried a few questions from his list. His lack of experience with the grammar of islander language rendered a good number of them incomprehensible, he soon discovered, and the answer to others was too complex for him to understand. Nevertheless, after some laborious back and forth, he managed to gleam a few facts about Gakupo: he was indeed the last of his kind, as far as he knew; he used to live alone before his capture, although he was in contact with other fae, and he wasn't expecting any kind of rescue from his friends.

It made sense. Magic was very dependent on long incantations and taking advantage of the energies of the natural world; a large city like the one they were in was a terrible battlefield of concrete and smoke for wind or wood fae, who seldom had the destructive capabilities of dragons or the sheer physical prowess of deep dwellers. There was no way Gakupo's friends could succeed in such an attempt.

Once that topic was exhausted, Kaito turned to more trivial matters: what foods the endling liked, his favorite color and so on; little details he wanted to know, just to complete the picture of the person before him. For Gakupo was a person, Kaito had decided, despite the arguments drilled into him throughout his life. It didn't matter what Gakupo looked like, he was a rational being; he belonged inside a cage as much as any of the humans surrounding Kaito, or Kaito himself. Once more, as he scanned the lists of words for the right terms, Kaito felt an overwhelming desire to spring Gakupo out and take him home.