(The increasingly misnamed) Small piece of Cain fanfic

[Crystallyne]

*Eagerly joins the group and accepts goey melting sugar on a stick as a perfectly acceptable foodstuff*

Wow, I like it too. There is a lot more posted here than there is in the Sakura-Crisis fanwork section.

~Crystal
(holding a huge "Go Risu-chan!" flag)
[img]cool.gif[/img] [img]cool.gif[/img] [img]cool.gif[/img]

[Risu-chan]

@Crystal: ^^;;; That would be because I mailed two more HTMLized chapters to Crisis, several times, over several months, but they never made it into one of the fanfic updates for some reason. Maybe I should switch to pestering Katze... hmmm...

Hostboard's DNS record has been making like a yoyo today - I got here briefly earlier but then something lost track of where it was and I could only get that annoying new Verisign "we didn't find it, do you want to go to one of our paid sponsors instead?" messages. @_@ So I wrote this offline and figured I'd copy-paste-and-HTML in one shot and hope the Hostboard DNS record stays put through the edit so that when I send it, there's someplace for it to get to. @_@ I wish I knew Hostboard's IP address... actually I wish I had access to a Unix box so I could do an nslookup; this is my decrepit ol' Win95 box...

anyway... back to the story... ^__^

-------------------
And so, once again, I found myself marveling at the sheer unpredictability of life with Master Cain. Only a few days earlier, I'd been far from eager to bring Master Cain with me while I took Althea to the village to see to the mundanities of daily life, and I had been feeling quite sorry for myself about experiencing the resulting incendiary moments of interpersonal fireworks. But after that memorable morning of personnel negotiations, I was desperately anxious to find any excuse to take Master Cain out of the house and away from the possibility of unsupervised interaction with the women of the staff. Shopping for and with Althea seemed a heaven-sent respite by comparison.

Despite my most fervent assurances, and despite the passage of several days with neither cameras nor firings, quite a number of them had still retained a distressing tendency to shoot him sidelong glances, burst into tears, drop trays and dishes, and flee sobbing from any room he set foot into. The housekeeper was quite vexed with the week's bill for broken porcelain, and so I had been tasked with purchasing replacements along with the rest of the day's shopping duties.

"So this morning we'll literally set loose the cow in the china shop?" Master Cain asked, with a crooked grin. "Well, as long as Althea hasn't been afflicted with this peculiar variety of dropsy, we should be safe. What on earth's gotten into that cowering little thing -- you know, the little brunette with the curls; what's her name, Meg?"

"Maggie, sir."

"I swear the girl must have gone through two or three teapots this week alone..."

None of the responses I considered were even printable, let alone permissible; so I held both the door of the carriage and my silence with equally firm grips.

The first thing we heard, upon arrival at the cottage, was Althea's voice raised in outrage. While this wasn't an entirely unexpected phenomenon, the fact that a second voice was present to shout back at her was somewhat unusual.

As Master Cain and I stepped down from the carriage, I realized something else as well. They were both speaking some other language; if it had been English, both the volume and the indignation would have made the details of the argument quite clear.

I hurried my steps, in case Althea might be in need of assistance, although it had already struck me that the second voice was that of a child. In Master Cain's service, I had met several deadly children whom I would never dare to leave in Althea's presence -- or indeed anyone's presence, although I had to admit Althea was more likely than most to provoke our less stable acquaintances into a murderous rage simply through being herself.

Something crashed inside, and I knocked more loudly than I might otherwise have done. "I beg your pardon -- is something amiss?"

There was a moment's pause, and then the cottage door was wrenched open, and a boy near Miss Merryweather's age stormed past me without so much as a nod.

"Stop that brat!" Althea snapped at Master Cain.

His brows quirked sharply at the command in her voice, and his natural defiance was briefly cast into a war with his natural curiosity. Of course, the curiosity won; Master Cain hooked the boy's arm with his cane and pulled him to a standstill.

The boy cast Master Cain a disgusted look, and muttered something surly in Althea's general direction.

The first thing she replied was in the same language; and then she changed to English, most likely so that her outraged venting of spleen could be fully comprehended by the widest available audience. "And you are not going back to see that nancy faggot of a priest either! I sold my body to keep you fed, you filthy, ungrateful wretch -- you're not going to get religion and spit on my sinful head for keeping you from starving! You're going to grow up and get yourself a real job and you're going to feed me when I'm too old to sell myself anymore because it's damn well time you paid me back, and I'm not about to watch some doily-bedecked nance take you for an unpaid bedtoy while I've got anything to say about it--"

"He's not like that, you fat ugly sow!" the boy shouted back, shaking. "He's not like you!"

"Of course he's not like me!" she shot back. "I earned the money I've been paid, the money I feed you with! He suckers fools into feeding him for charity, filling idiots' heads with tranquilizing nonsense, and likely naive little boys' asses with--"

"However luridly illuminating the dregs of this conversation might be," Master Cain cut in drolly, "might I enquire as to the precise nature of the dilemma at hand?"

The boy shot Master Cain another filthy look, and said, "There's no 'dilemma,' you snooty toff. I just talk to the priest sometimes. --And that disgusting sow can't heave her swelled-up gut around fast enough to stop me!" He made an obscene gesture at Althea, jerked his arm free of Master Cain's cane-handle, and took off at a run.

Althea drove a fist into the frame of the door, struggling on the edge of tears of rage and frustration.

Watching the boy run toward the village, Master Cain observed, "Your family's distinctive brand of congeniality must run in the blood after all. I wonder what sort of enfant-terrible I've so ignorantly offered to relieve you of..."

Althea shot him the sort of expression I had seen on too many men before: the expression which said that yet again, Master Cain had failed to temper his insights with any compassion for the victim of those insights, and that there would have been bloody retribution if he were anyone other than the thrice-damned poisoner-count of Cornwall guarded by a tall and physically imposing individual such as myself.

Master Cain was inevitably amused when he succeeded in provoking these wordless, soundless visual snarls. I, however, was much more cautious. I remembered quite vividly a fact that Master Cain had perhaps neglected to recall: that Althea was a part of his expenses now, and that keeping a calculating mercenary of a woman happy could prove quite a bit more painful to the pocket than a simple punch to the nose would have been.

Judging by Althea's expression, I didn't think she'd forgotten that angle in the slightest...

[tenjou_sama]

Yaayyy! Marshmellows!!

.....

A new part of the fic! And so quickly! Wow!!

hehe...she called him a brat ^.^

Edited because I typed Cain by accident XD

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ September 26, 2003 11:59 PM: Message edited by: Carole Ann ]</font>

[Crystallyne]

Did she? I thought she was referring to the boy that stormed out . . .

[img]graemlins/hmmm.gif[/img]

Um, yep, I think it was aimed at the young boy, not Cain himself.

Anyway, I like the new update too.

@Risu-chan: Yeah, I haven't seen crisis around much lately; I think it's all the homework ("homework" meaning "parties" [img]wink.gif[/img] ). I bet Katze would probably fix it for you, though.

~Crystal