Work Text:
Kipperlilly Copperkettle keeps a list of facts about Riz Gukgak.
To be fair, she keeps a list on everyone she meets. (And she does mean everyone.) Her mind sprawls, a vast citadel stuffed to the corners with such details there are days, long days, where her brain feels hot inside her head. On reflection, perhaps she met her oblivious rival at the exact moment her mind hit some kind of critical mass. The kilobyte of data required to catalog him tipping the threshold and all the fans kicked on in her skull.
Chugging like an overtaxed laptop.
(Maybe it's why he dogs her thoughts like he does.)
Kipperlilly has a list for each of Riz Gukgak’s deranged and mollycoddled adventuring party, of course, but even she can admit the list of things she knows about her fellow rogue student is – maybe damningly, certainly significantly – longer than what she knows about the rest of the Bad Kids. There is a kind of dolly zoom around Riz. The others she relegates to a halo of blurry background noise.
It makes sense though; Riz has been in Kipperlilly’s classes since freshman year. He sat next to her for a few weeks when they shared homeroom, participated in class projects, etc. And while she hadn’t known much about him beyond the surface details, she often (more often than she likes to acknowledge) thinks back on what stood out.
The truth was, a lot, but not in a good way.
A: He dressed like a newsie and his clothes smelled like dollar store detergent, the kind a coin-operated laundromat machine can’t rinse out. B: Business cards. (She still has the one he handed her his first day.) C: The way his huge golden eyes had stress-dilated when she asked him, mildly, about the small print on the card. D: The way her lower belly had tightened like a coil and left her confused after he stammered and ran away.
Kipperlilly ignored him, of course, the weird goblin kid with a bad haircut who stank occasionally of vomit and smiled too big, too eagerly, baring every one of his eerily white razor-sharp teeth. (He stopped smiling all together when Holly Maxwell told him his smile was ‘super creepy’ to his face.) Kipperlilly, back then, had wondered with a fascinated revulsion, how much it would hurt if he got amped in a fight and bit someone. Relatedly, she wondered what it would take to send him into a goblinoid frenzy.
She ignored Riz less, however, when the second semester pop quiz – breaking into the rogue teacher’s office to review class rankings – had revealed Riz Gukgak alone stood in a dead heat with her for academic rigor.
They were matched 4.0 to 4.0.
Riz “The Ball” Gukgak: Her on-paper equal.
Kipperlilly recalls it perfectly – the spark of pure undiluted and incandescent rage as she stood in that office reading and how, later that day, she’d put her fist through her locker door and attended her first session with new school counselor. Thinking back, that germinating seed of loathing might actually be what first splintered her heart open to the possibility of divine rage, splitting wide fissures inside her where a rich vein of red could crystalize and grow.
Jawbone O'Shaughnessey, unaware of all this, of course, just saw an angry freshman girl denting up school property. A wiser girl would have kept her mouth shut, but Kipperlilly was new to this kind of rage. She had never succumbed to it before. It over-rode her. Ran her. Roiled up inside her like heart-burn. Word vomiting and incriminating herself in front of an adult and helpless to control herself in her eagerness to tell him how fucking unfair it was.
Eventually, he asked, “Are you saying you wish something bad would happen to your classmate?”
“No.”
Jawbone (he insisted on being called by his first name) nodded before saying, gently, “It doesn’t make you a bad person if your first thought’s not very charitable, you know. First impulses are unfiltered. It’s about what we do with them that’s important. But here and now, in a moment of calm, let me ask: Would you rather not have a peer like Riz?”
Yes, part of her had said, petty and mean, but aloud she’d said, “Well, no. It’s not really ‘winning’ if everyone is an idiot.”
Mister O'Shaughnessey had peered at her over the edge of his glasses, balanced perfectly on his long werewolf snout, his absurd leather jacket really ruining his chill teacher’s aesthetic. “Okay,” he said, reasonable and wrong, “if Riz transferred schools right now, would that make your life better?”
She recalls hesitating.
She thought about Riz Gukgak hunched over his desk, one cheek propped in his palm, his mouth moving silently as he transcribed his thoughts into encoded shorthand, how his soft bat-like ears would twitch and flap absently. How, sometimes, the tufted end of his tail would brush her ankle if she sat in the desk to his immediate right and crossed her knees, to put her foot in the isle between their desks.
“No,” she’d said, rolling her eyes. “I don’t care if he gets good grades. I care if he’s getting the same grades without doing the same work.”
“What makes you think he doesn’t do the work?” Jawbone asked so curiously, so genuinely.
Back then, she’d been embarrassed, had hesitated.
Now though… now she knows better.
Riz looks different in junior year.
Kipperlilly finds herself thinking this despite her very good sense that linear time exists and scrawny teen boys sprout like weeds when you look away from them for more than five minutes, even the goblin ones. (Maybe especially the goblin ones.)
She had been too angry interacting with Kristin fucking Applebees on the first day of school to really register that Riz looked different but looking at him now, she gets out her mental notebook and makes a detailed re-evaluation. He’s a bit taller, taller than Kipperlilly by just a little bit. His clothes fit, like he paid to get them taken in. He ditched the weird newsie hat and got a haircut. Short on the sides, fly-away at the top.
It’s… it’s a good haircut.
Has Riz Gukgak always had great hair? Why the hell did he wear that god-awful hat—?
Riz looks up presently from the stack of papers he’s filling out and with the mien of a spy in a genre-movie, glances around, comically paranoid as he does a perfectly executed over-the-shoulder scan. Looking right through the space where Kipperlilly stands, invisible, studying side of his head. She’s surveying, with interest, the place where his jawline meets his ear. There is small constellation of dark green freckles clustered there, visible now because he’s shaved the sides of his head.
Kipperlilly’s hand itches with phantom sensation. Her nerves lie to her skin about how it might feel to run her palm up the back of her rival's head, imagining the transition from the buzz of his undercut to the loose curls at the top of his skull. Her fingers anticipate what it might feel like if she looped them through the long part of his hair, hauled his head back and—
Jawbone looks at her. “Are you saying you wish something bad would happen to your classmate?”
—she thinks slitting Riz’s throat here in the school courtyard would be a mess, sure, but it’s a nice daydream. She can visualize it; pulling his hair hard enough to make him look back at her, bare his throat, and how she might watch his big kitty-cat eyes go scared before they went dead and—
“THE BALL!”
Kipperlilly barely jukes clear as Fabian Aramais Seacaster bullrushes his team rogue and grabs him in a headlock. He proceeds to give Riz the most disrespectfully affectionate noogie possible while Riz yowls like cat and tries to pry his bigger and infinitely stronger teammate off him.
“Ow! Ow! Fabian! Hey! Ow!”
“Equipment manager!” Seacaster booms merrily before releasing Riz, gasping and disheveled, from his grip. “That’s not so bad. Not so bad. That means we get to hang out after school!”
“Uh, sure. Yeah.” Riz adjusts his glasses. (He did not wear glasses before.) “You know, on the days it doesn’t, uh, overlap with Apiary Club.”
“What is Apiary Club?”
“Bees?”
Seacaster tilts his perfectly quaffed head. “You’re in bee club, The Ball?”
Riz rubs his face, shoving his glasses briefly up his forehead before groaning, “Look, I have like ten minutes before my next class. I really—”
“Okay, okay. Whatever. Look.” Seacaster flops dramatically into the seat next to Riz, back to the table, elbows on top of Riz’s paperwork as he leans in conspiratorial and casual. “I’m trying to set up a cool low-fi study nights thing at my house. Do you want to drop by and consult as, you know, the study guy of the group? Adaine will be there as consulting study gal.”
“Yeah, of course.” A beat. “Wait. Why didn’t you just text the group chat?”
“Oh. I threw my phone in the river.”
Riz tilts his head, ears going airplane flat along his skull. “You can’t keep doing that, dude.”
“It’s cathartic!”
Riz grins, careful with his teeth. Not smiling too big. “Okay. Okay. I’ll be there.”
“Great!” Fabian play-punches Riz in the ribs as he gets up and departs, shouting, “Bardy Boys!” over his shoulder.
“Wait, will Gorgug be there?” Riz stands up on the bench, his tail lashing with enthusiasm.
Seacaster throws a thumbs up as he walks directly into a group of seniors and immediately makes small talk with the absolute charm and confidence that comes with everyone kissing your ass since freshman year. (Kipperlilly realizes far, far too belatedly then she can taste blood, having bit the inside of her lip watching Riz Gukgak and Fabian Aramais Seacaster boyishly wrestle and make after-school plans together.)
Riz hunkers over his papers. Drumming his claws on the tabletop, he seems momentarily at a loss how to restart his previous efforts. Kipperlilly peers over all his documents, but it’s just extracurricular club schedules and class syllabus papers. Nothing interesting. But, for a moment, Kipperlilly stands directly across from Riz.
Just… watching him.
Riz sighs again and rubs his face.
He drags both hands through his dark green hair, exhaling, his blunted claws leaving furrows as they pass through, ending on the nape of his neck, which he cracks with a grunt. This close to him, she counts over a dozen different rings on his slim fingers, a variety of bracelets and a complicated looking watch. Magical gadgetry. New. Probably dangerous. Less tactically relevant but true: His forearms are tattooed with what looks like the same encoded short-hand Riz uses for his school notes.
(Did he tattoo case notes onto his skin? What the fuck?)
Kipperlilly looks down the front of Riz’s rumpled white dress shirt to confirm, yes, the tattoos go well past his arms. She can see letters inked across his collarbones.
Utterly unaware of this scrutiny, Riz picks up a pen and uncaps it between his teeth before immediately losing himself in creating a truly nightmarish class and club schedule in a leather-bound day planner. Kipperlilly memorizes the contents at a glance. Then leans further over the table to get what might be an unwise proximity to her target and watches his hands.
(This close to him, so unwisely close, he smells a bit like lavender and cloves.)
Under the multiple rings on each finger, Riz Gugak’s hands are badly crosshatched with pale, wintergreen scars, paler than the moss-green of his complexion. Like he crawled in broken glass. Whoever healed him had taken pains to smooth the skin closed, cut by cut, so the discoloration is the only permanent evidence of the damage, but she wonders if there’s a texture to the scar tissue.
Riz spits the pen cap onto the table when he finishes the first month of scheduling, then inspects it. He bites his lip in dismay, unbothered by his own delicate, shark-like teeth but deeply bothered it seems by the back-to-back 24-hours gauntlet detailed in color-coded highlighter before him. He puts the day-planner down with a smack.
“Focus up,” he mutters, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “C’mon. C’mon. Focus up.”
Kipperlilly watches Riz dig in his briefcase for a can of vile-looking energy drink which he snaps open at the table and downs in a herculean chug. Riz does it with such gusto, Kipperlilly has a long and interrupted moment watching the fine muscles in his throat move and feels, again, an urgent heat coil tight inside her. She thinks, unbidden, about driving her dagger into his trachea and—
Riz slams the can on the table, breaking the spell.
“Fuck me,” he says. Then, as if correcting himself, “It’s fine. We’re fine.” He waves his hands and exhales, centering himself. “Pressure,” he says, softly, to just himself. “We do pressure.”
Then he bends back over his notes and Kipperlilly leaves him to plan his entire school year down to the minute.
“I’m not allowed to discuss other students,” Jawbone said, rifling through a filing cabinet of student psyche files.
Kipperlilly broke into it already, looking for Riz’s file at the end of sophomore year, but while Jawbone had a folder for her fellow rogue, the contents were just a sticky note saying, GET RIZ TO TALK ABOUT HIS FEELINGS. And another sticky note saying, LURE HIM INTO OFFICE HOURS WITH COFFEE?
“I understand what you’re saying about Riz’s academic… advantages,” Jawbone went on, “but I don’t think it’s useful debating whether there’s favoritism. Not because addressing injustice aint the right move to make, kiddo, but because sometimes life is just like that. I’m more concerned about the intensity I’m hearing from you. You’re… so passionate about this. I worry you could be putting your energy in the wrong place.”
She’d made the right noises back at him but wasn’t sure if he bought it.
Since finding the rogue teacher, Kipperlilly has an abundance of free time.
She spends most of it working on her campaign to win class president and trying to find an opening to reasonably kill Kristin Applebees. (Porter said ‘no’ but Porter isn’t the brains of this operation and if anyone can find the right moment, it’s a mastermind rogue with time on her hands.) To her vast irritation, her efforts are largely foiled by the tiefling bard bitch being on Applebees like a dog in heat.
Kipperlilly develops a specific hatred for Figuroth Faeth fiddling with her tasteless cherry-red electric guitar. Constantly anxiously composing then abandoning songs and then pretending she was just messing around and doesn’t care, totally, hahaha. Then smashing her crystal on the pavement when she gets unwanted texts. (A lot of the Bad Kids smash their phones under pressure, she’s noticed.)
“You gotta stop doing that,” Riz says after Faeth squeaks and smashes hers during a shared lunch period.
Kipperlilly stands, invisible and tucked behind a tree, watching them closely.
“Shit. Yeah. You’re right.” Fig inspects her phone. “I’ll get Gorgug to fix it.”
Kristin Applebee, engrossed in her own phone, says, “Gorgug’s got artificer chops now. It’s, like, good practice you know?”
“Okay, can we focus?” Riz gestures to the day planner he’s got open on the grass between them. “There’s a ton of different clubs here. I’ve convinced all of them to hear you come talk so can we please look at your schedule and see what times work? I’ve got, like, seven speeches I need you to review. Did you get my calendar invites or…?”
Applebees, staring at her crystal and clearly scrolling a variety of Wolf Song social media feeds, not paying attention at all, just nods and says, “Yeah, totally,” then looks up at Fig and turns her phone to show her a picture of her ex-girlfriend leading some kind of prayer circle. “Hey, do you think it means anything that they’re holding hands in this photo? Or is it, just like, that’s what you do in a prayer circle?”
Fig squints at the phone and says, brightly, “Oh. Uh, yeah, it’s totally just because of the prayer circle thing. Honestly, that other girl? A nobody.”
“Guys,” Riz says, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Can we focus on—?”
“I mean,” Kristin says, talking over him in a way that’s clearly not meant to ignore her campaign manager, but is absolutely what she’s doing. “Do you think it’s weird if I liked the photo? Or does it, like, show how cool and okay with it I am? You know? I’m liking the prayer circle situation of it all.”
Kipperlilly watches Riz’s eyes track from Fig to Kristin.
“Guys,” he says, but softly, almost to himself.
Fig gently takes Kristin’s phone away from her and says, “Girl. No.”
“But—”
“This is an intervention. I love you.” And then she smashes Kristin’s phone on the ground.
Riz sputters. “What?”
Kristin, emotionally, says, “You’re the best Fig.”
Riz, his hackles up, ears flat to his skull, leaps to his feet, pupils full adrenaline dilated as he declares, “I’M GONNA GET A SODA. DO YOU GUYS WANT ONE?”
Fig and Kristin immediately beam up at him with unadulterated fondness, chiming in ‘yes’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘root beer, please’ and ‘you’re the best, Riz’ as he practically runs away from them to dash inside the nearest building. He beelines for a dead-end hallway off the main thoroughfare between the cafeteria and main doors. A corner where no one else will be… and Kipperlilly shadows him.
The hall fills with the sound of Riz hyperventilating with increasing speed and volume as he walks, his tail lashing the floor uncontrollably as he moves to stand in front of the vending machines. Faced at last with the brightly colored buttons and suddenly alone, Riz Gukgak digs in his pockets, pulls a few copper from a wallet-of-holding… then bursts into tears.
Kipperlilly stares.
“Fuck.” Riz wipes his face, but his big yellow eyes produce tears at such a volume, his cheeks are soaked instantly, warm water dripping from his chin. He cries harder when his attempts to wipe his face simply soak his shirt sleeve. “Dammit. Stop. Fucking… stupid.” He wipes his face with the heel of his hand, grits his teeth, visibly baring them in sharp monstrous rows as his shoulders shake. “It’s fine. It’s fine.”
Kipperlilly watches. Enthralled.
“It’s okay,” Riz says again to himself. He evens his breathing. He’s braced his hands against the vending machine, leaning against it as if to catch his breath. His eyes squeeze closed as he self-soothes, thinking there’s no one to see or hear him freak out. “They’re just… distracted. Always distracted. It’s fine. You’ve got this.”
Kipperlilly, standing far, far too close, wonders if he’d notice if she put her hand on the small of his back, just to feel the way his ribs rise and fall while he’s losing his fucking mind. He’s gotten his shirts taken in or something. Or maybe his shoulders just filled out a bit over the summer, but the curve of Riz’s spine to his waist, where his suit vest rides up, fascinates Kipperlilly in a way that makes part of her panic a little.
For this crime, she pulls the plug on the vending machine, timing it so the machine eats Riz’s money.
It's probably bad how much joy she feels when the other rogue immediately snarls with a straight goblinoid rage and she hears a gunshot as Riz Gukgak loses what shreds of composure he had left to him and just shoots the lock off the loading door with his gun. He yanks the front of the machine open and grabs six root beers, cursing because regular size soda cans are still a lot to carry for a goblin.
Then he jogs back to his idiot friends.
That night, in bed, staring at the ceiling of her room, Kipperlilly replays the entire thing in her mind. She runs it back and forth in perfect eidetic recall. She flips her knife in her hand and tells herself that her interest in Riz is partially zoological – she’s never encountered anyone like him and she is clinically curious how much stress a creature of his disposition can tolerate before having an aneurysm.
She fantasizes – safely she presumes – about her rival suffering a grand mal seizure in the middle of class, his skinny body going rigid, spine drawn into a violent parenthesis before dropping him frothing at the mouth to the floor where he dies seizing uncontrollably over the course of several minutes. In this daydream, she gets a front row seat. She can hear him choke.
Kipperlilly squeezes her knees together and throws her knife into the ceiling, rolling over to go to sleep.
“Shoot me for suggesting it,” Jawbone said, holding up his hands. “But have you considered that you all might have something in common in the Bad Kids? I know, I know, you’ve got your heart set on them being rivals. That’s fine. That happens. You’re not obligated to like everyone you meet. That’s totally fine. I’m just… offering an option that might have passed you by in its entirety.”
Jawbone scooted a mug of tea a little closer to her, across the little coffee table. His counselor couch acquired a lot more tea stains since last year and he’d upgraded his leather jacket to a cardigan. He listened to her speak for a while, his wolfish face neutrally sympathetic.
“You’re talking about Riz again. Did you notice that?”
“Don’t you think you’re spending a little too much time following Gukgak around?”
Oisin posits this question while they’re meeting at his house for a touch base on The Plan. It’s not that Jace and Porter aren’t useful, but they certainly aren’t smart and sometimes it’s easier to get everything down when it’s just her and Oisin cooped up in a room drawing all the dots together. Oisin is the only one who can keep up with the jumps her brain makes. For that, Kipperlilly can admit she likes Oisin. Something she cannot say for most of the Rat Grinders.
So, she gives his question some thought, even if it pisses her off.
“Losing track of the rogue is how you get backstabbed, Oisin, You should know better.”
Kipperlilly artfully quick flips a stiletto from nowhere directly into the center of the book Oisin is reading, pinning it to the butcher block countertop. She gives him a mean-friendly smile when he slants a draconic look of annoyance her way. His electric blue eyes are weary behind the lenses of his glasses, but she’s good enough at reading her team wizard to know he’s not actually angry.
“See?” She pries the blade from the spine of his book. “Gotta follow the shadow blade, Hakinvar.”
“I don’t disagree,” he says.
“But?”
“But,” he concedes, “you’re acting a little weird about it.”
Kipperlilly cocks her head. “Oh?”
Oisin’s eyes widen slightly, as if registering a threat, then he shrugs. “I mean, I support whatever you want to do. But just… be careful?” He glances sidelong at her. “I know he’s gotten a lot of special treatment with all his sob-story bullshit and whatever. But… he definitely gangland executed a god-thing on live TV.” A pause. “And got the killing blow on Kalvaxus.” Another pause. “Then ate him.”
“What’s your point, Oisin?”
Oisin drums his claws on the kitchen counter.
“What the fuck is your deal?” She slaps her blade flat on the counter. “Spit it out or drop it but stop wasting my time.”
A sigh. “Do you… I dunno, get a kick out of messing with him?”
“Of course I do.”
“No, I mean—” Oisin sighs again. “Never mind.”
“No. I want to hear it.”
“Do you?”
She picks up the knife and levels it at him, just for emphasis, but says, “Spit. It. Out.”
Oisin casts a look at her, pointed as her stiletto. “Do you want to kill him and see if he’ll turn?”
She lowers the blade. “What?”
“Are you, I dunno, kind of into him—?”
“EW! NO!”
Oisin holds up two hands. “Fine! Okay!”
“GROSS! He’s a—” she almost says, ‘goblin’ but stops because Oisin gives her a look— “a fucking freak. The only thing I want is to see him and the rest of his shit-kicking buddies dead and dusted. Permanently.” She spins her knife in her fingers, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. “Don’t be a perv, Oisin. I’m focused on the mission. I’m keeping an eye on Applebees’ campaign and it’s all Riz fucking Gukgak hauling that stupid bitch to the finish line.”
Oisin is still giving her a look.
“What else could possibly be the problem?”
“One: Applebees is weird-factor popular. That’s not Riz. Two: Just be careful.” He goes back to his book. “I think he’s more like you than you want to admit and that means he’s vici— hey! Ow! Fuck!” He leaps back from the kitchen counter, cradling his wrist where she nicked him, her thrown knife off by a centimeter. “What’s your problem? Fuck you! I’m leaving until you stop being an idiot.”
Her wizard leaves Kipperlilly to seethe and (maybe) regret driving Oisin away for the afternoon. He’s wrong of course. It’s offensive and disgusting and no growth spurt, haircut, or the fact he smells a little like ten gold lavender soap and smoke instead of vomit is going to change what he is. (The wizard, Adaine, gifts her teammates nice bar soaps, probably an effort to keep the teen boy BO under control in her adventuring party.)
“He’s a freak,” she says, just to herself.
Unprompted, her ankle prickles slightly, like something brushed past it.
Early in junior year, she broke into Jawbone’s office again to read her own file but found it wasn’t kept with the rest of the student psyche records. (There were, she noticed, a lot of rogue student files that weren’t kept on site. Which made a lot of sense given the demographic’s tendency to rob as a matter of course.) However, Riz Gukgak’s file was still in the cabinet, empty as ever.
She checked its contents.
A third sticky note: GET RIZ TO TALK ABOUT DYING ON STREAM.
A fourth sticky note: GET RIZ TO TALK ABOUT KALINA.
A fifth sticky note: FINANCIAL AID PACKAGE? STRESS COUNSELING?
She put the file away.
Adaine Abernant corners Riz by the fountains during free period in what looks like an effort to keep their conversation private, but Kipperlilly is on top of the lockers, invisible, listening to them trying and failing to keep their voices down. Riz has his briefcase on a shoulder strap slung across his body and three large binders in his arms and an absurd paper hat on his head that reads “Aviation Club Co-Captain”. It’s too big and held in place by his tie, cinched tight to his forehead like a headband.
He looks… well like that. And everything implied therein.
“Riz, you cannot keep running so much of Kristin’s campaign for her.”
“I’m fine,” Riz says tonelessly. Not in a mean way, in a way like he can’t spin up the correct emotion to be comforting to his friend. “I’m…” he blinks, but his eyes don’t close simultaneously, “so good.”
“Your shoelaces are undone and you have your tie around your forehead. Did you know that?”
Riz looks ponderously down at his shoes which are, indeed, untied. He’s wearing red high-top sneakers with his slacks and seems to be realizing this just now. He squints up at Adaine.
“I’m… making bold fashion choices.”
“You need to take a fucking nap.” Abernant grabs his elbow and starts pulling her smaller teammate into the library. She’s so focused on leading a half-sleeping Riz Gukgak to one of the quiet rooms on the far side of the history section, that she absolutely does not detect an invisible halfling rogue trailing behind her. “You’re going to take a nap. I’m going to guard you like a dog and make sure you take a nap.”
“M'fine,” he mumbles, literally already leaning against Abernant’s hip and half dozing. His tail coils around her slim ankle as if for additional support. “M’good.”
“God dammit—”
Adaine looks furtively around to make sure no one sees her. Then she crouches down, hooks her arms under Riz’s knees and around his shoulders and lifts goblin rogue and his million binders into her arms with an un-lady-like grunt. She huffs, then kicks the quiet room door open to carry him inside. She hugs him to her chest a little as she does so.
“Shh. It’s fine. Naps for insane lunatic gun-toting—”
“Noooo,” Riz whines, wiggling.
“You have to—”
“I caaaaan’t.”
Adaine drops Riz into a chair in front of a table. She starts pulling a fat length of blanket from her jacket pocket of many things, swiftly draping it over him. Like putting a blinder over a horse’s head.
“You’re not sleeping on the job,” she soothes, sing-songing slightly. “They canceled the AV Club meeting. You’ve genuinely got a free period, Riz. Think of the blanket. It’s so fluffy and good. That’s a ten-gold blanket right there. So nice, right?”
“Holy shit, that is nice.”
Riz starts crying a little.
(Kipperlilly has come to realize Riz Gukgak cries much more than the average teenage boy over things that range from ‘someone gave me an extra pudding cup’ to ‘wow, this blanket is fluffy’. It fills her with a venom so toxic it eats at things inside her. If she hadn’t been lying to Jawbone for the last six months, she might have recruited his expertise in diagnosing the matter, but as it is, she stands there with acid in her veins while it corrodes parts of her that may or may not be load-bearing.)
Adaine swoops in to give Riz a hug from behind, strait jacketing her friend into a warm and fluffy cocoon. She squeezes him, growling, “Go to sleep.”
“But—”
“Head down.” She pushes him over so he’s chest down on the desk. “Go to sleep.”
“I… okay. Just… just for lunch.” He lifts his head anxiously from his folded arms. “Okay? Adaine? Wake me up. I can’t miss any class—”
“I would never let you miss class, Riz. I’m going to be right outside the door.” Adaine is pulling a scented candle from her pocket and setting it next to Riz’s elbow. “Sooo, relaxing. Sooo nice.” She lights it with her finger and pulls a small throw pillow from her pocket. It’s far too big and she really has to yank to get it out. “Fuck. Okay.” She tucks the pillow into Riz’s arms and gives him a smooch on the head for effect. “Sleepy time.”
Riz mumbles, arms wrapped around the throw pillow, half groaning, “Thank you, Adaine. You’re the bessssst.”
Then there is snoring.
Adaine, unseen by any but Kipperlilly, pumps her fist victoriously. Then she shuts the study room door with the care of a new mother having put down her infant… leaving Riz sleeping soundly with Kipperlilly Copperkettle tucked into the corner of the room behind him. She waits until she’s sure Abernant is completely occupied outside with her hilariously ineffective task of guarding her teammate. (Though, Adaine being immediately present does mean she can’t do anything serious to Riz. But still.)
Kipperlilly ghosts near. There’s a dichotomy to her as she does – a riot in her nervous system that doesn’t reach her calm, utterly controlled exterior. Rogues keep a steady hand in all conditions, after all. She takes a seat on the tabletop directly next to Riz Gukgak, where he's resting his head on his arms, a squashy and misshapen throw pillow hugged under his cheek. He’s drooling a little. He smells like he hasn’t showered, a faint aroma like overripe fruit rising from his underarms.
It’s gross. He’s gross.
Despite this, her hand hovers like an uncertain halo over the top of his head, not quite touching his nest of green curls as a squalling thing inside her protests the dangers. She hangs there, in a burning limbo, close enough to feel his body heat against her palm and let sense war with impulse. She likes it. This. The potential energy in her hand.
I could kill you, she thinks.
He doesn’t wake up.
Far from killing Riz Gukgak, Kipperlilly brushes her finger along the soft, slightly downy length of his right ear and is rewarded with a reflexive little flap. His face scrunches and he turns his face into the throw pillow, mumbling. His ear twitches again when she touches it same way. Does that a few times before the reflex dims and she’s left sitting there, gently rubbing the tip of his ear between her fingers.
There’s no defense for this behavior.
She is off the deep end here and a little manic with the fact, her nerves soaked in gasoline and chemically charged, anticipating her own ignition, but in what way she cannot admit and the longer she stews in the fumes, the further into the stratosphere she is going. What the fuck is wrong with her?
Then, all at once, the slow noise of Riz’ snoring converts to a rumble. She startles but Riz stays inert, the new noise originating from somewhere deep in the sleeping boy’s chest. Kipperlilly blinks. Riz… Riz Gukgak is purring. She didn’t… she wasn’t aware that was a thing goblins could do and feels marginally weirder about touching his ears. She stops. She was trying to be a bit haughty and roguish. Not trying to literally pet her rival for valedictorian.
“Freak,” she mouths.
Then she brushes his bangs off his forehead with the same level of hair-trigger delicacy she’d give a deadly pressure trap. He continues to purr, something in his throat and diaphragm working independently of his breathing; his eyelids twitch with rapid eye movement, already deep in sleep and dead to the world in a way that’s probably dangerous. Physiologically incapable of waking from what his body desperately needs.
Kipperlilly hesitates, then she reaches under his torso where he’s bent over the desk.
She glances at Abernant, still diligently watching for all comers outside the room, and presses her palm slowly to Riz’s right pectoral, just over his heart, to feel the vibration hum through her hand into the bones of her wrist. He’s warm through his shirt. Almost feverishly so. When the intensity of the rumble picks up a little bit, unconsciously reacting to the warmth, she runs her spread palm down his ribs a little.
Kipperlilly gets a sudden flash of Oisin giving her a side-eye in his kitchen.
She pulls her hand away.
Okay. Right. This is… this is weird. She needs to stop. She can’t—
“Adaine?” Riz mumbles, still very deeply asleep.
The blonde wizard girl remains happily engrossed in a book outside, scanning for exterior threats to Riz Gukgak’s nap. Meanwhile, inside the study room, Riz sighs as an invisible hand runs indulgently up the back of his neck to the top of his head, carding fingers through his hair with a cat-burglar’s attention to detail. It is shockingly soft, like dark green down against the skin, silky between the fingers.
Thirty minutes later, Abernant gingerly shakes Riz awake.
“Wow, you’ve got crazy bedhead.” Abernant, unlike every other wizard Kipperlilly has ever known, doesn’t appear to have prestidigitation and immediately fingers-combs his bangs into an artful floof. Then she fixes his shirt cuffs and adjusts his shoulder holsters to hang better along his flanks. “There.” She straightens his tie and dusts his shoulders for invisible dirt. “Now you’re perfect.”
Riz yawns massively, jaw not… quite unhinging but goes wide enough to be alarming. He rubs his eyes absently. Adaine, meanwhile, doesn’t seem phased by this goblinoid quirk of anatomy, gathering some scattered papers for him while Riz flaps his ears sleepily. She adjusts his lapels with the easy intimacy of someone who does it all the time and Kipperlilly realizes there is, perhaps, a reason he mumbled Abernant’s name when someone touched him gently in his sleep.
“Thanks, Adaine.”
“Hey.” She holds up a fist. “Nerd Club.”
He grins with more of his sharp, white teeth than he did in first semester. In profile, it does something to his features, crinkles the corners of his big gold eyes, dimpling his cheek, bringing something out from under all the stress and frenetic vibrato. There’s soft and radiant calm in his expression, buoyed up from the depths, fished out by Abernant. Relief fashioned into a shy grin.
The adoration has a heat to it, feels almost physical in its intensity except nothing at all is happening. His tail swishes happily on the floor. He bumps knuckles with his party wizard.
“Nerd Club,” he whispers.
When they are both gone, Kipperlilly drops invisibility and sits in the study room for a while, taking Riz’s chair while her nervous system remains a burning nest of nerve and fire beneath her skin. Her fingers ache with phantom sensation and try as she might not to think it, she does herself the irreparable damage of admitting she wants to see what it would be like if Riz Gukgak smiled at her.
Then she contemplates a very unwise plan of action.
“Kipperlilly, can I ask why you feel the need to bring up Riz Gukgak when we’re talking about you? If I’m not mistaken, you two haven’t actually talked much since freshmen year. And you… didn’t talk much then either in your descriptions of your relationship. Do you honestly care what he has a going on?”
Jawbone crossed one long digitigrade leg, his denim jeans rustling slightly. He listened to her answer.
“I understand. Maybe that’s true, but the fact of the matter is that lots of systems unfairly favor some people over others. I am not saying that’s exactly what’s happening here, but even if it was… I don’t see how fixating on him is helping you build a better future for yourself.”
He listened intently.
“Can you explain to me how the unexpected death of a parent could be an advantage to an adventurer?”
Kipperlilly uses a potion to physically transform herself into a bloodrush kicker on the Owlbears.
She doesn’t trust an illusion to hide her in close proximity.
Best to commit.
She picks a stocky half-orc kid named Ongir, a senior, a nice guy whose perfectly blended high-elf and orcish looks have made him incredibly popular with most of the student body who have eyes and like pretty people. Kipperlilly picks him because, as a kicker, he spends more time on the bench and warming up on the sidelines and therefore hangs out a lot with the team equipment manager, Riz, during games.
They seem like they’re friendly.
Ongir has Riz’s crystal number and follows Riz’ business profiles online. He likes most of Riz’s posts. He is also, at eighteen years old and emancipated since sixteen, the legal guardian for his little sister Elga at Elmville Elementary. He cuts practice immediately and without question when Kipperlilly spoofs a call from her school saying that little Elga is crying uncontrollably asking for her big brother.
So Riz thinks nothing of it when she closes the door to the equipment room while everyone else is practicing outside.
He looks up and grins, “Hey, Ongir. Did you need something?”
“Nah, just hiding.”
Riz flaps one ear, puzzled, crouched among stacks of sweat-smelly sports equipment where he’s clearly taking inventory and organizing things after the last away game. He looks so comically small among the full-sized bloodrush padding and helmets, it makes Kipperlilly aware of her borrowed body and significant weight advantage in a way that’s a little dizzying. She knows better than to start a fight in a body that she doesn’t know, but she suspects her hand – Ongir’s hand – could easily encircle Riz’s entire throat.
She wonders…
Riz stands up, tail flipping curiously behind him. “Are you okay?”
Kipperlilly blinks. “Oh. Yeah, just a little stressed out.” She lifts a hand to rub the back of her disguised neck. “Got a call from my sister’s school. She’s fine, but my head’s not in the game, you know?”
Riz, hearing this, puts down his clipboard and moves to pat her on the forearm, too short to reach Ongir’s back. He’s careful with his claws.
“You, uh, wanna sit down? I can get you a water.”
Kipperlilly, pretending to be Ongir, slings her backpack to the ground and sits down with a huff, bracing her back against one of the equipment cages. She made certain to buy the same backpack as her target and broke into his locker to get his sweatshirt. So Riz’s detail-oriented brain doesn’t pick out an obvious discrepancy when she digs around and produces a small black vape. (Another reason she picked Ongir. He’s not a ‘smoker’ per say, but that’ll do.)
She takes a long drag from the little machine and exhales toward the ceiling. She discretely flips a switch on the side of the little device and offers it to Riz.
He hesitates.
Kipperlilly smiles with Ongir’s face and says, “C'mon. I know you don't smoke. It’s just hooka, I promise.”
And thus peer-pressured, Riz takes the vape and experimentally inhales. Not like he hasn’t done it before but like he has and is bracing himself for an unpleasant experience. He doesn’t know it, but even if he doesn’t take the smoke into his lungs, the poison laced into the secondary cartridge is going to hit the second it touches mucus membrane, so it really doesn’t matter what he does to politely appease his bloodrush teammate.
Experimentally, Riz opens his mouth to let coils of smoke unravel from between his teeth, like a dragon releasing smoke, the gray vapor coiling up into the curls of his hair. He seems briefly mesmerized by the interplay of the smoke as it rolls up and over his face… then Riz coughs violently, ears flattening to his skull. He shakes his head.
“I can’t,” he croaks. “That’s… uh, soooo good.” He coughs again. “But not for me.”
Kipperlilly laughs with Ongir’s voice and takes the vape back. “You probably have a better nose than me. Sorry.”
Riz’s eyes are watering. “You said Elga’s okay though?”
“Yeah, totally. Just scared me.” He shrugs. “Coach will understand if I sit out, I bet.”
“Yeah, Gortholax is pretty chill for, you know,” Riz shrugs, “a former archdevil from hell or whatever.”
Kipperlilly tilts her head. “Can I ask you something, Riz?”
“Sure.” Riz’s ears perk up, visibly excited that a classmate appears to be confiding in him. He clears his throat and adds, “I’m all ears.” A beat. “That’s, ha, not… not a goblin joke. I’m listening.”
What a fucking moron.
Kipperlilly waits a little longer, before asking, “Do you have a type?”
Riz blinks.
“A type of what?” There’s a long beat. Then he seems to re-wind the conversation in his head, and his face goes faintly pink. “Oh! You mean for dating?” His voice has gone up an entire octave. “Why? Uh, why, do you ask?” He sounds panicked now, eyes darting around the equipment room and to the door and Kipperlilly watches Riz Gukgak consider running from this conversation in real time. “Did someone say… something?”
Kipperlilly shrugs. “Maybe. I heard someone say they liked your new haircut.”
Riz unconsciously reaches up to touch his hair, then quickly drops his hand, going bright red through his cool-tone complexion. “Uh, uh, cool. That’s cool. Um, do I need to… should I—?” He clears his throat. “Why are you telling me this? Did they ask you to tell me? Is this—?”
“People are just… curious what you’re into.”
“HAHA! WHY?!”
Kipperlilly wasn’t sure what she was expecting poking at this line of questioning to play for time, but not a full-blown crash out on the part of her long-time academic rival and guy who helped kill multiple world-ending threats. Riz Gukgak ate their freshman principle. Literally. But the prospect of multiple people perceiving him as an object of intrigue has his engine rattling of the rails.
Kipperlilly, fascinated, puts her thumb on the scale and starts to push. “Um, probably because they’d like to fuck you, man. What else?”
Riz goes white.
“Cool. Cool. Cool,” he says way too fast.
“You don’t want to fuck?”
“Please stop saying ‘fuck’,” Riz whispers.
“Are you… kidding?”
“Sorry. You caught me off guard. No one’s ever—” He pauses, horrified. He stammers, “I mean I haven’t had a lot of time to think about that stuff, ha, you know, with all the extracurriculars and the Night Yorb, Kalvaxus, and the Nightmare King and… and…”
Name dropping little shit.
“Look, I just… I don’t date. I don’t date right now. I—” He rubs one arm as if for comfort, then slowly admits, “I might not ever date, actually.” In the time it takes Kipperlilly to realize he’s making a confession of some kind, possibly for the first time to anyone, he gathers up some courage and meets her gaze. “It's not a big deal, but I don’t… I don’t think I like that stuff, honestly.”
Kipperlilly waits, holding Riz Gukgak’s heartfelt admission in her hand like a stone.
Then, bringing it down on his skull, she says, “So you’re a virgin?”
Caught brutally off guard, Riz recoils. “W-what? No. I mean, yes. I mean— what?”
“How do you know you don’t like it," she persists, "if you’ve never done anything before?”
“I— What the fuck does that—?”
“Hey, lots of people like giving a first timer a ride, you know. And you’re, uh, easy to pick up.”
Riz, frozen with bare faced hurt at this cruel and undeserved onslaught, suddenly goes tense. His eyes widen. The fringe of his hair slides into his rapidly un-focusing gaze and he tries with dawning dread to step back… and stumbles.
“What’s wrong, Riz?” She feigns concern. “Are you feeling okay?”
Riz shakes his head, hard enough his ears flap a little and his hand goes over his nose and mouth. Another heartbeat. Foreign material races deeper through his blood stream. His other arm flails blindly behind him, his fingers hooking the gaps of another equipment cage as his equilibrium goes out and he staggers. His shoulders bounce back against the fencing. He claws the cage for support, hauling himself upright against it.
“I… dont…” His gaze darts to the backpack that’s too new, to Kipperlilly’s out-of-the-box clean sneakers, then up to her growing smile with huge, terrified gold eyes. “You’re not… On…gir…”
And then his knees give out and Riz collapses on the floor of the equipment room.
There’s a long silence, the sound of the coach’s whistle outside and the deafening thunder of bloodrush players battling it out in a scrimmage game against one another, the cacophony of the school band practicing for the next big game against the Hellions next week. So much noise penetrating the silence in this tiny room where Kipperlilly Copperkettle has one of the Bad Kids down for the count and one on one.
She can hear Riz moaning softly.
She pushes herself leisurely up from her seat against the ball cage.
Riz is laid out on his stomach trying desperately to activate something on his wristwatch, but his hands shake so badly with decaying motor control his fingertips just brush, feather-light, over the wristband while she watches. Waiting. Giving him a chance to save himself so the fact of how fucked he is can really take root, penetrate to the bone while the toxin starts to melt colors inside his brain. He shudders, his entire body tensing as sensation starts to hit his nervous system, vicious and unfiltered before stopping.
He goes limp. He pants. Sweat drips from his chin as he lifts his face, saying, “Why—?"
Kipperlilly gets on top of Riz.
“Which—” Riz bites down on a sob. “Which one are you?”
She rolls him onto his back, trapping his legs under her shins and stripping the gun from his shoulder holster, tossing it across the room. He’s too delirious now to yell. He just growls and squirms, panic creasing his expression as Kipperlilly plucks his glasses off his face, stacks his wrists against his own chest and pins them there with one big hand. The bones in his arms feel so thin in her grip. His ribcage fragile under her fist.
“Don’t worry,” she says, staring down at him. “You’re not going to remember any of this.”
Riz makes a strangled noise of panic. His big golden eyes dart wildly, horror stacking deeper with every passing heartbeat that he fails to get away. His pupils are blown, his breath fast and frantic in the birdcage of his chest.
She leans in. “Not so smart after all. Are you?”
“Wait." His eyes widen. "Kipperlil—?"
She grabs his chin and drives his head back against the concrete.
Riz immediately stops moving. Stunned. Even poisoned out of his fucking mind, he’s too tough an adventurer to go down from a single simple blow to the back of the skull. He groans, turning his head slowly, trying to roll over, to get away from the source of pain. She grabs him. Turns out, the span of her transformed hand does, in fact, fit all the way around a goblin’s slender throat.
(Jawbone looks at her, across time and his office, with the shelf full of spider plants and peace lilies, his big wolf eyes regarding her like a predator might regard another. “Are you saying you wish something bad would happen to your classmate?”)
Riz’s mouth tastes like coffee.
Sour and sharp. Completely fucking disgusting. Kipperlilly cuts her lip immediately on his teeth because he’s all but unconscious and she’s all but feral alone in this room with him. Copper pain floods her mouth and like swallowing whiskey from a bottle it puts heat inside her hot as the rage that brought her to her knees like this. She pulls Riz’s skinny necktie loose, kissing him until her own mouth is bruised.
“Not so fucking smart.”
She kisses him again, says it against his mouth as his breathing gets labored.
“Everyone thinks you’re so fucking special—”
She keeps her tongue only because Riz snarls before he tries to tear her fucking throat out. His eyes snap open and some animal adrenaline reflex surges through his skinny body, busting through the narcotic running rampant in his brain. She jerks back but he sinks his teeth into her shoulder and rips a strip of skin open to the muscle beneath. Blood sprays the equipment lockers. She shrieks, body-slamming him back to the ground.
“Fucking freak!”
Riz spits her own blood at her, snapping like a rabid dog. He hisses, throat-noises that might be a dialect, but wet with gore down his chin like paint. There’s nothing left of the awkward kid who maybe doesn’t date in his eyes now. Kipperlilly holds him at arm’s length as a rage that rivals hers – natural-born and utterly masked until this moment – roils forth and Riz Gukgak tries to bite her to death through paralysis and injury.
His frenzy speaks to her. Something in how his eyes go nearly completely black with hatred, his fingers clawing her arm as his brain boils all sanity and shyness out of his skull. How, in this moment, he’s pure and undiluted. Just a beautiful thing focused on nothing else, wanting nothing else, committed only to the task of killing her…
Then Riz’s eyes roll back, and he passes out on the floor of the equipment room.
Silence then. The drip of her blood on the floor. Kipperlilly made aware, suddenly, of her own ragged and gulping breathes in the aftermath. Her fingers soaked in warm copper.
Then there’s banging on the door.
“Hello?” Someone rattles the handle. “Riz? You in there?” Muttering. “Why is this door locked?”
Kipperlily comes back to fucking earth with a gasp. She lunges to her feet in a panic, staring at the fucking crime scene she’s left here. Riz Gukgak, fully unconscious on the ground, disarmed, clothes disheveled, her blood all over this room. She’s no wizard, but she prestidigitates the forensics off the floor and off Riz. The magic buttons his dress shirt and vest, fixes his tie, artfully disheveling his hair until the only sign something terrible has happened are Riz’s glasses and gun on the floor.
More banging on the door. “Hellooooo?”
No time. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
Kipperlilly pulls a potion from her pocket, swearing, soaking her shoulder to stop the bleeding.
She scoops Riz up in her arms, whipping around and – okay, she might be panicking a little – shoves him in an equipment locker like a corpse. Then she goes invisible and unlocks the door. Seconds later, the knob turns and Gorgug Thistlespring sticks his shaggy head inside. The gangly half-orc towers awkwardly in the doorway sweaty, wearing grass-stained bloodrush padding and looking around like a puzzled puppy.
“Riz?” he says, scanning the lockers and moving into the room. “Hey, Gortholax is ordering smoothies for the team. Do you want one?” His dark eyes drop, picking out his teammate’s arcane weapon immediately where it lies on the ground. His voice gets urgent. “Riz?”
Kipperlilly slips through the open door behind him.
“Riz? Are you in here?”
She runs, but she still hears it when Gorgug starts to yell for help.
“I worry,” Jawbone said, during a late after-school session, “that this fixation on Riz isn’t really about Riz. It’s not healthy. You should focus on your life, within itself. Not in comparison to others and certainly not in comparison to Riz Gukgak.”
He sighed, taking off his glasses to lean down, setting his elbows on his knees to meet her eyes.
“It’s going to blind you to other possibilities. You’re going to end up orbiting him in your efforts to beat him. It can only end badly. Do you get what I’m saying? You don’t even know this kid, you know? You don’t— It’s not healthy. I really hope you hear me on this, Kipperlilly. I want you to do well, kid. Okay? See you next week.”
As Kipperlilly Copperkettle dies – burning alive beneath the shattered floor of her school gymnasium, vitreous jelly boiling out of her eye-sockets, her body erupting in flame – the last thing she sees is Riz Gukgak standing over her with his hand outstretched. She’s clawing the inside of the net he threw over her, shrieking, the rage inside her agonizing as the fire that’s eating her. His slitted gold eyes shine in the dark, the glow of the lava throwing shadows across his face.
Just one predator watching another die.
And Riz smiles at her with all his teeth.