Lost Is Our Homecoming (Team ShaZaM)

"Keep looking--around," Zeke snapped between wheezes, not even looking at Maggie. If he looked at what the expression on her face, what he was sure was going to be a shit eating grin, Zeke didn't know if he would be able to keep himself from slugging her. Again. He did a lot of slugging Maggie. She deserved every punch to her fucking arrogant face that he gave her too.  "For a--place to stay. Somewhere fucking--safe." And free of lube and dildos, preferably. 

It was starting to look like he actually might have to believe her crazy ass ideas about the God living on some Floating Island or whatever. Zeke was prepared to follow whatever lead he had at this point, no matter how crazy it was. Sex shops marked as Libraries had convinced Zeke that this place just didn't abide by the rules.

He stumbled back a step, the head butt coming as unexpected. Blinking, he looked down at the monkey child that had an ear plastered to his chest. If it had been anyone except for Shiv, Zeke probably would've head butted them right back. Now Zeke looked at Maggie with a puzzled expression, almost as if he was silently asking her for an explanation for the child's strange and sudden behavior. 

"Dying?" he repeated. Oh. She was concerned because of his asthma. "No. I just have a--problem breathing sometimes." 

Zeke had never been sick a day in his life, but he did have a chronic illness that had always been difficult to control. Zeke was pretty sure his disease-monster heritage had bit him in the ass, but Zeke was considerably less concerned with the condition now that he was older. As he had grown, it had actually gotten a good deal better. When he had been young there had been times it was positively impossible to draw breath that had scared his poor mother to death. Himself too. 

His sister didn't have the same problem, but she didn't need that on top of all the other problems that she had. 

"I'm fine. Don't worry about it, Shiv." 

Now she could be wrong, but Shiv was fairly certain that breathing troubles tended to result in death. Just one of those funny coincidences really. And a testimonial of health was not particularly convincing from someone making noises like that. It wasn’t that she thought Zeke was a liar per se, but in her experience adults had a habit of lying to her about things they thought she couldn’t understand. It was a little annoying really.



“What’s that?” Shiv reached toward the thing Maggie was forcing into Zeke’s mouth- not to take it, just to touch it a little. She watched the bit of interaction with all the fascination of someone who literally had no idea what was going on. Shoving things into the mouths of people who weren’t breathing properly didn’t seem like the brightest plan to her, but she trusted Maggie knew what she was doing.



Shiv craned her head up to her as she spoke, blinked once, and said “Okay.” It was much easier to accept that Zeke was not going to die today than the idea that his abominable chest squeak wasn't out to kill him at all. It just meant it was something she wouldn’t have to think about until tomorrow.



Her feet were starting to ache again. Without so much as a little forewarning she jumped up and pulled herself onto Zeke’s shoulders. Then, reconsidering the wisdom of riding someone who was definitely probably kind of an invalid, used him as a springboard to leap up and latch onto Maggie. She was a much higher vantage point anyway.

Zeke didn't even bother yelling at Maggie about how inhalers actually worked or snarl about how he had never been fucking small enough to fit into a fucking thimble. Yelling at people for calling him small actually happened to be a favorite pass time of Zeke's, but maybe he just didn't feel as small lately since there was someone in the group that was, for once, smaller than even he was. He kept his eyes plastered on the sidewalk, rubbing his fingers back through his hair occasionally. He kept looking for a stone or a piece of garbage that he could kick but there didn't seem to be anything. Despite being devoid of life, the streets were so fucking pristine there wasn't even a bit of trash for him to kick. That pissed him off, but he didn't have the energy to throw another tantrum.

Weapon-wielding was something Zeke indulged himself in very rarely as it was addictive and dangerous business. His frustration with the fact that he still didn't know where the fuck he was, where the fuck his family was, or how the fuck to get out of here though made the idea of smashing shit with flying knives quite appealing. Zeke made a sweeping motion with his hand in front of himself, and Crusty, seemingly from nowhere, came zooming over head and smashed into the window of the nearest building to make a delightful smashing noise.

The motions continued with both hands, like Zeke was conducting some sort of sick orchestra, and one after another the windows broke as spinning knife bashed through them.

"This--is such--bullshit!" he hissed under his breath. "Where--the fuck--am I--what the--FUCK--is going--ON!?"

Shiv stared intently at her thumb as Maggie answered her questions. She made a circle with her hand around the middle of it, and pulled it off like a ring- that was pretty small. And to fit inside, Zeke had to be even smaller (Shiv took a moment to mull over the vast array of sizes People apparently came in. It seemed to her that People were more like Trees than Nomads. Her Mumma had told her babies started out bigger than seeds because they had less time to grow than trees (Some trees were so old that her mother's mother's mother couldn't even remember when they were seedlings.). By that logic, People had to live for a long time indeed if they started out seed-sized and ended up Maggie-sized (Or bigger. She couldn't quite wrap her head around that yet.).).

She was about to ask what Zeke had done to make the world hate him (It couldn't have been that terrible, after all, Zeke was Zeke.) when she heard something shatter loudly. Squeaking like she'd just been stepped on, she bounced and scrambled backwards until she was comfortably sure that Maggie's broad shoulders were between her and whatever was making the noise. (She didn't think particularly hard about using Maggie as a meat shield- after all she was reasonably sure she could stop anything coming at them with girth alone.).

Of course, by the time that had been achieved Shiv realized that most of the crashing was happening behind them, and by the time she realized that it was only Zeke (and Crusty) being loud again, she'd shot back up Maggie's back and had hooked both hands into her hair, ready to propel herself up and away into the safety of one of the branchless trees.

She let herself slide back to her original position. This newfound discovery didn't really stop her from being tense or wincing with each crash, but it did make her try to achieve both. Eventually she just reached behind one of her ears and folded it against her head to try and mute the sound. It helped, a little. 

Shiv was suddenly being suffocated in an abundant amount of cleavage and Maggie was trying to dance away from the the questions about her family like a particularly mischievous ballerina cow in a bow tie. Zeke's expression instantly changed from sour to one of distressed concern as he heard the sounds Shiv was making. He didn't watch her scramble for release from Maggie's embrace for long, quickly darting toward them to begin repeatedly punching her in her rock hard thighs with both of his little fists. His face became bright red again, spittle flying from his lips as he hollered at her in the middle of the street. Obviously Zeke wasn't worrying about possibly scaring Shiv again through screaming expletives left and right.

"AND YOU'RE SUFFOCATING HER YOU STUPID FUCK! I DON'T GIVE A SHIT WHAT MAMA WOULD SAY MAMA IS NOT FUCKIN' HERE RIGHT NOW! LIKE I SCARED HER BUT NOW YOU ARE GOING TO DAMN NEAR STRANGLE HER, MAGS! PUT HER DOWN! I SWEAR TO FUCKIN' FUCK YOU ARE A PIECE OF INSUFFERABLE SHIT I'M SO SICK AND TIRED OF DEALING WITH YOUR GIANT STUPID FUCKIN' ASS I DON'T NEED YOUR BULLSHIT RIGHT NOW MAGS WE'VE GOT ENOUGH BULLSHIT--" 

If Mags thought she was going to get out of talking about her family she was dead wrong. He was going to corner her about it as soon as he got the chance.