Summary: Enevere plays dressup and Raphael is paranoid - again.

Warnings: None. /

Disclaimer: Enevere and his world belong to me. So does Earth. Raphael, on the other hand, belongs to himself and will probably sucker-punch you if you try to kidnap him.

A/N: Yeehaw, two chapters in a month! Well, this one's like a demi-chapter because it's pretty much just a filler. But still. (:

Chapter Six

In which there are Shimmery Gold Pants.

“So I’m in your world?” Enevere was a little confused. He hadn’t known, for one thing, that there were such things as ‘planes of existance’, as Moryg had put it. He felt a surge of panic - he was in an unfamiliar world, nevermind an unfamiliar city. A whole godsbedamned world that he didn’t know had existed a day prior to meeting with that accursed woman, and he was stranded in it with this bad tempered, demon-haired man who had no patience whatsoever, because he failed to answer Enevere’s question - though it had been mostly rhetorical - and was now asking ones of his own.

“Wait, wait. I’ll be asking questions for the moment, you’re the one who seems to have no trouble believing that parallel worlds and magic bridges actually exist.” Raphael snapped, and Enevere resisted the urge to roll his eyes. The older man reminded him of no one he’d ever met before, and he wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

“First off, what’s this about a dream? She said this whole saving the world thing had something to do with your dream.” The man was pushy, but Enevere knew what he needed to do. Calm, collected, he slowly slid out from between the sheets of the bed and stood barefooted on the cool floor.

“Do you have a map somewhere that I could use?” He asked quietly. Raphael was taken aback.

“A map?” He parroted. Enevere nodded. “I think I’m going to need one.”

“Uh, alright...”

Enevere might have gone in search of the lady himself, but he didn’t know the lay of the land and was very likely to get lost. Raphael, on the other hand, lived in this bizarre world.

When the redhead was gone, Enevere rubbed his arms up and down to ward off the faint chill that permeated the room. It wasn’t too sickly a color, when you looked at it - really more of a green that was trying to be white that was trying to be cream, but it made for an interesting color at least. He wondered what material it was, then realized the futility of even trying to guess. From previous experience, it probably had a foreign and unpronounceable name the origins of which he couldn’t even begin to guess. It was a strange world, to be sure.

Raphael returned shortly with a huge book and a many colored sphere about twice the size of his head, both of which he set down on Enevere’s bed.

“Maps.” He explained to the skeptical boy. They looked nothing like any map that Enevere had seen, but he knew , somehow, that these were what he needed.

“Are you ever gonna tell me about that dream of yours?” Raphael asked.

“On the way.” Came the short reply, as Enevere pulled the book toward him. There was a flimsy paper cover wrapped around three sides, and underneath was a hard material that seemed to protect the book. An ingenious method, Enevere though, grinning. He’d always held a certain sort of reverence for books.

“On the way?” Raphael repeated. “Where are we going? Or rather, where are you going, because - “

“Moryg will kill you if you leave me to do this on my own. She said you were important in this, God knows why.” Enevere interrupted, with no trace of sarcasm in his voice. He wasn’t quite serious about Moryg murdering his companion, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt to give him a bit more of a reason to help. Unfortunately, Raphael didn’t take him seriously, as he snorted and muttered something about women all being the same. Although his face became noticeably paler. Enevere put this down to having met Moryg and believing that she was perhaps capable of killing him in cold blood.

“In any case, I don’t yet know where we are going. That’s why I needed the map.”

But as Enevere turned to the first page and realized that it was, in fact, an entire book of maps, he became slightly less sure about finding where they needed to be in enough time to get there.

Raphael chuckled at the boy’s wide eyed amazement as he flipped through the glossy, colorful pages of the atlas. Then Enevere looked up at him and said, “I can’t read this.”

Surprise, surprise. The text was in some undecipherable language that definitely wasn’t Latin or Seaport Common, though a few of the characters looked vaguely similar. It couldn’t be Celtic, he’d seen a piece of Celtic carving once with all those blocky, linear shapes that somehow managed to be beautiful still. This written language was round and finely scripted, each character exactly similar in size to the next.

Dismayed, Raphael dropped his head into his hands. “Are you sure you can’t just open it to a page, close your eyes and point somewhere? Moryg didn’t exactly give us directions, so how do you know that where you’re looking for is the right place?”

“Intuition,” Enevere answered truthfully, “I don’t really know how it works, but I just have this feeling...”

“Brilliant. So we’re going traipsing across the country on a feeling.”

“Is this all one country?” Enevere asked, astounded. There had to be at least a hundred pages in the book, all of them with a full-page, detailed map that had incomprehensible lines everywhere.

“No, you dolt, it’s an atlas. That means the entire world is drawn out in that book - like the globe, see?” The redhead pointed to the sphere sitting on the bedside table. Enevere prodded it, and was startled when it began to spin. Impatient hands stopped it and turned it slowly. “This is where we are.” Raphael said, pointing to a small dot on the map that was labeled in the same foreign script.

“It says ‘London’. And this is the country we’re in,” He circled the small, irregular shaped green blob. “England. The rest of the world -” The globe spun wildly once more, countries blurring into the blue sameness of the ocean, “- is off limits. Okay? We can’t go there. I have no money for plane tickets.”

Enevere ignored this last comment, having not the slightest idea what ‘plane tickets’ might be, and not really wanting a long winded explanation though Raphael was, in fact, anything but long winded. Moryg would probably have given him a full history on the item in question, as well as its possible future uses and many other pointless facts. Luckily, Raphael seemed more than happy to not give an explanation.

“Why is the whole world divided up like that?” Enevere asked, pointing to the globe, where thin white lines ran perpendicular to each other like the crosshatching of coarse wool, sectioning the world in a manner that Enevere could find no reason for. The entirety of the land masses were different colored blobs that each had a label beside them in that strange round language, leading him to believe that they were countries and therefore the other lines did not need to be there.

But Raphael was uninclined to explain this, too.

“It’s too complicated.” He said, which, if you knew him, you would know was his shorthand for ‘I don’t actually understand it, don’t make me explain.’

Enevere sighed. “All right. But I still cannot read this map, and that may slow the progress of our journey somewhat.”

“Look, you just open the pages on your ‘intuition’, point to somewhere and I’ll read it off.”

It sounded like a good enough plan. But Raphael was beginning to get impatient, and was looking antsy about something.

“Is something the matter?” Enevere inquired out of curiousity.

“Uh - well, no, it’s nothing...” Raphael looked uncertain, the oddest expression on his face. So far he had seemed nothing but short temper and general bad nature.

“Something is the matter, I can feel it.” He pressed, and the redhead scowled.

“You and your bloody feelings. You’ve got too many of them, I tell you. It’s just - my, er, my car. It’s been sitting in that underground parking lot for nearly two hours and I’m a bit paranoid about it...” He did seem more worried than irritated, but Enevere had trouble piecing together what he was talking about. Something underground, maybe a grave? He shuddered. No, it couldn’t be that.

“Why don’t you go check on it?” Enevere wouldn’t have minded a bit of time to think things over and get his bearings with that map book, but Raphael didn’t look like he was eager to leave. It could possibly have been the fact that Moryg might return, or that all that was keeping Enevere together was a handful of thread. In any case, he soon came up with a solution.

“Why don’t we drive back to my apartment? It’ll only take a couple of hours, and you can look through that atlas in the meantime. I should return Robert’s baby anyway, since I’m not going to be dropping by my parents’ estate.”

“Are your parents wealthy?” Enevere asked, latching on to the word ‘estate’. He assumed Robert had lent Raphael his - carriage, maybe? But he wondered briefly about the ‘baby’ bit. He couldn't see Raphael as being very charitable toward children.

The Angel snorted. “Hardly. It’s just the kids who’re rich, and they practically own the estate. Ma and Dad just live there because the rest of the family does.”

His parents’ estate sounded rather cozy, although Enevere had never heard of the wealthy deigning to fraternize with the less fortunate, family members or not. Then again, he hadn’t seen any honest to god noblemen since he was five and one came galloping in on a great black horse. He’d been rather rude, demanding the best room that Randa had, and complaining about cockroaches the next morning. Enevere hadn’t thought very highly of him, and neither had Father Benedir; the Father swept into the inn’s common room that day at almost exactly noon, and held a hushed conversation with the noble. He left soon after that, and Father Benedir acquired a very large, noticeable gold ring soon afterward.

“Oh, and we’ll be needing to get you some clothes...” Raphael sighed.

-- --

Enevere was rather a pain to talk to, Raphael found. He had to censor his words before he opened his mouth, in case he mentioned something that the boy didn’t understand - although, he was pretty good at not asking for an explanation. Raphael figured that when three weeks were up, he wasn’t going to be needing a bunch of useless facts on Raphael’s world because hed’ be back in his own.

But they’d - or rather, Raphael had - decided to travel back to his apartment, mostly because of his fear that the car would somehow get scratched, dented, or even stolen while he was sitting up in the hospital. Robert must have passed on some of his sense of paranoia about that precious car in all the yelling he’d done at Raphael.

The only problem was, Enevere had no clothes. Literally. Raphael hadn’t seen so much as a thread when he’d found Enevere, although admittedly he hadn’t really been looking. But he was sure that if Enevere dressed as gaudily as he seemed to be trying to do now, the clothes would have been visible even through blood and dirty water.

Upon request, the nurse in charge of Enevere had brought an enormous chest of clothes - dressup clothes. For the children, of course. But Enevere had been enchanted by them, and was currently in the process of stroking the soft crushed faux-velvet of a crimson red cloak, grinning as he sat in a pool of discarded clothes. Raphael was a bit afraid that the stitches would tear, having been exposed to such strain, but they were amazingly resilient. Enevere was, at the moment, dressed in nothing but a pair of gold, shimmery genie pants that, oddly enough, complimented his fair complexion and pale gold hair. Across his chest were white bandages, that now covered his stitches in order to allow them to better heal. The nurse had done this before bringing the clothes, which was a good thing considering they were going to be sneaking Enevere out of the hospital long before he was supposed to be released.

“What do you think?” Raphael looked over. Enevere was getting to his feet a bit stiffly, dressed in a relatively understated pair of dark blue suede pants that looked suspiciously like they belonged in the sixties, along with a StarWars style beige tunic - a bit too tight for comfort - and an oversized blue cloak. He spread his arms and smiled.

“It was the most normal thing I could find.” He said ruefully. Raphael snorted. The boy would certainly stand out in a crowd. Luckily they only needed something to get him back to Raphael’s apartment. There, he could get Enevere into some of his old clothes, when he was a bit more short and scrawny - although they would probably still hang loosely about the boy, because he was sure he’d never been quite that small.

The clothes that Enevere had chosen were probably the closest thing to what was normal for him, which wouldn’t be much help in this world because wearing that sort of thing, people tended to look at you as if you belonged in an asylum, unless you were in America. “It’ll do,” Raphael said finally, reaching down to stuff the rest of the clothes back in to their chest. He hadn’t actually thought there would be anything that fit the kid.

“I feel like some sort of royalty,” Enevere said, grinning. He was running his fingers over the soft suede, leaving little pale marks where it went against the grain. “I’ve never had clothes so fine... Mine are usually wool, because we’re only a small sea port, see. These must have cost a fortune.”

“Hardly.” Raphael replied, to his companion’s astonishment. “People drop them off here when they don’t need them anymore. The children use them in games, usually.”

Enevere gaped. “You mean - the nobles just give their clothes away to the children?”

“I wouldn’t call them nobles.” Raphael muttered. “They’re more like ‘middle class’, or ‘normal’. Everyone but the poorest of the poor can afford fancy clothes.”

He picked up the chest by the end handles and heaved it out the door, wincing as it slammed down onto the linoleum floor. A nurse stuck her head out of one of the doors and gave him a glare, putting a finger to her lips. He rolled his eyes. They were so uptight, it was no wonder people hated staying in the hospital. He’d only been in one once before, when he was eighteen, and he’d contrived to escape as soon as possible. They’d fed him some sort of glop for breakfast and then followed it with cocktail canned fruit in a sickeningly sweet syrup, and then they refused to let him smoke - back when he was on nicotine still - so he’d overturned his porridge and made a run for it the next day. His mother and father hadn’t been impressed.

When he closed the door with exaggerated carefulness and turned back to Enevere, the boy was sitting crosslegged on the floor, the peacock blue cloack wrapped around him and a pensieve look on his face. “It’s so strange.” He said quietly. “I’ve always wondered what the city would be like, but now here I am and it’s not anything like I imagined. Not that my city would be anything like yours, I suppose.”

“The people are the same, no matter what city you go to.” Raphael said. “Always going somewhere, they are. Running to and from their little antholes.”

Enevere didn’t reply, and eventually he unfolded himself and said, “Well, shall we be on our way? We haven’t even one moon to figure this out.”

“Bring your atlas.” Raphael handed the boy the slim, heavy book, and raised an eyebrow when he clutched it to his chest. “Come on, then.”

Raphael led the way, cautiously peering around corners and keeping a sharp eye out for their nurse. It wouldn’t do to be caught escaping when they were this far already. Who knew how long she’d try to keep Enevere hospitalized for. No one else paid them any attention, rushing by with no mind for the two figured who were pressed against the wall. A few patients sent them odd looks, but seeing as they had just passed a sign stating ‘Long Term Ward’, Raphael figured those few who did see them would have a hard time convincing the nurses they hadn’t been hallucinating. And besides, who had time to go looking for a patient who flew the coop? They had far more pressing matters on their hands.

Unfortunately, Enevere was considerably slower than Raphael would have liked, having to stop every few moments to examine this or that - once he stopped in front of a picture taped on to the wall, a happy crayoned family that included a unicorn and a flying cat, and examined it for several minutes before Raphael could drag him off - or else giving a smile to one of the patients. Often they happily smiled back in a delirious sort of way that suggested copious amounts of prescribed drugs, but occasionally it had to be explained to Enevere that some of these people were not in an entirely sane state of mind.

But other than the occasional delay they made it down past the cafeteria without any trouble - and Raphael decided later that he probably should have seen the next stroke of bad luck coming from a mile away.

-- --

/End Chapter

Ohoho, more bad luck! Silly boys, can't you stay out of trouble for one day?

Stick around to see who makes a second appearance!