Episode 249: French School is Crap (Niels)

Niels probably should warn Mel. He hadn’t left the headmaster of Viggo Junior’s school, Conservatoire de Saint Charles Garnier with any lasting good impression of his role as older brother to Viggo. 

In fact, Niels and the headmaster both left the man’s office in a state best described as “mutually pissed off.”

And Niels had left without Viggo.

For his first solo negotiation as almost-king, it was a complete flop. He needed Mel, which was just pathetic. Not because needing Mel was pathetic, but because Mel wouldn’t have needed him, to do a fucking negotiation.

Niels was letting personal shit get to him. He bet his blood pressure was through the roof right now.

Didn’t matter; he had a job to do.

He knocked on Mel’s office door and leaned into the air between the frames, since the door was open. Mel stood behind his desk, leafing through a stack of papers. He looked up when Niels knocked.

“Do you have any free time today?” Niels requested.

“No, but I can move busy time aside.” He set the papers down and walked around his desk. “When you’re king, the correct answer to your kids is yes. Everything is something you can delegate.”

Niels could thank his mom for making that the most fucked up statement he’d heard today. Did Mel think he was Niels’s stepdad now? Technically, yeah, he was. But nope, father-in-law first. Step-father-in-law. He and Talise couldn’t share the same step-dad. That was fucked up.

“What do you need?” Mel asked him.

A frigid swimming pool.

“I’m trying to get Viggo home. My mom always said if anything happened, to bring them here. But the school won’t let me get him out.”

“And she is the only name on file?” Mel clarified.

“Yep.”

“We can visit Zero and be stealthy or we can involve the government and he can vanish appropriately.”

The government of Babylon, dicks that they were, had convinced themselves that the world would end if people found out about magic. They were very panicky and insular and talked about the environment and nuclear warheads a lot, which didn’t have much to do with getting Viggo out of boarding school.

But…

“Which one do you think would be more fun?” he asked. There was some definite appeal to fucking with the government by adding more Babylonians to the list of people who knew.

Mel cleared his throat, amused. “Stealthy.” He closed his office door and checked the lock. “Zero will be in his office. How are your sons?”

“They’re doing really well,” he said, because they were. Except for the not crying thing, but Zero wasn’t worried. “I thought this would be fast,” he complained.

“Spaden can check in on them,” Mel assured him. He must have picked up on Niels’s worry. It was…nice…to be family enough that Mel could see things he didn’t say. 

Mel smiled and added, “I’m still stunned that Aadya was his first victim.”

Niels laughed. “Yeah. What the hell happened? I thought Zero was doing everything, and then he wasn’t.”

“He became busy,” Mel supplied. “I’m not sure.”

He opened Zero’s office door, which was ajar, without knocking. 

“Zero,” he said. “We are in need of a stronger than average glamour and a holding spell.”

Zero looked between them with an expression that said I wasn’t busy or anything while it tried to figure out what they were up to, too.

“DNA from the person would help,” he suggested. “A hair or nail, as usual. Blood. Whichever.”

Sneaking into his mom’s room and grabbing her hair out of her brush was definitely husband territory, not Niels’s responsibility. 

“Do you have…a brush or something?” he asked Mel. 

“Yes. I’ll get it while you two sort the spell out and decide which of us is going in. I’m more than happy to.”

Yeah, no way in hell was Niels dressing up like his mom. As his mom. That was husband territory too. If he did it, Viggo would never let him live it down.

“I’m going with you,” Niels insisted. “Because one, I haven’t told Viggo yet, and two…I want to be smug at them when my mom shows up to pull him out of school.”

Mel laughed. “Why don’t you visit Viggo while I get ready and I’ll meet you there. It can look like you were waiting for me to come by.”

And save Niels the trouble of accidentally telling the headmaster off. It was a good idea, even if it kept Niels from unleashing all his smugness on the headmaster.

King. In days. He needed to get his shit together.

“Watch out for the headmaster,” he warned. “He makes Thelos look reasonable.”

Mel looked way too fucking satisfied. “I should enjoy this, then,” he commented, and he left.

“Do you need any other spells while I’m preparing?” Zero offered.

“My mom?” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “But it sounds like that’s impossible, so this works for now.”

“We tried multiple spells,” he apologized. He sat down in his swively chair and leaned back. “Someone doesn’t want her to be found. I did try a subtle spell about an hour ago, and wherever she is her mood is positive.”

That made no sense – fighting with husband, kidnapped, murdered…happy?

“Huh,” he muttered. “I think I’m not going to pass that info along to Mel. Thanks.”

“No problem. How are you?”

It was hard to compare the Zero who chilled in his office, and did cars and shit, with the Zero who had just delivered Caspian and Alde a few hours ago. When he was doctoring, he was so intense and focused, but right now he was casual.

What he needed was a freight elevator and a garage right next to his office. Then he could go straight from cars to medical to kitchen and have the best fucking life.

Hey, why not? They were redesigning the palace anyway, to accommodate all those kids. Right?

Niels leaned against the wall. Zero was a good listener, and Niels knew he was a bigger mess than he was letting himself admit.

“I invited my dad back to life, because I guess I hate myself.” He shrugged.

He liked getting advice from Zero. He was much more Dadish for Niels than Mel was. Mel had the whole – this kid is screwing my daughter – element and he’d given Niels a couple of intense talks back at the beginning of things.

Zero was more in the mindset of hey, good luck, if he even cared at all. He didn’t seem as protecty of Talise as he was of his own family, which should have pissed Niels off except it gave him a safe place to vent his own issues.

“How did meeting him go?” Zero asked.

“I told him a little about myself.” Bullshit and lies, anyway.

Zero laughed. “You gave him life. You don’t owe him a relationship.”

“Maybe,” Niels shrugged. “Bet you’d be pretty pissed if anyone said something like that to Rhyss though.”

“No one needed to. He said it to me, in his own words.”

Niels could see that. Rhyss was a pretty intense guy, as it turned out. Talise was into intense like Niels was into Talise. Even Spence was a complex mass of passion.

Talise totally subscribed to the go big or go home philosophy, when it came to guys.

“Well,” he admitted, “I said it to my dad, in my own words too. Told him I was a druggie with too many kids to count, and I spent all the money on drugs. It was great.”

Zero glanced up at him. “What are you going to do when he finds out the truth?”

Niels shrugged again. “Let him be pissed.”

“And if he isn’t? Rhyss thought things about me. Some true, some not. You may discover the same thing. Your mom had anger when she told you about him. I don’t think she lied, but she may have forgotten any lingering positives.”

Like, at least the asshole was out of their lives. 

Niels laughed. “Lingering positives? That sounds like an annoying part of chem class.”

Not that Niels had taken chem class. He’d had the common sense to drop out of school and pursue being a professional badass long before words like chemistry crossed his agenda.

“If you were a smart druggie,” Zero teased, “it wouldn’t be annoying.”

Ha. Meth lab central, was that what he meant?

Niels liked his healthy teeth just fine, thank you very much.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he joked back, just as Mel walked in with a clump of hair. Good thing his mom sucked at cleaning her hair brush.

Zero finished mixing the spell in silence and then passed a drink and a bottle to Mel. “This should last until the antidote is given, or thirty-six hours. I have a spare antidote in case you lose it.”

“Good thinking,” Mel said, like he was careless.

Though, if someone stole it, or a cop at a checkpoint decided it was alcohol…

“Am I the one becoming your mom, or are you? Last chance?”

He knew it was a fuckton to ask. If Talise was dead, he wouldn’t want to pretend to be her. To look in the mirror and see her.

But.

“You want me to go there, as my mom, and tell my little brother she’s dead?”

“With you, his brother, as himself. But you know your mom better.”

Doubtful. Mel probably knew shit about his mom he didn’t even want to guess at.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “If you don’t want to do this, I can find someone else to be my mom. It doesn’t have to be you.”

“I don’t mind,” he said.

Niels couldn’t figure out if that was a lie, or wishful thinking, or if he really didn’t mind. Mel was a very different beast from anything Niels would ever understand.

He glamoured himself into Niels’s mom and then drank the potion. Niels couldn’t really tell a difference between the two.

And Mel thought Niels knew her better. It was almost funny.

“I’ll undo it once I’ve spoken to the headmaster,” Mel promised – himself, or Niels, it wasn’t clear.

“Thanks,” Niels said. “For this.” He glanced at Zero. “And thanks for your help.”

“Anytime,” he said.

While Niels and Mel walked, they decided, mostly by Mel deciding for Niels, that Mel would talk to the headmaster alone, as Giana, and then change back to himself before he met Niels at Viggo’s dorm.

Niels transported them to the outside of the school, which was a cluster of massive grey stone buildings with tidy lawns and shrubs all over the place.

Niels pointed to the building with an arched doorway. “Headmaster’s office is in that building.” He pointed to a longer three-story structure on the far end of the quad. “I’ll be over there.”

“I’ll be there soon,” Mel promised, in Giana’s voice. It was fucked up. Helpful, but fucked up.

He crossed the quad to Viggo’s building and hit the buzzer. “It’s me,” he said.

He could hear Viggo’s bafflement, his what are you doing here? In his tone of voice, but Viggo didn’t ask. He buzzed him in without question and Niels walked into their room without knocking, just like Mel had with Zero.

“Oh, c’est toi,” Viggo’s roommate, Jerome, said. He could not have sounded more jaded if he’d been modeling for some American teen television show.

“Why are you here?” Viggo complained.

Niels walked over and looked out the window. “I came to piss you off,” he said. “You need to come home. Ish. Somewhere else.” How was he going to manage to say all of this to his brother, without Jerome catching on? Obviously, share nothing. “It’s a different school, near me.”

“Okay…where’s Mom?”

Niels walked around and picked up a little metal action figure of a jousting knight. “You’ve collected some cool stuff.”

“Put that down!” Jerome commanded.

“Yeesh.” Niels put the damned thing down and looked at Viggo. “Do you need help packing?” he offered.

“No.” Viggo picked up his controller and returned to whatever game he’d been playing.

Screw him. Niels didn’t want to do this now, in front of Jerome. He wanted to do it in the Dells, with Viggo all distracted by dragons and magic and weird neon apples.

He sat on Viggo’s bed, a few inches away from him. “Something happened to Mom, Vig.”

The kid finally paused his game and looked at Niels. “What?”

“She was visiting me, and she got mugged.”

Viggo looked at the tv screen. “Did she die?”

“Yeah.” He waited for Viggo to react, but he didn’t, so Niels added, “I haven’t told Cille yet.”

Maybe it would make Viggo feel important, to be told first. Viggo didn’t have to know Niels was scared of Cille.

After a minute or two, Viggo shut his game off and stood. “Yeah I need help packing.”

He opened his massive dorm-supplied wardrobe and pulled out two duffel bags. He tossed one to Niels and started filling the other with hanging shirts from the wardrobe.

“I’m sorry,” Niels said. He opened the dresser and started adding boxers and socks and shit into the duffel bag. He would’ve thought Viggo would care more about the games than the clothes, but he seemed to be wrong about that. Maybe he was leaving them for Jerome.

“It’s your fault for moving there,” Viggo said, surly.

That.

Was true. “I know,” he said. “She was dating someone, too. He came here with me.”

“Where was he when Mom was mugged?”

“Right next to her,” Niels half-admitted. Fighting with her about I-don’t-know-what, would have been a more accurate response. “Nobody saw it coming, okay? Sometimes shitty things just happen.”

“Is that guy in prison?” Jerome asked.

How the fuck would the guy already be in prison if she’d just been killed. Niels gave that question the look it deserved.

“And why isn’t her boyfriend dead?” Viggo demanded. “He should be.”

Thank Christ Mel hadn’t been around to laugh at that.

“Because whoever it was went for her, not him. He got hurt,” he made up. Wherever he was on campus, Mel had luck magic and would know how to back up Niels’s story. “But he’s doing better now. Don’t be a dick to him, it isn’t his fault.”

“Yeah it is,” Viggo countered hotly. He zipped his duffel closed with emphasis.

“You’re just leaving?” Jerome complained. “What about me?”

“Dude!” Niels snapped. “His mom’s dead. Shut up.”

“Dude,” Viggo mocked. “He’s my best friend. Shut up.” Viggo looked at Jerome. “We’ll get you out,” he promised.

Niels threw his hands in the air. “Fine. Good luck getting him out of here. The headmaster barely let me get you.”

Speak of the devil, Mel knocked.

Niels wrenched the door open and turned back around. He assumed Mel came in, but he didn’t look. “This is Mel,” he told Viggo. He pointed to the other two. “This is Viggo and his roommate Jerome.”

“Va te faire foutre,” Viggo spat at Mel.

Niels gave Viggo his best glower. “That’s French for, Welcome to my dorm room.”

“I know French,” Mel said mildly. Of course he knew French. What didn’t he know? Mel ignored Viggo altogether and turned his attention to Jerome. “We’re excited to have you. Maybe you can sway Viggo to not bite before seeing what he is being offered.”

“He learned it by watching Niels,” Jerome defended. He got out his own duffel bags and started tossing random things in, without any obvious structure to what he was getting. “So, New York? City of hookers.”

What fucking fourteen-year-old needed a hooker? Except Spence, apparently, but he’d found a princess instead.

“Not quite,” Mel warned. “And no hookers.”

“Maybe you just don’t know where to look,” Jerome boasted.

Apparently the goal of the Conservatoire de Saint Charles Garnier was to build massive undeserved egos in pubescent boys.

“If you can find – and get – a hooker,” Niels offered, challenged, “I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

“Euros are worth more,” Jerome said.

“I’ll foot the difference, and double it,” Mel goaded. “Are you two ready?”

Jerome grabbed the metal jouster and threw it into his duffel before zipping the bag shut. “Yeah, ready.”

Now for the fun part.

“Can we take a moment, before we go, to pray for my mom?” He held his hands out towards Mel and Viggo.

“Asshole,” Viggo muttered, but he took Niels’s hand, and Jerome took Mel’s and Niels transported them all as soon as his hand connected with Mel’s arm.

Viggo stumbled when they arrived. “What the fuck is this?” He looked around the garden – Aadya’s recently overgrown jungle of a garden. 

“This. Is fucked-up New York. Last week a dragon tried to eat a guy, so watch out.”

“Oh, so you’re a liar too,” Viggo accused.

Fuck him.

“Your mother wants you safe,” Mel lectured. “I don’t care how you talk to me, but you will respect your brother.”

Wow. That was a big deal.

Niels’s tone softened. “And she might not be dead. She’s just unreachable.”

“So you just thought telling me she died was funny?” Viggo was blustering there; Niels could hear the hurt under the coarseness.

“No, she fucking died,” he said. “And then whoever killed her brought her back, wherever they’re hiding her, and our family needs to be all in one place right now until we get her back.”

He and Viggo glared at each other for a minute.

“Is there magic here?” Jerome asked Mel.

“Yes,” Mel said, sugary. “Would you like some, Jerome?”

“Like, to eat? Is it safe? Or is it like those stories where you get cursed and trapped?”

“Like I touch your head and you can control fire or water,” Mel stated blandly. He could have been talking about tax forms, for all his tone was interesting.

Jerome glanced at Viggo. “Yeah, sure.”

“Which?” Mel asked. “Or both?”

Jerome stepped towards him. “Any and all, please.”

Mel put his hand on Jerome’s head, like a Bishop passing on the Apostolic Succession – not that Mel probably had a clue he looked like that – and gave him magics. “Congratulations,” he finished. “Your lifespan has increased.”

“Thank you.” Jerome grinned at Viggo. “Dead mom aside, this is pretty cool.”

Niels half expected Viggo to argue that it turned out their mom wasn’t dead after all, but he just looked at Mel and said, “Fine. Can I have magic too?”

“I’ll consider it,” Mel teased, but Jerome didn’t know he was teasing.

“Just give it,” Niels laughed.

Mel touched Viggo’s head. “Enjoy. By the way,” he added, it is legal to be gay here.”

Niels smothered another laugh.

“I’m not gay!” Viggo protested.

“You two just seemed close,” Mel said mildly. Niels loved the way Mel messed with people. Subtle and smart.

“Friends,” Viggo insisted. “Close friends.”

“It’s called a bromance,” Jerome informed Mel, like he was educating him. “I have his back, he has mine.” He glanced at Niels. “So what do we need to know, besides avoid dragons?”

“I think Niels lined up jobs for you two. Or school.”

“The price of immortality is slavery,” Niels added. “Ten years of service gets you ten years of freedom.”

Viggo scoffed, peering through the massive jungle plants. “Liar. What’s fun around here?

No. Fun came second.

“First, Mel is king here. Second, we’re in the middle of a war. Third, my wife just had kids so once I get Cille I won’t be around much today. But I did enroll you both in the boarding school here and you can still share a room or have separate rooms. And we’re working on finding Mom.”

He gestured towards the palace and continued. “There’s a game room for now, and later this week we can get you a tv and game system.” Like after Talise and their mom were both back and alive and safe. “Oh, and this place is full of princesses.” He looked at Jerome. “You might not want to decide any of them are hookers.”

“Where’s our room?” Viggo asked.

Oh, good, they’d listened. Really well, it sounded like.

“This way,” Mel offered. He looked at Niels. “Do you need help with Cille or would you prefer I focus on getting them settled? Delphine is available as well.”

“Can you help them? I was kind of hoping to have Talise come with for Cille, since Cille likes girls more than other humans.”

Mel laughed. “Sure. I’ll send Spence and Ach to sit with the twins.”

“Thank you,” Niels said. He didn’t know where to fucking start with all the things he was grateful to Mel for today.

“If you would like, we can arrange for a nice evening for you and Talise, in room,” Mel offered.

That would be awesome. Maybe just them and their kids, a last night as the little family they were before Talise got all these new heirs. “I’ll see what she wants to do.” He scowled at Viggo and Jerome. “Behave,” he warned.

“Like you?” Viggo pushed.

“Just like me,” Niels laughed.

Everybody knew he was fucking badass at behaving, right?

So Viggo should be fine.

Ha.

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