Slayers - Blended

Blended.

Her parents had passed away long ago; even her adoptive home at the temple of the Fire Dragon King was gone, along with those she'd lived alongside for years. So Filia could be nothing but thankful from the bottom of her heart to even have a family now. It was a family that… admittedly must've looked strange from the outside. None of them had a drop of blood in common. Heck, they didn't even have race in common. But here they were a… blended family.

And it was all because of Val. He was what had drawn them together and he was what they all orbited around now. The tottering child with the unfortunate haircut passing his mornings at the local preschool had no idea what he had brought her; what he had brought them all. Hopefully, someday he would.

There had been many moments in their time together in which that fact had been brought home to her: when she first took Val's egg home; when Jillas, standing on Gravos's shoulders, had hung the shop sign up for their opening day; when Val's egg had hatched. But for some reason she always came back to, of all things, the paperwork.

Filia had been determined to enroll Val in the local preschool. Just because he was a creature of staggering power didn't mean that he shouldn't be allowed playmates. She wanted him to get acclimated to the community of humans, to be accepted, to learn, and to make friends. He deserved that. She desperately needed to give him the happy childhood he'd been denied in his past life.

But that didn't mean she wasn't worried. There were a thousand things that could go wrong. What if he had trouble leaving her? What if he thought she was abandoning him? What if he transformed and burned down the school house? What if the other kids didn't see how special he was?

Well, now that he ran ahead of her to join his buddies on the playground, and she practically had to drag him out of the sandbox at the end of the class, her worries seemed pointless. But they'd been so real when she was filling out the forms to enroll him.

After reading over safety procedures, some legal mumbo jumbo, and filling out his medical history, she'd come to the pick-up authorization. It was a list of people besides herself who she'd allow to pick up her son from school. She put Jillas and Gravos down in a heartbeat. They loved Val and would protect him to their deaths. She knew that it was the delight of their lives that they'd somehow made the transition from his devoted servants to his adoptive uncles.

Her pen stopped hesitantly along the next line, poised to make a familiar stroke. Why? Why did she almost automatically have the urge to write that name? The name of her household's other sometimes-resident. This list was for people she entrusted with the treasure of all treasures in her life. It was not the place for someone who could never prove himself trustworthy.

And yet… she struggled.

She didn't know why she thought of this now, as she added a smattering of spices to the soup that would be that day's lunch. Maybe it was because he was there—humming at her. He'd taken to humming tunelessly whenever he was idly hanging around her house and couldn't think of anything to say to start a sparring session. He knew it drove her completely up the wall. Just lately, though, he'd found a new, even more obnoxious trick: he'd stop humming. Now that set her teeth on edge.

Xellos. No matter how much she wished otherwise, he was also a part of this blended family. And she was almost sure that he hadn't meant to be. Almost.

The fact was, he was just… there. Oh sure, he'd disappear occasionally, but it seemed like he spent all his spare time in her home. She wasn't even sure if he went away at night, which worried her slightly.

So in some ways, it wasn't surprising that she'd thought of him while filling out the form. If she was Val's adoptive mother and Jillas and Gravos were his adoptive uncles then Xellos was… well…

It had been an accident. The look on his face told the whole story, really. Xellos had visited her many times before Val hatched. At first she'd been horrified beyond belief, thinking that he might be there to steal Val away; to deliver him to the monster race and raise her boy into something dark and tainted, or to kill him before he could even take a breath to threaten them. But he'd seemed indifferent to any such scheme. In fact, the unhatched Val had been an afterthought to Xellos, who only brought him up as a means to insult her. "Haven't dropped him yet, have you, Filia?" he'd ask sneeringly. To her dawning surprise, amidst sustained irritation and the desire to smack him upside the head, she realized that he was there for one person and one person alone: her.

That had changed after Val hatched. Oh, he still showered her with attention—mostly negative, but Val had innocently and unthinkingly propelled him into a new role. "Dudduh," Val had gurgled unmistakably. If Xellos wasn't shocked by this, then he was an even better actor than Filia gave him credit for. It was as though the wind had been knocked completely out of him, and he could do nothing more than stare keenly, curiously, perplexedly, at the little bundle in his arms. Before, Val had just been another tool with which to mock Filia. In fact, he'd only picked up the child in order to better insult her for having to repeat "Say Mommy!" to the baby for an hour before he followed suit. But suddenly he was assigned a new fate in the child's life. Just like that, he was 'Dudduh.'

Filia had tried to fix it. "No, no, no, no, no!" she'd whimpered, snatching her Val away from the still gobsmacked Xellos. "Not 'Dudduh!' Absolutely, certainly, 100% not 'Dudduh!'" But Val had been resolute. "Dudduh," he'd said, stretching out his fat little arms toward his newly christened father-figure.

So by relation, Xellos might have earned the right for consideration on that list. He was 'daddy' nowadays to Val, and there wasn't a damn thing Filia could do about it. No more than she could stop the gossiping villagers from assuming that she and Xellos were married or at least 'shacking up' (their phrase, not hers).

The funny thing was, Xellos had sort of… adapted to his fatherly role. Now he hung around not just to dish out verbal abuse to her, but to play Candyland, tag, and destroy-the-resale-value-of-Filia's-house with the son who had adopted him instead of it being the other way around. He was even talking about building a tree house. It was like he'd caught some kind of madness.

But… but on the other hand, she'd thought wildly as she'd stared down at the legal form, he had no right to be trusted with her child. He was a monster! She couldn't trust him just because he acted nice. He always acted nice! That didn't mean there wasn't some kind of sinister scheme under all the niceness. Maybe this was just fun and games for him; a way to pass the time and nothing more. But she couldn't know. She could never know for sure whether or not he was just playing the waiting game to devastate her and take away what was most precious to her.

She didn't know how long she'd stared at that form without moving. Her pen had been frozen on the paper, and she couldn't bring herself to move it away or to press forward. She knew she'd have to make a choice, and she wasn't sure if it was the right one.

But that horrible moment of indecision was past now. Val had settled himself pleasantly among his new classmates this last month and, aside from accidentally causing the water table to boil over that one time, he'd been doing just fine. Having Jillas or Gravos occasionally charged to pick him up from class whenever Filia was too busy to go down to the schoolhouse herself to walk him home earned him much respect amongst his peers. Gravos's stature alone was impressive and Jillas managed to dazzle the children with a fireworks display. So Val had no shortage of friends and was a happy, healthy, and surprisingly normal boy.

Xellos stopped humming from his perch on the recliner. Filia scowled and turned away from her cooking.

"Stop that," she ordered him sternly.

Xellos looked up at her with a would-be befuddled expression. "I'm not doing anything," he'd said innocently.

She crossed her arms in a movement that she hoped indicated that she wasn't going to take any crap from him that day. "Don't play dumb with me," she said. "You know what you're doing."

"Why don't you tell me what I'm supposedly doing," he said calmly.

"You're not humming!" she snapped.

He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow at her.

"Don't look at me like that," she glared. "You are! I can hear you not-humming at me!"

"Truly that must be deafening," he said with a smirk.

"It is!" she insisted.

"Would you like me to start humming again?" he offered.

"No!" she shouted, turning back to her lunch preparation. "No," she said more calmly, having caught sight of the clock. It was nearly twelve.

"Well, those really seem to be my only options," he answered. "What else am I supposed to do?"

"Why don't—" she began softly. She stopped herself. "Why don't you do something useful for once and take Val home from school," she ordered in a put-on harsh tone that in no way matched her expression.

He couldn't see her face, but he seemed to feel the tension in the air. He stared at her back for a few minutes as she tried to go about the casual business of preparing lunch. Then she heard him rise from his seat.

"I'll be right back," he said, and was gone.