OK! Here it is. :3
"Ducks! There are ducks in my house!"
I knew immediately who was yelling. It was the angry, dumbfounded, ticked-as-frick yell that could only belong to Gavin.
I'd know, he yelled like that all the time. If it wasn't one thing, it was the other.
He wasn't a little kid or anything. He was thirteen, a year older than me.
He just got really mad really easily.
Well, sure enough, there were ducks in his house.
Lots of them.
I had been getting myself a bowl of cereal, as neither Gavin nor his parents minded if I ate their food.
The next thing I knew, there was a duck sitting in my cereal.
Obviously, I didn't feel very inclined to eat it after that.
That's when Réku burst in through the door, panting. He looked around at the ducks and at Gavin, who looked like he was about to attempt to murder everyone and everything.
"Aha! There you are!" he said and picked up one of the ducks. It had a pendant hanging on its neck.
Ah yes, princess of the ducks.
How glamourous.
That's when Réku noticed that Gavin looked pretty ticked off.
"Oh, they must've gotten in through your window, sorry." he said, scratching his head and laughing.
He acted like a little kid half the time, which was funny, as he was thirteen as well. Only slightly younger than Gavin, though it wasn't currently a year difference.
"What are these ducks doing in my house?!" Gavin demanded.
"Quacking?"
As he said that, a duck quacked, as if to prove that they really had flown in through Gavin's window just to quack.
Well, not really flown in, but went in.
Whatever.
"That answers a lot, idiot, now explain!"
"I'm babysitting them!"
The look on Gavin's face was priceless.
Réku sighed.
"They're Pain's ducks."
Now that I thought of it, Pain did have ducks.
They were her pets.
Though I'm not sure why she chose ducks to be her pets when cats were her favorite animals.
It always felt weird saying Pain as a name.
Pain wasn't her real name. Her real name was Rose, but she said she wanted to be called Pain.
She said it was because the thorns of roses caused pain.
And because everyone said she was a pain.
"I had only turned my back for a second and they ran off!"
It was Gavin's turn to sigh.
Very angrily.
"Réku. I don't care if they're the Queen of England's ducks or if they swam across the state to get here. I want them the frick out of my house!" Gavin yelled.
Réku flinched slightly, but then shrugged.
"Well, if they decided to stay here, then there's nothing I can do about it. Just lock the doors and windows and it'll be fine."
Then Réku recieved a diamond-melting glare.
"What do you mean, there's nothing you can do about it?! Get them out!"
Boy, was I glad Gavin's parents weren't home at the moment.
"I can't get them out! They undid the locks on their little shed and I've been hoping I could find a place to keep them for the rest of the week! This is perfect!" Réku said enthusiastically.
Gavin's jaw nearly hit the floor.
And yes, that was an exaggeration.
A slight one.
"I am not keeping a hoard of ducks in my house for any time! They'll flap everywhere! They'll keep me up all night quacking! They'll eat all my food! And my house will be covered in duck eggs!"
"Actually, you don't need to worry much about eggs. There's only one girl. The other nineteen are boys."
He said it so casually, as if twenty was the regular number of ducks for people to have locked in their house.
"Twenty ducks?!" Gavin screamed.
He literally screamed.
So while Gavin had a heart attack and Réku tried to reason with him, I sat there at Gavin's table in the nearby kitchen.
With a duck sitting in my cereal.
"C'mon, Bobby! You wouldn't mind ducks in his house, would you?" Réku asked desperately.
"Since when does Bobby get to decide what birds are nesting in my house?!"
There were times I regretted visiting Gavin.
And I also regret the sleepover I arranged so that I could stay up all night eating candy and drinking soda without my mom and dad scolding me.
Now I'd probably go to sleep and wake up with four ducks in my sleeping bag.
And now that Réku was here, I'd have to sit through the night hearing him snore, because he had twenty ducks in Gavin's house and wouldn't mind sleeping over.
Réku doesn't just snore.
He snores insanely loud.
And talks in his sleep a lot.
He once cried out "Dad! The postmaster ate my new puppy's leg!" in his sleep.
So I had to sit through the night imagining postmasters eating puppies.
What on Earth does that kid dream about?
Actually, I don't want to know.
When he says things like "Oh no! My snot is poisonous and catches fire!" and "Stop puking on my bed just because it's made out of mice!", I don't think I'd make it through the rest of my life without ending up in a mental hospital if he explained.
I didn't reply to Réku's question, hoping that the situation would be sorted out in a sane manner.
Of course, that didn't happen.
Gavin started screaming like a little kid and got into a fight with Réku.
So they tussled on the ground for a while and tried to clobber each other.
But then a duck pecked Gavin on the nose.
If a duck can really peck someone.
Then it tried to eat his face.
I'm not even kidding.
Of course, he totally lost it and tried to hit the duck with a frying pan.
He luckily missed, but the duck was pretty mad.
So all the ducks swarmed him and started trying to peck him.
By the time Gavin had got the ducks away, he looked pretty rough.
He wasn't hurt very bad, but he was angry and tired.
So he surrendered.
He said Réku could keep the ducks in his house for the week, but only if they were confined to one room.
Réku chose the guest room.
Then Réku insisted that he stay as long as the ducks were there.
There were two reasons for that.
One, some friends of his mom's were coming over to his house.
His mom was a horrible cook who made things like roasted bananas in garlic sauce and chocolate-covered pork chops.
Well, maybe not those things specifically, but 'fancy' foods that were just there to impress guests but tasted like they were dug out of the bottom of a garbage can and garnished with parsley just to look like they hadn't been dug out of the bottom of said garbage can.
They were bad was the point.
And the sad part was that, when Réku rejected the food, his mom made a show of telling the guests that he was bratty and misbehaved.
Because clearly you're just a disobedient child if you don't like to eat rotted chicken hearts dipped in lemon and mushroom juice.
That had been sitting behind a radiator.
For three years.
Which is why Réku was always stealing food from peoples' gardens.
And two, he wanted to play the video games on one of Gavin's fancy video game machines.
Gavin said he had, at last count, seven hundred and forty-three games.
And that he cared about around six.
Réku wanted to play them all.
Some of them were for young kids.
Some of them were for adults.
He had beat three hundred and ninety-nine games so far, and was desperate to beat one so he could get the total to four hundred.
So, that night, Gavin's parents luckily still hadn't come home.
They were nice, but if they saw twenty ducks quacking and flapping around the house, they'd probably lose their minds.
Réku had went home and come back with a sleeping bag.
Then he had hoarded all the ducks into the guest room.
With food and water, of course.
But when he went into Gavin's room and set up his sleeping bag, Gavin came in.
Mar 6, 2021
by
Gau
"Réku." he said calmly.
When he wasn't angry, he was usually calm.
But this wasn't the regular calm.
It was the faked calm.
"Yeah?" Réku replied.
He didn't notice how Gavin's seemingly straight face was twitching.
He was going to say something calmly, Réku was going to laugh and not believe it, and then realize that Gavin was serious.
It had happened so many times before.
"There's a duck egg in my tea kettle."
It was worse than I had thought.
Gavin loved drinking tea in the middle of the night to calm his nerves.
Which explained why his nerves weren't very calm.
As expected, Réku burst into laughter.
But then shut up when he saw that Gavin was about to lose his mind again.
"Oops, must've forgotten to lock the door."
"There's a duck egg! In my tea kettle!" Gavin screamed.
The most predictable part is when Gavin screamed in Réku's face.
And when Réku shrugged helplessly.
"Make duck tea!" he suggested before busting into laughter again.
"The duck egg is glowing purple!"
More laughter.
I decided I'd go into the kitchen and look.
Sure enough, there was a duck egg in Gavin's tea kettle.
And it was indeed glowing purple.
Which isn't exactly natural for a duck egg, I'm pretty sure.
I picked it up and went into Gavin's room.
He had grabbed Réku by the shoulders and was screaming in his face while shaking him back and forth.
Réku squirmed out of Gavin's grip when he noticed the duck egg.
"Ooh, cool! Is it magical?!" he cried and snatched it out of my hand.
But then he dropped it.
And I heard a crack.
"There is duck liquid on my shoe."
Gavin just seemed to adore stating the obvious.
"Ooh, it glows too!" Réku cried and kneeled down to take a closer look.
Glowing, blue-colored liquid was coming out of a break in the egg.
And was pouring onto Gavin's shoe.
And the floor.
At first I thought it was yolk.
But then I saw a tiny head poke out of the shell.
It was more than a head.
The shell broke away as the duckling pushed itself out of the egg.
It was covered in that glowing blue liquid.
It was actually pretty cool to look at.
The duckling looked like any regular duckling.
Except for the small, glowing, bright purple mark on its chest.
Mar 6, 2021
by
Gau
