Staccato

Written by Zelda

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Tap---tap---tap---

 

The duck sighed out slowly, letting the breath hiss lightly over his teeth, letting the water dripping from his bathroom sink faucet punctuate the noise at random intervals.

 

Tap---tap—

 

Insomnia was the truest curse he’d ever known. Worse than even bad luck. He didn’t believe in bad luck though. Bad luck was just an excuse for people who had no skill, no drive, nothing. It was their excuse for not getting out of bed and being more than just a warm body. Then again, that was all he was at the moment.

 

Tap---tap---tap---tap---

 

Perhaps it would help him sleep if he turned off the lights. The florescent track lighting along the ceiling had always annoyed him. He either wanted incandescence or darkness… right now darkness seemed better. But he didn’t want to get up and turn the lights off. Instead, he settled for reaching a hand up to shade his irritated eyes. Or rather, eye.

 

Duke had been thinking about that a lot lately. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t get to sleep. Or maybe it was just the lights, or the dripping water from his sink. Each tap was sharpening, sharpening as it plinked against the porcelain sink. Like a tapping knifepoint against glass. Or a gunshot. The duck drew in a long, thin breath. If he thought about it hard enough, he knew there were still nerves there. Old ones, dead ones, or at least they were supposed to be dead. If he thought hard enough, he could still feel something at the ends of those dangling nerves. Phantom pains at his age? He supposed anything was possible. Duke listened to the tap-tap-tapping of the water in his sink, and took a moment to drearily reflect. For as far  back as he could remember, everything in his life seemed as quick as those drips. Whether he was on the giving or receiving end of puckfire, the glint of light off of a blade, the radiating spike of pain produced as balled fists or bootheels met bone, everything was short, went by in flashes. And then the next moment it was gone, right? Not really. Just like the water was puddling in the sink, and the remnants of his dead nerves remained in his missing eye, Duke couldn’t force himself to forget what had gotten him to this point.

 

Lying in bed, unable to sleep, growing increasingly angry at himself.

 

“Enough with this.” he growled aloud, rolling out of bed, feeling worn abdominal muscles knot as he curled up. He’d gotten a good check to the gut in last night’s game, saw stars for a moment, and scrambled back to his feet to get back in the play. Though they were no experts, humans played a rough breed of hockey, lost in a haze of contract negotiations, overbearing coaches, and frighteningly secret steroid use. As Duke stood and half-heartedly dusted himself off, he was glad the team had never had to put up with any of that. Phil was annoying at times, but certainly tolerable. They were all pretty different, but they got along very well. He didn’t think the situation would be the same if they were all competing against each other for ice time, or the coach’s good favor. What would the team be like if they had all turned on one another? It made Duke shudder for a moment. He ran a hand through his hair and was faced with a more immediate decision: turn the lights off and go back to bed, or not? Duke blinked at the lightswitch, and then walked out of his bunk door. No way he could sleep, not with all of these thoughts running rampant through his head. He decided for a walk instead.

 

                 The Duck emerged through a set of elevator doors and into the team locker room. Clean and quiet, with nobody else around, the setting seemed very different. Normally it would be buzzing with activity and crammed full of equipment. Now, it seemed rather empty. But there was a familiar feeling in the air which Duke welcomed, the reason why he’d come up to ground-level in the first place. He paced out of the door and onto the runway that led to the ice. Clean, cold, and almost glowing underneath a few emergency lights, the smooth surface welcomed him with an exhaling cold breath that stung the back of his throat. This sharp air was just what he needed to think straight. Duke paused on the gap between the walkway and the rink, leaning against the boards and looking out over the clean surface. Something told him that skate blades needn’t mar it tonight. So, back to thinking it was. His stomach muscles were still bothering him a little. No doubt a result of him getting old. Being the eldest Duck on the team was something that didn’t really seem like a big deal to the others. He certainly didn’t act like an old fogey, nor did the team treat him like one. But internally, he was well aware of his age and what his body could do with the needs imposed by the game of hockey. Knowing his limits, knowing the limits of his teammates, was crucial to having the team function at their best during a game or a fight. Simple tactics. When he was younger, Duke might have been perfectly nonchalant about such a thing. But having been through the destruction of Puckworld, he knew that one mistake, even the smallest mistake, could have deadly consequences. He wasn’t about to miscalculate when the stakes were that high, even if it was just a game of hockey. It all tied into something bigger, somewhere down the line. Besides, there were enough young-guns on the team to be flippant for him. His wingers were two very different people. Duke had often seen just why Wildwing could get so exasperated with his younger brother. Duke often took up the cause of chiding the duck so that his brother wouldn’t have to, during practice. Despite the ploy, Nosedive had ignored them both at times, much to Duke’s annoyance and Wildwing’s near-fright. But when Nosedive had so easily snorted away Wildwing’s advice, he had looked to Duke for silent orders, waited for his center to lead by example. Duke had caught that happening more and more often recently, it actually made him rather proud to be able to reign in the young prodigy. He had, admittedly, grown attached to the kid. He’d been afraid to do that with any of his teammates at first. Maybe if things were different when he was younger, he wouldn’t have had such misgivings. All in the past now though, wasn’t it? What was the point of questioning it? Now Mallory, she wore such a rigid outer core of military discipline, that she fit perfectly into the focused and tactical game the Ducks tended to play. But inside, she was just like Nosedive, an excited youngster who was eager to use the skills of her teammates to her best ability. Could Duke go so far as to label her repressed from her upbringing? Truly her real relish for life came out only during a great play, or a great sale at the mall. Duke had, unfortunately, seen both firsthand. He found himself smacking his forehead in regret, he was not fond of malls. And then, he was smiling at himself. Maybe he wasn’t as alone as he thought here. As aloof towards the others as he’d been, they’d somehow wormed their way into his good graces. He was a little old, after all, for group hugs and all of that, the type of bonding activities that Zelda seemed to delight in most. Contact was important for her, not the same for him. Distance was comfortable, silence was comfortable. There was a lot that he could discern on his own, thank you very much, without it having to be spelled for him.

 

    Duke stifled a yawn in the cold air, rubbing his eyes and then letting his gaze scan over the rink. Automatically he found himself scanning his familiar haunts on both ends, noting new damage to the boards along the corners, a new pane of plexiglass they’d put in last game, scratches on Zelda’s running ridge, the way the nets near the goals stretched up to the high roof. Another part of being so methodical about the game was not only knowing himself, knowing his teammates. It was also knowing what he was dealing with in terms of the rink. And that’s why he liked being here so much. The Pond was predictable and constant. The ice was always in good condition, the locker room was always the same. He knew just which boards had more give and flex when you were slammed into them, knew the strange nicks and corners along their borders which produced odd bounces with pucks. Knew how to judge distance one way or another based on the advertisements that donned the boards and along the balcony. He liked having that predictability, those constants. It felt, strangely, like home. Now there was a word that had many definitions. People always said so many different things, ‘home is where the heart is’, ‘home is where you hang your hat’, ‘home ice’, ‘home world’, and such and such. He wasn’t on his home planet or anything, but he certainly felt comfortable here. He never had much of a home back on Puckworld anyway, nothing with this constant feel to it. Even the old Brotherhood headquarters was never a safe place, with a constant influx of new faces and a rouges gallery of the old and new guard waiting to challenge him for power. At least here, he felt comfortable and safe, which was odd given the number of times the Saurians had tried to take this building. Was his heart here? No… no he didn’t think so. But he hadn’t left it on Puckworld, that’s for sure. He couldn’t really understand why Tanya had been so homesick in their first few years here, how hard she had taken being trapped in this dimension. She probably had much more to miss back there. But, to her credit, Earth wasn’t the nicest place either. He wouldn’t mind seeing a few more beaked faces around, the thought of being the only six ducks on the entire planet kinda weirded him out, to say nothing of the people the team passed by on the street. In Anaheim, people had started to get used to them, and had for the most part stopped treating them like monsters or costumed characters from the theme park across the freeway. But in other cities, people didn’t know quite what to make of them. It had never made Duke very happy to be treated with such hesitancy. It was the same reaction he’d gotten from most back on Puckworld anyway, being a hardened criminal and all. So, when he thought about it, he really didn’t have that much of a problem with being stuck here. They’d done pretty well for themselves, after all, and he had the chance to begin life anew without having to relive his past every day. Now, that past was just stuck in his head. He could deal with that.

 

On second thought, he’d been rather foolish to think that he could just dismiss it like that. Especially with Falcone running around, Dragaunus had dealt him an unseen blow in pulling that stunt. At least with the gateway generator destroyed, they could be sure more visitors from Puckworld’s ‘Most Wanted’ list wouldn’t be gracing their presence anytime soon. Falcone was in jail, Lucretia was in limbo. Duke couldn’t help but shudder as he thought of it, and it wasn’t from the cold air of the rink. Limbo… what a messed-up place to be in. Of course he heard stories about it, mostly kid’s tales from when he was little or saw little children playing. Big black oblivion, crawling with nothing but the slowly starving old Saurians as far as you could see. Like a pit of alligators down in a Florida swamp or something. Just one Overlord was enough, he couldn’t imagine a mass of them. But the fantasy-image of children’s tales seemed a lot more real to him now, knowing Dragaunus and knowing that one of his teammates called that hellspace a home. Duke had never really gotten to know Canard, he couldn’t say he was attached or even liked him per-se. All the duck seemed to do was to order people around a lot, but there was a war going on and all. Duke yawned again as he thought back. He was slightly guilty, it should feel a lot worse to know one of his comrades was trapped like that. But… well… he had sort of outgrown the situation, gotten used to not thinking about it. Wildwing on the other hand, would never stop thinking about it. Poor guy… Duke saw little use to it all now, there was no way to rescue him with the generator broken. Was he giving up? That kind of thinking made him rather uncomfortable.

 

He was also feeling a bit chilly. The ice was definitely responsible for that. Unless he were out and hustling on the ice, it was easy for a skinny guy like him to get cold. Also a consequence of adapting to the warm weather here in Anaheim, not that he was complaining. Hugging himself slightly, the duck turned and headed back into the locker room. Maybe he’d done enough wandering for the night, and it was time to try his hand at sleep again. He took the elevator back down, and was about to enter out into a corridor, when a noise struck his ears, unusual and easier to hear in the nighttime silence. It was a tapping, a tap-tap-tapping noise that made him shudder again for a moment, as he huddled behind the elevator door for cover. He wasn’t nervous, merely curious, and a little distracted by the thought of the dripping faucet in his bunk. The noise was becoming louder, starting to echo in the hall, as the source of it approached. Duke peered into the dim light. Much like they were upstairs, the lights were dimmed or replaced with emergency bulbs at night to cut down on energy use. Tanya had reasoned that if they had left them all on, they’d all go nuts with a consistently interrupted circadian rhythm, not that they weren’t disturbed enough at night as it was. He forced himself to focus as the source of the noise continued to come closer, trying to identify the exact sound in the darkness. He didn’t have long to wonder, as the noise’s creator tapped into view, walking right past the door with no thought to it. It was Zelda, he should have recognized that sound of her claws clicking on the metal floor long ago. She hated that noise, Duke knew that much. She claimed it was horribly distracting, that the constant rapping of her claws even made her fingers go numb at times. Understandable, but Duke had always suspected there was something more to it, something that she didn’t like about the closed corridors of metal and florescence, the humming of the security system, a cocoon of sheet metal around her. She wasn’t claustrophobic, but she didn’t like things that she didn’t know, and she wasn’t familiar at the core with any of this. But she was out on her nightly patrol, some odd routine of hers that made her get up in the wee hours of the morning and traipse around the entire Pond as if she were sniffing out rats. Another habit buried in her past? Duke wasn’t really curious enough to let it warrant more than a passing thought. The dragon passed him by without knowing he was there, and he peeked out into the elevator, watching her go, taking that tap-tap-tapping noise with her. Duke held his breath for a few moments, waiting until the sound had faded completely. Only then did he let out a sigh and smirked a little. With her animal senses, it wasn’t easy to hide from her. But he’d managed to slip under her radar this time, maybe he wasn’t getting rusty after all. And maybe he shouldn’t press his luck. Slipping back into the hallway, he started heading back for his bunk. His night round was over for tonight, or at least he hoped.

 

As he paced back, keeping his steps quiet in a half-playful nod to his effort to hide from Zelda, he continued to think, measuring just how much he had adjusted to life here because of creatures like the dragon. Zelda had moved right in with them; a cousin of the Saurian bloodline that the children of Puckworld had been taught to fear, fresh out of the egg. And the humans? Incredibly odd at first, especially someone as eccentric as Phil. But it hadn’t taken Duke long to see beneath the looks and exterior habits of such people. Underneath everything, they were very much like them. Whether they acted for or against the Ducks, they were essential to what the team had become. They’d have run in circles if they had simply continued to fight the Saurians. But because of the advances and friendships they had found with the Earthlings, they had grown. They had all grown. He remembered the days when Zelda refused to use gauze, opting for messy dried moss to bandage her wounds. And when Phil simply had no way to understand what they were fighting for. They had all grown together. Fssh… talking about friendships? As he had thought to himself earlier, they had worked their way into his heart. And growth? How had he grown? It had been many long years since he had come from Puckworld. The team had given him a place, but what had he gained from it besides a little peace of mind? Duke entered a code into a panel beside his bunk door, and it slid open to reveal the brighter florescent lighting in his room. Instantly he cringed and shaded his eyes, reaching over to flick the lights off. When his vision had cleared again, he realized the answer to his question. He realized that his time on Earth had given him a chance to move on, to move past, to no longer feel the irritating scrawl of the deadened nerves in his eye, or notice he dull ache in his aging body when he was in a rough game. He had outgrown the shadows of his past. Here on Earth, with the Ducks and their friends, he had restarted, a younger and more energetic soul rising inside of his frame. The thrill he’d found in thievery was gone. Now he found it somewhere else, something better and much less self-destructive to replace it. He let out another sigh, another little smile, and realized something that made him quite happy indeed: he was tired. Insomnia cured! Now he could get to bed and have a decent rest for the game tomorrow night. That was a whole different set of concerns, all thankfully easier to address than the ones he’d spent the night mulling over. He was quick to sit down on his bed, remove his shoes, and settle down. After his sheets stopped rustling, he noticed some odd background noise. The water was still dripping, still tap-tap-tapping into the basin of his sink. He remembered the discomfort it had caused him before, but now the noise was merely a background sound, something natural and normal down here in his subterranean bunk. White noise, something to help ease him into sleep. Duke let his eye slide closed, and found rest for the night.

 

 

The End

 

 

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